adventures in a foreign land

know what's weird about being here? I'm halfway accross the world and my life is more or less exactly the same. I wake up. I go to rehearsal. I go home. That's pretty much it. You'd think I'd be seeing the sights and shopping and doing all kinds of fun things, but the reality of it is that everything here closes by 6:00 and we usually rehearse until 6. We buy groceries on our lunch break. Not a lot seems to happen here after 6, which is funny cuz i read on the internet that graz is supposed to have great night life. although it also said october was one of the best times to travel because it would be pleasantly warm (it's not).

Last night, Pam, Lise and I did take a gamble and went out for dinner. It is rather difficult to find a restaurant and order successfully in a foreign land. and my german-english dictionery doesn't seem to keep up very well. We ended up in a little underground restaurant for which we were underdressed and couldn't understand the menu very well. They did happen to have one that had some english on it (but only one so we all sat on one side of the table to read over eachother's shoulders). I ended up having some weird potatoey dumplings and a mound of saurkraut.
After dinner we went back to the tram station only to find out that our tram stops running sometime before 8:00. So we decided to get dessert. We wandered more or less aimelessly through the rain, one of my companions with a sad and hilariously broken umbrella and the other walking with the type gait only found in a person who has severely sore legs and is still somewhat constipated...
We ended up in the diveyest, smokiest little restaurant - full of fake palm trees and paintings of fish. And our dessert ended up being really quite terrible. But we laughed a lot (partially because they give you a shot of schnapps after every meal to aid in digestion) so I guess it was all worth it in the end.