Things That Are/Are Not Bigger in Texas

My friend Anna and I entering the Lone Star State

Greetings from Friola, Texas.  According to the saying, everything is bigger here.  After a few days in the state, it's time to evaluate the stereotype.

Things that were bigger:

-The shoulders on the highway.  This was nice for us cyclists, as the trucks on the highway also seemed much larger.

-Dairy farms.  I was lucky enough to tour the High Plains Dairy, where I saw a rotating milking carousel that held 72 cows at a time.  The dairy produces 46,000 gallons of milk per day.

-The crickets.  Seriously, they were huge.

-The "Welcome to Texas" sign.  Without a doubt the biggest state sign we've come across.  

-Soft drinks.  A normal soda in a restaurant is a 24-32 ounce monstrosity that would make Michael Bloomberg would throw a conniption fit. 

-Steaks.  My friend Josh attempted to complete the steak challenge at the Big Texan Steakhouse, which requires participants to eat 4 1/2 pounds of steak, a baked potato, side salad, and shrimp cocktail in under an hour.  He nearly did it too.

Things that were not bigger:

-Towns.  Aside from Amarillo, the towns we have been staying in had 1,000-4,000 residents.

My friend Josh valiantly ate
61 ounces of a 72 ounce steak
in Amarillo.

-Standard weights and measures.  These are pretty much the same everywhere.

-French fry portions.  What was the deal with that?

-Salads.  I guess that was to be expected.

-Post offices.  These were tiny.  Their hours were shorter than expected as well. 

Funny Signs, Part II - Church Signs

A real gem from my trip back in 2008.  Found in Paris, KY

Something I've noticed on this trip is that the only organizations with signs as consistently punny as hairdressers are churches.  Although churches are not often known their sense of humor or marketing savvy, somehow they excel at dorky, but attention-grabbing wordplay and turns of phrase.  Some are pleasant and witty ("This church is prayer conditioned") while others are dark and gloomy ("Live each day like it is your last and someday you will be right").  All are amusing.  Here is a sample of what I've seen so far:

"You cannot stumble on your knees." - Wells, ME

"You have one new friend request from Jesus.  Accept or ignore?" - Kittery, ME

"If you need to make ends meet, put Jesus in the middle." - Buffalo, PA

"God wants full custody, not just weekends." - Penns Hills, PA

"Sign broken, the message is inside." - Deersville, OH

"What part of 'Thou Shalt Not' did you not understand?" - Columbus, OH (the sassiest of them all)

"Don't look back.  You're not going that way." - Nashville, IN (near the bad ass town of Gnaw Bone, IN).

"7 days without prayer make one weak." - Xenia, IL (my favorite so far)

"What is missing from Ch _ _ ch?  U R."  - Breese, IL

"And you think this is hot? - God." - Lake Ozark, MO

"ATM inside. Atonement, truth, & mercy." - Springfield, MO

"The closer you are to the son, the less likely you'll get burned." - Stroud, OK

"God doesn't believe in atheists, therefore they don't exist." - Stroud, OK

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness." - Edmond, OK

Funny Signs, Part 1

Too good to be true.

We all understand the appeal of puns.  They entertain, then vex the mind, and they mock.  As I've been riding across the Northeast and Midwest, I've noticed that for some reason one type of business relies more heavily on punny, ironic, and pseudoclever titles more than any other - hairdressers.  Here is a selection of ones I've seen so far.

Shear Envy - Fitchburg, MA
The Hairport - Orange, MA
Upper Cuts, Round II - Pittsfield, MA
Head Lines - Port Jervis, NY
Hair's to You - Port Jervis, NY
A Cut Above - Berwick, PA
Hair Time - State College, PA
Hairway to Heaven - Cadiz, OH
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow - Gnaw Bone, IN
Larry's Hairy Business - O'Fallon, IL
Wanda Full Salon - St. Louis, MO
Hair Commanders - St. Louis, MO

Pennsylvania: Now with Amish

Much like us cyclists, the Amish use
reflective safety triangles to stay visible
on the road and protect themselves
from aggressive Pennsylvanians.

Yesterday's ride from Berwick, PA to State College, PA was a fantastic Bike & Build day for a number of reasons:

-It was our first century ride (100+ miles).  Actually is was more like 97.2, but I went around the block a couple of times to cap it off.

-We had two lunch stops because of the day's extreme mileage and heat.  At second lunch (the best meal of the day), we had farm fresh cheese, peaches, meats, and raspberry shrub.  The food was donated by a Bike & Build alum and his parents and we ate in an Amish-built barn.

-I passed a horse and buggy on my bike.

-A nice Amish lady gave me two free bandanas "to help control my sweat issues."  I guess my sweat issues were quite apparent.

My new favorite road sign - "Truck Use Low Gear"

-We ended the day in State College and showered in the notorious Penn State locker rooms.  The ghost of Joe Paterno is still heavy on the town. 

-We had some major descents (see photo). 

Next is Johnstown, PA, then a day off in Pittsburgh, then Ohio and beyond

Pre-B&B: Final Thoughts

With just 8 days remaining until my trip's orientation begins in Portland, here are some thoughts that are running through my head.

-Will any of the riders accidentally fly to Portland, Oregon?

-How much do postcard stamps cost?  Why are they cheaper than regular stamps?

Baker, CA might not have much to offer...

-Will I find enough donated food for the riders to eat during the trip?  Will they get hangry at me?

-Will I actually have time to blog once the trip starts?

-Is there a way to get from Baker, CA to Barstow, CA without riding on I-15?

-Why do people in California refer to highways as "The 15" or "The 1" instead of just "15" or "1"??

-Should I bring my laptop?

-How come nobody in Portland responded to my press releases?  Is there just too much news in Portland?  Come on!

That is all.

Things I'm going to miss about Austria

Waidhofen Stadtturm, with
our 25 meter tall maypole!

I'll be leaving in just over two weeks, and I've started to think about the things I'm going to miss once I move back to the USA.  A bulleted list:

-Lovely springtime weather in the Ybbstal.  This valley is absurdly lush and it's been an amazing place for hiking, jogging, cycling, swimming, and outdoor napping.

-Practical, non-Amtrak train travel.

-Having things to blog about

This spring Waidhofen got really
green, really fast. 

-Drinking outdoors not necessarily indicating that one is a degenerate. 

-Having sales tax included in the listed price of goods at the store and thus feeling as though I do not pay sales tax.

-Practicing German.

-Topfen (also known as Quark in Germany), a type of curd cheese that is a healthy, tasty, cheap, dress-it-up-dress-it-down miracle food.

-Austrian Gemütlichkeit

-Being employed.

-Austrians, Americans, and even Brits that I've met, blahblahblah.

-Referring to people with definite articles before their names, as Austrians tend to do.
Ex: "Hello, I am the Scott, it is nice to meet you." "Hello, you may call me the Helmut.  Are you friends with the Carinna?" "Do you mean the Baumgärtner Carina." "Yes, her." "Oh, then I am friends with the Carina."

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Stayed tuned for things I'm not going to miss about Austria (a much shorter list).

Easter Itinerary

Since Italy and work/productivity are more or less incompatible concepts, I may not be able to update the old blog very frequently in the next two weeks, however anyone who's curious parties can always consult the following travel schedule.

At least eleven trains will be ridden in the
next two weeks.  Time will tell what
percentage of the Italian ones will be on time.



April 12 - Overnight train to Italy
April 13 - Rome (Colosseum, Circus Maximus)
April 14 - Rome (Vatican, St. Peter's)
April 15 - Pompeii/Subiaco
April 16 - Rome (Catacombs, Spanish Steps)
April 17 - Rome (Pantheon)
April 18-21 - Corniglia/hiking in the Cinque Terre
April 21 - Pisa
April 22 - Florence
April 23 - Florence
April 24 - Klagenfurt
April 25 - Vienna
April 26-May 4 - Waidhofen
April 29 - Innsbruck
April 30 - Bregenz
May 1-4 - Waidhofen
May 5-May 8 - London

Then just 17 days and I'll be back in America!

Things that I collect

Living in Europe and having too much free time has inspired me to pick up two not-so-glamorous hobbies: keeping a blog and collecting things.  To combine my two passions, a list:

-Austrian beer coasters.  Anyone that can find me a Schwechater, Zwettler, or a Puntigamer would complete my collection and be my hero!  Although most all Austrian beers taste the same, their coasters have cool designs and slogans.  My favorites are "das bierige Bier" ("the beery beer") and "Ein Glas heller Freude" ("a glass of delightful joy").  Also, anyone with a suggestion for a lovely coaster art project please speak up!

-Currencies.  The euro really ruined my opportunity to collect currencies.  I've only got four so far, not counting the ten-dollar bill I've been carrying uselessly since September.

-Metro tickets.  So far I've got Vienna, Prague, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Budapest, Athens, and Zagreb.

One of the only German hairdresser
puns I've ever seen.  It's a play on the
words for "progress" and "cut."

-Animal stickers from Billa, initially intended for children to stick in a sticker book.  If anyone has the bottom-third of the giraffe sticker, I'm willing to trade.

-Postcards.  I guess that one's not that weird.  Send me some more.

-Photos of hairdressers with punny names like "Curl Up & Dye," "British Hairways," or "Hair Force One."

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An unrelated word-of-the-day, but one which I find amusing, if a little morbid, is das Leichenschauhaus.  It means "morgue," but in little German chunks it means something more like "dead body looking-at house."

America vs. Europe - Grocery Store Edition

Dogs are theoretically forbidden
from Austrian grocery stores.

A recent trip inspired me to point out some of the more comical differences:

-Whereas American supermarkets are known for hiding the milk in the back of the store to make you walk past all of their other offerings, Austrian grocery stores are more likely to apply this principle to beer and wine.

-American grocery stores usually provide free and limitless shopping carts, while Austrian stores usually require a small deposit for each cart, presumably to discourage theft, although I think that anyone who really wants a shopping cart is willing to pay €.50 for it.  (Tip: Austrian shopping cart dispensers also take American coins!)

-America: 168 open hours per week. Austria: 72.  See: Gemütlichkeit.

-Produce in Austrian grocery stores often needs to weighed and labelled by the customer - a task that I think many Americans would be incapable of.  I myself have gotten majorly scolded for forgetting.

-Supermarkets in America often provide customers with free bagging service.  The lack of such a service in Austria has surely destroyed a potential job market for teenagers, ex-cons, retirees and other qualification-impaired individuals.

-Peanut butter here is 100% more expensive and you get weird looks for buying it.

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And for today's German lesson, I'd like to point out how amusing it is that the names of German meals can also be used as verbs, which is certainly not the case in English.  Thus, das Frühstück is "breakfast" and frühstücken is "to breakfast."

Miscommunication - Pi Day Edition

Pi Day - The day when math teachers
attempt to reconcile Americans' love of
pie with their hatred of math.

For those who didn't realize, yesterday was Pi Day, so called because it was March 14, or 3.14 - the first three digits of pi.  I tried to explain this to one of my teachers and I failed for the following revealing reasons:

1. Austrians, and Europeans in general, write dates "backwards" (to Americans).  Thus yesterday was 14.3 and not 3.14.
2. Austrians don't really ever think about pie.  They're proud of their cakes and would probably never be caught dead with a slice of Mrs. Smith's PreBaked Dutch Apple Crumb Pie, even though Apfelstrudel is more or less the same thing.
3. Even if you met an Austrian who, despite all odds, loved both pie and geometry, he wouldn't even get the pun, as pi is not even pronounced the same way in German.  It's pronounced like "pee" and somehow "Pee Day" is just not as appealing.
4. Austrians, to generalize, just don't understand puns.  It's why Austrian crosswords are so inferior and about 20% as difficult.

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And in honor of Pi Day, today's word is unendlich, which means, predictably, "infinite."
  

Most Interesting Lessons I've Taught So Far

Advanced English vocabulary

For every mind-numbing lesson I've had to teach on banking vocabulary and Heathrow Airport, I've gotten to teach at least one on a more interesting topic, often one that allowed me some amount of creativity.  A partial list of the more interesting ones is below, although I should admit that "interesting" means I found it interesting and certainly not that the students necessarily shared my enthusiasm.

-Is Paul dead?
-Is Tupac dead? (the class firmly decided that he is not...)
-Bushisms
-Human vs. robot Jeopardy! match
-Facebook (I printed out my friends' profiles and made students assume their identities)
-American artists*
-Pop art*
-Ivy League lightbulb jokes (match the college to its stereotype!)
-Bobbing for apples
-Misunderstood lyrics
-Are you a Republican? (turns out they're not)
-The death of the Sony Walkman R.I.P.
-Comparing James Bond actors
-E-Books (just kidding, that sucked)

And I'd be happy to share any of these lessons with struggling English teachers or really bored Austrians.

*Stars indicate that I was completely unqualified to teach this lesson, but did so anyways.

Very Austrian Things That I've Done So Far

Since arriving in September, I've...

-Waltzed to a live performance of the Baywatch Theme Song.  (The blatant lack of appropriate time signature does not deter Austrians from waltzing.)

Alpenhütte party atop nearby Prochenberg

-Enjoyed three-hour lunch breaks.

-Screamed at a stranger for failing to stand right, walk left on an U-Bahn escalator in Vienna.  I'm not normally this unfriendly, but I could not miss that train. 

-Hiked up a mountain, discovered an Alpenhütte (mountain hut) party, drank a beer, hiked back.
-Hiked a different mountain with Maggie, discovered a Gasthaus (guesthouse/inn), drank a beer, hiked back.  We also played a wooden glockenspiel on said mountain.
-Judged people for mentioning The Sound of Music.
-Demanded, with near immediate success, that a DJ play the #1 International Superhit Barbara Streisand.
-Bagged my own groceries every time.
-AND stayed in one cafe for a period of time so lengthy that I would have almost certainly been suspected of homelessness in the US.

Ein Gutes Neues Jahr

After completing about two-thirds of my holiday travels without updating my blog, I became anxious that my readers would begin to lose interest and decided to post a partial update.  Right now I'm in a hostel in Hamburg resting from a long train ride that left Vienna at 6:30 am, just minutes after the ball dropped in New York.  Needless to say I'm rather proud of catching such a train, uncaffeinated, on the hangover holiday of the year.  

Despite having only about ninety minutes of sleep so far in 2011, I admit that I had an excellent Silvester - as Germans call New Years Eve.  Although I was sad to forego Dick Clark (or is it Ryan Seacrest?) and the annual Twilight Zone Marathon, I was happy to discover some new December 31 traditions with my girlfriend Maggie and a few of our friends from college.  Here are highlights from the last night's Vienna program (official and unofficial):

-Pouring molten lead into cold water to predict your 2011 fortune.  My glob formed itself roughly into the shape of a shoe.  Its meaning is open to interpretation.
-Hot punch
-Unsanctioned fireworks

New Years is a busy day for the purchase
of useless plastic trinkets

-Sadly, missing the Madonna cover show in Vienna's 1st District
-Buying lucky Austrian New Years totems: pigs, mushrooms, chimney sweeps, and clovers (seem  Irish...)
-Attempting to waltz to Strauss at midnight, failing due to lack of space and ability to waltz.

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And the first vocabulary lesson of the New Year is einen guten Rutsch - a nice German New Years greeting that literally translates to wishing someone a "good slide."  I do not know the etymology of this phrase, but I suspect that it might relate to a champagne-related decrease in ability to walk (or waltz) properly.

Holiday Itinerary

 Although I may not be able to update the old blog very frequently in the next three weeks, curious parties can always consult the following schedule to figure out where I am, what trouble I may be in, and which consulate to call in order to post my bail.



Train tracks with an unrealistic
amount of snow



December 18 - Vienna
December 19-21 - Genoa
December 22 - Vienna
December 23 - Waidhofen an der Ybbs
December 24 - Salzburg
December 25 - Salzburg
December 26 - Munich
December 27 - Munich
December 28-31 - Vienna
January 1 - Hamburg
January 2 - Hamburg
January 3-5 - Berlin
January 6 - Vienna
January 7 - Budapest
January 8 - Budapest
January 9 - Waidhofen an der Ybbs

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And today's word, just for fun, is der Dudelsack - bagpipes.

Things That Are Not Free in Austria

Although the following are usually free (or kostenlos) in the United States, they are often non-free in Austria:

The 0 Euro Coin, official currency of Greece

-Public restrooms
-Ketchup
-Grocery bags
-Shopping carts
-Bread at restaurants
-Tap water

Then again, the following are free in Austria, but decidedly non-free in the United States:

-College
-Prescription Drugs

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Tomorrow I am headed to the Austrian province of Burgenland to reunite with some other American teaching assistants.  More on my travels on Monday.

Things I See While Jogging

So I've finally settled on a fixed course that I use just about every day to go running.  It's about 6 or 7 kilometers long and it offers a number of truly amusing sites.  Some are delightfully Austrian and some are just charming in their own right.  I usually run by:



Waidhofen's Cool Viaduct



-A self-service schnapps bar

-A fresh milk automat (milk appears to come directly from cows)

-Several foxes, a family of deer, and an emu

-Two cemetaries, one of which is adjacent to a retirement home

-A cool viaduct

-A restaurant that advertises "Five Euro Schnitzel Wednesdays"
-Three traffic circles

-A full-time castle, part-time nightclub

-A mountain

-Packs of older Austrians who seem to love their Nordic walking sticks, but also seem to ingore proper Nordic walking technique







I question the necessity of using poles.

And as a follow-up to my last post, the castle club night was a fun and successful adventure.  I have collected some real, live Austrian friends, one of whom taught me my new favorite German word and today's offering - das Kuddelmuddel.  It's an unbelievably adorable word for a mess or a mix-up, especially one that a child would create. 



American Things That are More Common in Austria than in the US:

-McDonald's
-The King of Queens
-David Hasselhof's Musical Ambitions
-Grease
-'Hey Baby' by Bruce Channel from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
-Two and a Half Men (aka Mein Cooler Onkel Charlie)

And for those of you concerned about the red sludge catastrophe, Hungary is downstream along the Danube from Austria, so it will remain firmly Hungary's problem and not interfere with life in Waidhofen an der Ybbs.  And for today's vocabulary lesson, an environmental disaster is called Umweltkatastrophe.