Day 51
Monday 21Sept
0840(22Sept)
I left yesterday morning for work at 730, It was so funny. I pumped up my front tyre and got on, with my big pack on my back. I had my smaller back pack on the back of my bike and I was using it to support the weight of my bigger back pack while I had the waist strap done up tight to balance it.
It was slow but quicker then two trips. It probably would have been about 10 minutes faster had I not needed to stop twice on the way to pump up the front tyre aswell.
Work was a bit of a drag, I spent most of the day working, for a change, but was spending it trying to write a reference sheet for all the articles I’d found for the GPS presentation we gave to Martins boss’s boss. I couldn’t find any of the sites where I’d got the info from, I’d copied most the sites into the presentation but the ones I couldn’t were proving to be an absolute pain in the ass.
I’d realized that morning that I didn’t know the address of my new hosts for tonight, I didn’t have there phone number either, I emailed them and was super lucky that they replied otherwise I would have been sleeping on the floor of one of the Girls rooms at Eheim.
I quit that at about 4, I needed to fix my bike tyre. Here at the uni not only do they have a vending machine for bike tubes but they also have a heap of bike tools on retreating wires that u can use during the day before they get locked up at night. Fixing the tube took about 15 minutes after I’d got martin to tell me which tube I needed for my bike, stupid German.
I sat around at work untill about 6. My new hosts weren’t going to be home untill after 8 so I walked home with Kiki to Eheim and went for a run from there. I’d left a shirt at the place I stayed last night so I ran there. It was a bit further then I thought, about 5k’s there. On the way back I got totally disoriented. The roads not being at right angles here totally throws out your sense of direction. I was lucky that I looked up and saw a street sign at one point to the street where Eheim was. I stopped for a while as I could have sworn I was miles away from it, I stood looking at the sign for about 2 minutes and then decided I better run along it, just in case. It took me straight to Eheim.
I Got to my new hosts place at about 9. I’m staying with a couple, Gabi and Chris. Gabi is a romanian Ballet dancer, she is possibly the smallest adult human I’ve seen in my life, and epitomizes all the things I found absolutely gorgeous about the south eastern European Girls. Chris is a good bloke, he’s studying sociology at the uni here and works part time as a social worker with kids from disadvantaged back grounds.
They cooked up a pasta and we ate that and drank beer untill about 11 oclock. I then went to sleep. Although the house I’m in isn’t huge or overly extravagant it still has a remote for the lights. Chris was showing me it and as a joke said, “and if you really want to sleep peacefully you can have this on, it was a water feature with one of those spinning transparent balls and a few lights, I laughed for a while at it but decided I may aswell give it a crack.
At first the sound of the water and the moving lights on the roof was really relaxing and I was out in a flash, but come about 3 oclock in the morning I woke up and they were really giving me the earits so I switched it off… with the remote. Haha.

Day 52
Tuesday 22Sept
1005(23Sept)
I woke not too early yesterday at 7 and did a heap of push ups. I was feeling good, starting to get a little bit more back on track. I rode to work and got here before anyone else, the door was locked, luckily a cleaner was walking past and he opened the door for me.
The day went slow. I was actually really bored, there wasn’t much work to do, so I kept myself occupied with emails and things like this. My boss left early at 430 so I soon followed.
I got to the appartment of where I was staying and the door was locked, of course. I looked at the door bells, there was no Gabi or Christian there and I had no idea about their last names, I decided to just call Gabi. She wasn’t home she was in town somewhere and Christian was still at Uni. I sat down on the steps and waited, gabi took about 30 mins to get home, nothing to complain about.
We went inside and gabi cooked me some toasties, the same as what her family used to make her when she was a kid, they were fantastic. A combination of a couple of different cheeses and some wurst of some sort. It was great.
Christian got home not too long after and he grabbed out some other cheese that they had and some brown bread (which is really chewey and almost bitter, I really like it. There’s heaps over here and it’s a little more expensive then the other bread) and we got stuck into that. The chease was called…. Leotom…. I think. It was really kind of rubbery but tasted a little like fetta, it’s a romanian cheese and tasted great.
After Gabi finally got her stuff together we went to head to one of the local bars for a few drinks. We all got on our bikes and rolled from there house, as it was all downhill to the pub. The pub was pretty funny actually, not to dis-similar to an Australian pub, except for the haze of smoke in the air and the fact that the barman all spoke German. There was pleanty of rock on the speakers and a bit of ACDC. At one point ‘I‘ve been everywhere man‘ even came on, which I had to laugh about as I explained the song to Christian and Gabi. Myself and Christian ordered a couple of beers and Gabi ordered some sort of wine I think, She was talking in German.
Before our drinks arrived a concerned look came over Gabi’s face as she wasn’t sure if the barman had understood that she wanted red wine not white, she turned to me and asked “did I order red or white wine” I thought she was joking but she was just having a blonde moment, I replied “ahhh, you were talking in German, I have no idea” to which she laughed rather sheepishly. Again it seems girls are the same all over the planet.
Conversation was pretty funny and was mainly oriented around different situations where the lost in translation effect came in. Christian was telling me how the first time he went to visit Gabi’s family in Romania that one of the uncles gave him a beer, so he opened it and said “Proost” the german word for cheers. The only problem was that in Romanian Proost means ‘stupid’ and so for the first time he’d met her family he was thanking the uncle for the beer by calling him stupid.
I asked Gabi if she could remember the revolution when the Romanians kicked out the commies in 1990. She said that she had a hazy remembrance of it and I asked when she came to Austria. Off handedly she said “yeah not too long after the revolution we came over here, illegally.” She then went on to tell me about how when she was very young just after the revolution how her and her mum escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. Even though Communism had fallen in most the states the border was still very well in place. She told me about how her and her mother had traveled across Bulgaria and then her mum had run through the forrest while another man carried her while they evaded the border guards to get to where her father was waiting for them on the Austrian side of the border.
She spoke of how they used to travel to the border where the fence was quite thin and various family members would talk to each other from the other side mostly through tears, she said her aunts cannot recount these stories with out crying aand that she was glad she was too young to remember the communist rule properly. To be honesst I didn’t understand it fully, it was all a little too incomprehensible. And in Australia all we’ve got to whinge about is a few AWA contracts and how instead of getting 4% pay rise we want a 5% pay rise, really what do we have to complain about?
I left them soon after to go into town. Johannes 1 was leaving soon to go to Turkey and was having some going away drinks. I expected it all to be IAESTE people but it was mostly his colleagues from university. I sat down and was talking to a Romanian guy and an Indian who study with Johannes. Talking to them was good for a while but pretty soon the language barrier kicked in and conversation came to a bit of a grinding halt.
The girls showed up and I shifted down to the end of the table with them. Ioanna was worried about Johannes sitting next to her. She’s so Melodramatic. So I sat beside her and we ordered a pizza. Picking the pizza took forever. Kiki was so picky. “No I do not like onion” or “No I do not like pepper, I want chicken, mushroom, cheese and tomato”. She has assured me that in Macedonia they only use please and thank you to people that they are not friends with, but to me it still sounds like everything is an order and she‘ll cut off my head if I don’t obey. I just said ok and ordered something I wanted. When it arrived I told her she could pick off the parts she didn’t like, she screwed up her face and I passed her a napkin. I’ve taught them the phrase about offering a tissue to anyone who is complaining about something so that they can ‘dry their eyes’.
I stayed there till about 1120, mostly just laughing at Ioanna, who’d had a bit of a fall out with Johannes 1, and then I rode home. To get inside I had to ring Gabi to get her to open the door for me. Her phone rang for ages and I thought I was going to have to go back to the girls place a Eheim and again sleep on the floor.
Luckily she eventually picked up and answered the door, the PJ’s she was in looked so funny!!