AUSTRIA!!!

so, some thoughts about austria so far:
1. it's incredibly beautiful
2. everyone is very nice
3. most people speak some english, which is good and bad
4. people take their time here to enjoy things
5. i can't believe i'm actually here
6. my german needs a lot of work :). but i think i'm learning quickly, i hope.
7. i'm incredibly dehydrated from spending 10 hrs on a plane
8. i think all these wonderful trees and fresh air is causing massive allergies to spring up. :)
9. vegetarianism is officially impossible
10. i'm living in crazy town (literally)
11. all the houses and streets are much smaller here.
next we'll recount my trip here. so first i got on the plane. that was a big step. :) no no. well i did get on the plane but that was very uneventful. the plane ride was 9hrs and 10 minutes. we watched 2 movies, take the lead and failure to launch. i actually slept through most of both of them so i can't tell you how they were. i maybe slept for 4 hours. oh, and i only maybe got 4 hours of sleep the night before because i wanted to tire myself out for my trip, which didn't work until i got to frankfurt, unfortunately.
next i arrived in frankfurt and had to pretend like i knew what i was doing. and i had to pretend that i understood german, that was fun. i had to go through passport control, which was a little scary, since i don't have any sort of visa. but everything was fine. they stamped my passport and i continued on my way. i got a little lost and had to ask for directions and all i was able to do was smile and nod and hope i had understood his gestures well. but i got there. even if i had gotten really lost i wouldn't have missed my plane because there were 2 hours between my flights. it was here that i got incredibly tired but i knew that i couldn't sleep because it would only make the jetlag worse. so i didn't. i listened to music. the plane ride between frankfurt and munich was mercifully short. the only exciting thing that happened during all of this was that when we landed in munich we didn't pull up to a terminal. they brought out those stairs that let you on to the tarmac and then you take a shuttle to the terminal. well, as i was going down the stairs i got tripped up on my boots/suitcase and...i fell down the stairs a little. that HURT!!! but ironically i only really fell on my left side. so my left elbow has a nice little gash and a wonderful bruise as does my left butt cheek. it's a little strange. :)
the lettner, the family i'm nannying for, picked me up from the airport. they are so nice and the kids are really funny. they are so excited that i'm here. in fact, birgit, the mother, was telling me that the youngest one, jakob who is 5, was counting down the days until i arrived. so we packed up my stuff and took off on our 2 hr car ride home. i felt really bad because i didn't know what to say. and even if i did, i didn't know how to say it in german so the kids could understand. thomas and birgit speak some english so we were able to communicate that way. the kids kept on talking to me and i just had to say "oh, ja?" (oh, yeah?)
half way home we stopped to have lunch near a lake, which i forgot the name of. but it was soooo pretty. we got the menus and i had to ask what everything was, since i don't really remember food from my german class. that's always the part of language learning that i think is stupid, except in my case when you actually might need it. :) so...my first official european meal was basically 4 hot dogs with rye bread and mustard. good thing i had recently started eating meat again. :) we stayed there for maybe 2 or 3 hours, letting the kids play and just enjoying our time. then, when i thought we were going to leave they asked for dessert and coffee and we stayed there longer. and then, when i thought we were going againg, we went to the lake and waded in for a while. it was great! instead of rushing home and just sitting around the lettner's decided to make a day of picking me up, which was also good because it kept me from falling asleep too early.
we finally got home and they showed me the house. the kids were climbing all over everything they were so excited. it is 4 stories up but it's incredibly small. it's kind of like a townhouse/duplex, except there are like 5 houses all together. and there's not much horizontal room. it's all verticle. so...i'm living on the 4th floor all by myself with my own tiny bathroom. that's saying a lot since the rest of the family shares one bathroom in the middle of the house. then it was time to move my luggage up stairs. i felt so bad for them because they took my luggage up the stairs, which was just barely under the weight limit for the baggage, which is 50 lbs. so they carried my 50 lb bags up 4 flights of stairs. i felt terrible! they asked me, "how did you do this before?" and i told them that in texas everything is so flat you don't have to take anything up any stairs, much less 4 flights. birgit suggested that i could take a shower if i wanted, which i did because it's incredibly hot here right now and they don't have AC because it never gets hot here. for those of you who went to california this summer with me, the heat here is nothing compared to the heat out there. now it isn't as hot as arizona but it did get up to 100 today.anyway, that's when i discovered the beauty of cold showers. and the water here gets nice and cold. oh buddy.
let's see, my friends, the krifter's, came to pick me up next. after that shower i had laid down for a few minutes, to help my hair get curly, and what do you expect, i fell asleep. next thing i know i hear voices i know calling my name. i was so completely disoriented! one of the weird things about the house i'm staying in is that you can hear what's happening throughout the entire house. like i can hear what's happening on the 1st floor all the way up in my room on the 4th floor. i think it's the stair way. so anyway, i heard a bit before they actually got in my room so i was able to get up and greet them very sleepily. they were bustling around getting all my stuff together for my time with them, which will be a month, and i just couldn't really get a hold of myself during all of this because it was all moving so fast! i said good-bye to the kids, who didn't understand why i was leaving so soon, and we put all my stuff in their car and we were off. the krifter's live about 50 minutes away from the lettner's by car. it took me most of the car ride to get myself together and get out of the daze i was in. during that time i discovered that the small town the krifter's live in, Irrsdorf, means crazy town. and they live by crazy lake, which is gorgeous, by the way. they have a house very much like the one i'll be living in except that it has 2 floors and the floors are a little bit bigger horizontally. their kids, josua and tabea were also very excited to see me and they couldn't stop talking to me, in german of course. their parents, hubert and sylvia, had to keep on telling the kids to stop pestering me and that i was very tired. sylvia then made pasta, with a pesto sauce from scratch! it was sooo amazing! i didn't know such amazingness could be made in a normal home. it was finally about 10 by the time i actually made it to bed. i was surprised that i was able to stay up that late for not having slept more than about 8 hrs in 2 days.
well, that was day one. i think i'll do day two tomorrow because it is already 1:30 am here and sylvia is taking me shopping tomorrow morning to show me how things are done here in austria. :)