Urlaub, Silvester, und Januar

After an amazing six days of skiing in Austria, I'm back at home wondering just how five and a half months passed by me so quickly. Yesterday was officially the halfway mark between when I left home (August 2012) and June 20th (which is the predicted date of departure). Already five months have passed? That means February  March, April, and May will go by faster than I can imagine. It worries me...and its a concept I've had trouble with for the last few days. Sometimes I can't decide whether to focus on how fragile life is (or seems) or how robust and extraordinary it is. I want to capture every single moment in a bottle so I can dwell on it later but they slip out of my fingers and before I know it, they're fading memories...

And with that frame of mind, I'll let you in on how awesome Austria was.

We were in Jochberg, (Kitzbühel) Austria, staying at an apartment right on the lift. At about 9:30 every morning, we were already on the first lift there. Once you get to the top of the mountain that we were on, you can either take a 12 minute gonadal over to the next mountain, or zigzag in the other direction for about and hour an a half until you find yourself in the middle of the alps. The first few days were amazing, sunny weather, not too cold, but still excellent carving snow. I spent a lot of my time on the other mountain via gonadal because there were a few choice runs over there. The last two days, it rained and snowed heavy wet snow, but we were up there anyways. On those days, we'd camp out in this cute little Austrian lodge on the slopes and warm up by the fireplace while sipping hot chocolate and sneakily eating our home made sandwiches.
I heard a variety of languages and accents. The Austria accent for German is quite interesting and I had a hard time understanding it just because its so...accented! I heard Russian, Dutch, lots of English, and I think an Asian language at one point. I only heard the American accent once, and they sounded like angry people so I stopped myself from saying hi. I also heard British and Australian accents, which was awesome, and met a kid from Manchester who looked exactly like a friend I snowboarded with last year, which was quite the trip.

 View from out our window there in Jochberg

 That thing there in the corner? I don't know if any of you know the T-bar lift, but it was my worst enemy during the whole trip. I think I fell twice, and ripped my ski pants on them the first day (I bought nice new ones) and a;dkjaf;sklj;dkl least convenient way to go up the mountain.

 My parents!

 In the lodge :)

 I only lugged my camera up with me two out of the five days because I only had my nice camera and was constantly worried about it getting hurt. And I'm really bad at selfies as such. And my fingers were really cold. So, all in all, I'm putting all the pictures up, even the bad ones. Because they're all I have. I know I look silly.

 In the gonadal!

 View out the windows from our apartment

My bed was one top, Tommy's bed was to the side on the left there, and then there was a bed dedicated to lego...:D

In the evenings, my German mutti and I cooked in the smallest kitchen possible with an old gas stove and a hot water cooker. After having spaghetti three evening out of the five, we've refrained from making that since we got home.
On New Years Eve, I found myself in a small Austrian hut pub, sipping a beer too big for me, listening to a band of ski instructors having the time of their life, and a very Austrian Austrian speak to me in his not-so-understandable German. I didn't stay out long honestly, I think we were all in bed by 11. Because of our not so festive (but still very festive, my family and I lit fireworks and stuff of course!) New Years Eve, we were able to have the slopes completely to ourselves the next day, which was the most gorgeous day of them all.
At the end, we had a ten hour ride home by car, which was quite strange for me. Its so cool how it only takes ten hours to get from one side of Germany to the other.
Now that I'm home, I feel like the whole thing was an amazing dream. I miss skiing desperately, I hope the snow is good in Boise.
Next month I have a week long seminar in Weimar, Germany that should prove to be interesting.
Big huge shout of to my host family for taking me to Austria, it was really amazing and something that I will never forget :)
Oh and my boyfriend and I had our year anniversary on Christmas eve, no big deal ;)