Long Lost Photos from Austria Part 1

I remembered today that I don't think I ever showed anyone except for Kyle my Austria pictures. It was a beautiful place and a big time in my life and my blog readers/family and friends were very supportive of me while I was there. I was reading through some of my old entries from when I was there, my one horrible day in particular, and I was very touched by the comments people left to encourage me. I'm thankful for all of you and for your love and support. You don't always realize how much people like you affect your life until you find yourself in a place where you no longer have them close. I definitely learned a lot that trip and while it wasn't always fun, I want to show you some of these pictures to honour that time of my life and to share some of the beauty and good times with you. (there are lots of them though, so I might just post a couple today and more later). Also, it seems I took the most pictures when I was out exploring by myself, so there are hardly ever any people in them, I'll try to include as many people pictures as I can but you may need to prepare for a scenic tour of Austria.

We'll start with our outing to the Armoury. It chronologically isn't a good starting point but we had lots of fun there with our guide and got to try on the armour, which people normally don't get to do.

Here's me in a helmet:


Here's our guide-man (he was so excited to get his picture taken. He said even though he's worked there for a long time, he's only tried the armour on once and never in a picture... he gave us his email address so we could send him these):



me in my full suit looking ready to fight. It's extremely heavy. I cannot imagine being very nimble in this stuff...



here's the whole crew. don't mess with us...



and these pictures are from a day when I went exploring on my own. First I went for a walk around my neighborhood (and got lost a bit) but found these creepy little lawn ornaments:



and then I took the tram in to the city



this is the tram station we stopped at every day



and then I went to the look out point on top of the hill that our cave theatre was in. You can see the entrance to the cave and then stairs up to the clock tower on top. Apparently it was built during the war, there were canons and stuff on top of the hill and then the cave was a bunker of some sort. It was so beautiful up there.







This was apparently my favourite thing to take pictures of. It's a water cistern that they used when they lived on the hill.







And here is a view of the city. The blue globby thing is their Kunsthaus or art gallery



And that concludes the selected pictures of Austria part 1... stay tuned (if you're interested)

Ottawa

Well, I'm back from Ottawa (I know... old news...) I got back last Sunday. We had a great trip. The first half was busy working towards our show which was on Tuesday and Wednesday but it was really fun working with the other schools from around Canada and all being a part of the same work. It was a really unique experience and the piece was incredible, in my opinion. It was really neat to see how the choreographer incorporated different themes and how he was able to organize 55 people in a very efficient way to create something really beautiful. I'm glad I got to be a part of that.

Other highlights of the trip included:

Dance parties in our enormous hotel room (seriously this place was way bigger than my apartment. It was great, we had a kitchen and a dining room and enough beds for the 4 of us to not share... anyways, here's a picture of Christie and Hilary. Notice how often Christie does the claw in pictures...



Milkshakes at Zak's diner. Many varieties! I had Chocolate Banana:



Discovering I could make this face (actually, I don't know if that was really a highlight...)



We went out dancing one night to 90's night. We had fun in theory but the club we went to was a little sketchy and they played more 90's grunge than we were expecting...









And in stark contrast, High Tea at the Chateau Laurier (we clean up well, except that I had to wear a sweater cuz I was sunburnt from 'landscape dancing' which is a story for another time):





This is their tea trolley, each compartment had different loose teas and they put them in a pretty silver dish for you to smell before committing to one. It was delicious tea. The big silver carafey thing was the hot water:



And of course, shopping is always a highlight. One of my favourite things about Ottawa is the open market with fruits and veggies and flowers and handmade thingies. I would like to get my groceries there.





We also found some really fun little boutiques:



This picture was taken illegally... The lady said we weren't allowed to take pictures because they have so many people's handmade things there and they don't want people stealing their ideas. So pretend you can't see the little owl pillow in the corner...



And I bought this tray at a little vintage shop. It matches our apartment perfectly:



Well I think that about sums it up. We had a lot of fun, got to see a lot of dance shows and... yeah, it was a good trip.

finally

well i'm off to ottawa.
i think we're all pretty excited to finally be heading off to perform and put to rest the pieces we've been rehearsing to death for the past 5 months. wish us luck, we perform on tuesday and wednesday. other than that we get to go to lots of shows, have high tea at the chateau laurier, shop, eat... all around i think it'll be lots of fun.
well...
love and farewell to everyone!
see you next sunday

Birthday Boy

Yesterday was Kyle's birthday. We decided to have a rather relaxed celebration as both of us have had a lot on our plates recently so here's what we did:

We began our celebration with dinner at Alycia's Ukrainian Restaurant, which is apparently one of the best places in the country to get perogies... and as most of you know, Kyle loves perogies and we'd never been there. It's a funny little place with rather dated Ukrainian decor, but we enjoyed ourselves and the food. Apparently it was one of John Candy's favourite places to eat. There were lots of pictures of him there...

And then we went to the globe to see Son of Rambow which was a pretty adorable little movie about a little Plymouth Brethren boy who agrees to be the stuntman in the school bully's Rambo-esque home movie. Quite a delightful little scenario acted by quite delightful little boys.

And then we came home and opened presents. It was altogether a lovely evening. He was a very happy boy...



Also, Kyle started a new job and they bought him a brand new macbook pro with all kinds of fancy expensive software and other exciting things... and as with all new mac owners, most of the first couple days are spent using the photobooth feature (see evidence of this above and below). Hours of fun and hilarity - so much fun, in fact that we couldn't even be bothered to move to a location where the lighting wasn't terrible.... I think Kyle laughed hysterically after each picture we took.

Hooray for birthdays and silly photos
Happy birthday Kylsie!