Baden, Liesl, and Home.

A week or so ago, we took a jaunt over to Baden. It’s a lovely little town that is basically built around the hot springs. We spent a couple hours wandering around the won before we headed to the baths. We walked through a few of the Christmas Markets and then took a detailed tour of the parking complex for the baths while we searched for the baths themselves. Finally we found it, noted the prices and hours it was open, and headed out to find lunch. I opted for my typical European afternoon meal – bread, meat, and cheese. Like usual, it was excellent.

After lunch, we hiked up to the Beethoven Temple. It gave us a really pretty view over the town. After we had seen that, we walked past the Mozart Temple before heading to the baths.

The baths were fantastic! In one of the pools, the water was just the perfect temperature. Every few minutes there were different water jets that would go off every couple minutes. Some places the water was shooting up out of the ground and others it was bubbling all over. It was really fun to try to jump/swim over the jets. It was pretty forceful and rather hard to get over. If you did it just right though, you could float on your back on top of the jet, above the rest of the water. It was so cool! After playing in that pool, we crawled under the bridge and jumped into the next pool. This one was a little deeper and there were no fun islands or water jets. However, I liked this pool much better. The water was a little cooler – the perfect temperature for swimming laps. The ceiling/roof above the pool was made of big glass tiles that you could kind of see through. You could also wee your reflection in it. It was amazing! You could see yourself floating through the sky and it looked like you were flying. What was even cooler, was that there was water playing under water! When you were swimming you could hear the music. It was cool underwater-type music and it kind of makes you feel like a mermaid! It was such a fun day!

Now on to the main reason for this post. Liesl. On the way home from Baden, I had my camera and got bored. Liesl was sitting across from me, so I had some fun. She has so many crazy facial expressions! It’s great!

My next item of business - I'm coming home tomorrow!!! I can't believe it's come so soon! Things are all going so fast. I'll add more pictures to this blog later. I've gotta run to dinner and then finish packing!

Thanksgiving... Europen Style.

As you may know, Thanksgiving is a North American holiday. So, being in Austria during the holiday led us to question what exactly we would be doing. To celebrate or to not celebrate.... that definitely was the question. Luckily for us, (instead of paying the 20+ Euro for the dinner that school set up) Elder and Sister Robison set up a huge Thanksgiving Dinner for us at the LDS Institute Building. It was great! We all pitched in and made a wonderful dinner. I was put in charge of the sweet potatoes and so I got to make my sweet potato cheesecake and some candied sweet potatoes. I thought they turned out pretty good.

Kimberlee, Heather, and Anne making mashed potatoes

David being domestic... way to go Dave!

Our dinner was really good, and it was fun to have us all eating together like that. After we stuffed ourselves on turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied sweet potatoes, stuffing, peas, fruit salad, and rolls, it was time for dessert. There were pumpkin pies, apple crisp, and of course, my sweet potato cheese cake. We all ate so much it hurt!! After dessert, a couple of us went for a walk to try and alleviate some of the pain. Then it was time for the talent show.

Dessert... Guess which one I made. :)

The first act was an interpretive dance themed on the First Thanksgiving. I think “interesting” would be a good word for it. We could hardly hear the music because everyone was laughing so hard! It was great! Our second act was me. OK, so that sounded really weird. I played my guitar. It was kind of funny, because I didn’t know that I was going second and so when they called my name, I still hadn’t picked a song to do. I had to kill some time with the story of Marty – my guitar – while I chose a song to sing. It was fun though and I thought it went rather well. After that, we were graced with everything from hula dancing, to music videos, to violin concertos! Over all, it was definitely a great day.