Happy '08, everyone ^^

Well...last night was interesting, to say the least.

Apparently, here in Austria, people like to use fireworks to celebrate the new year. They were going off all day (to be honest, all WEEK) and they still haven't stopped, even though it's already 1:30 in the afternoon. Haha.

Ok, so, yesterday, I was supposed to go swimming in a thermal pool in Oberlaa, in a hotel, right? It took us 45 minutes to get there, excluding how long we waited for each part of the ride (It took us about an hour, which is a long time to travel to get to a POOL, don't you think? 4 different means of transportation and waiting out in the freezing cold...hmmm). So, we get there and guess what: It's CLOSED. Nice. Haha. So, we're hungry, we didn't get to go swimming and we're an hour away from my house (she slept over)...So we get back in the tram, take the subway twice and get into a bus to go home. Well, after the bus stops at Pantucek (we took a bus that only went halfway because we were cold), we decide we don't want to wait, because it'll be there in ten minutes and it's cold. Haha. So we start walking and the bus never even passed us in the 20 or so minutes it took to walk.

We get to my street and were planning to go to McDonald's for dinner, but it's ALSO closed. Now, on any other holiday, this would be understandable, but wouldn't you think that on the one night where every person in Vienna is roaming the streets at least MCDONALDS would be open? Makes no sense. Anyway...we went back to my house, intent on dumping our swim stuff there and going to see if the pizza place was open, or the greek place, or the chinese place or any other olace on my street (there are a lot of places). And we decided that if all else failed, we'd go to the gas station up the road and get something there. We were hungry. Sue us. Haha.

We got home and my mom was there with her one friend, Daniela, who we thought were gone. They were supposed to meet my dad with another friend, Erika, sometime, but we didn't really know when. Anyway, they were making dinner, so we just stayed home (hey, it's free!).

This is where the story goes weird, because this is so very uncharacteristic of me it's scary. Earlier in the day, Mom and I had gone to Merkur to get some last minute shopping done for that night and while she was in the champagne section, I saw a strawberry-yogurt champagne with only 4.5% alcohol. So I said, 'Hey, it could be something good...' So we bought it. Well, come dinnertime, we broke open the bottle (only Anja and I would drink it) and it tasted pretty good. Haha. That's the first uncharacteristic thing. The next is that I actually had more than one glass. I think, out of .75 liters, I drank .50 of them. Haha. Anja didn't like it very much.

Anyway, I'd drank about half the bottle by 10 o'clock, so we decided to go for a walk and admire the noises (ROFL) and see what we could do, because at home, it was pretty boring with three older woman and music from the 20's that we didn't really like. So, we started out on the street behind my apartment complex and made our way back to Kaiserebersdorfer Straße, which runs parallel to Svetelsky and Simmeringer Hauptstraße and crosses Etrichstraße, which is where I live. So, we get there and then we decide we'll walk towards the church. Instead, we walk towards it but stop at the park, which is right next to a prison. We play for a while, minding the prisoner who's watching us. Anyway, soon some idiots come and start lighting some fireworks near us, so we go back home.

We stay in the apartment for a while until we get bored again and go back outside to watch the fireworks. Then we go back in and drink to the New Year and go back out again (once I finished off the bottle of champagne ^^) and watch the guy in the backyard shoot off his fireworks. We walk around a bit more and then go back inside and go to sleep while my parents and their friends go out for another drink.

All in all, the most eventful New Years since we lived in Pottstown, even without the flashing green glasses.

--Cassy [Prosit 2008!]