Brewery, Bowling, Brewery.

One thing the Austrians (and Germans, I´m not one to discriminate) do incredibly well is a brewery. On Friday evening we all went to the Augustinerbräu to celebrate Cecilia's, (one of the TA's)  birthday. It's a pretty huge yellow building just off of the river, and was originally founded by monks. The atmosphere is incredible and the place itself is full of character.  The beer is served in their signature tankards and you can pick between a half or full litre. Although you can get table service, it's much more fun to go up yourself, rinse the tankard out in a water fountain and then have them fill it up from a keg. There's also lots of traditional food avaliable, wurst, kartoffel usw, and at a very reasonable price. About half of us took this opportunity to wear our dirndls (we need to get as much wear out of them as physically possible to justify the purchase!) and weren't the only ones in traditional dress. The room we were in was pretty busy, but we could still easily carry a conversation. Quite a few tables were spontaneously bursting out into 'drinking songs' and 'prostin'` (cheers) each other, which further added to the great atmosphere. It was a great evening and we somehow managed to split a Sachertorte between us all 20 of us as well!

We headed out to a bar afterwards, where our dirndls were definitely a bit more out of place. However, it's still a lot more common here than I'd have thought. I would say that I see people in traditional dress almost every day, so we didn`t get any funny looks. We had a few more drinks and then headed home after a great evening.

On Saturday I had a pretty chilled day with a nice lie in after the 6am starts from the latter half of the week. I then met one of the teachers from my secondary school and she gave me a lift to the bowling alley, where we met up with the other teachers. It was fun, and although I'd been mentally preparing to be pretty embarassed, I'm actually better at bowling than I remember, so was able to save some face there! I noticed another example of Austria`s pretty relaxed approach to rules. When you go bowling in England, you have to wear bowling shoes. It's just a given. It's a rule and we stick to it. Here, however, they have the bowling shoes avaliable, and you are supposed to wear them but it ends up as your own choice whether you do or not. So for the more fashion conscious among us who hate the hideous bowling shoes, I can recommend bowling in Austria! Unfortunately, I haven't quite 'clicked' with this group of teachers yet. I think it might be to do with the fact that a lot of them speak in Dialekt (Austrian German, rather than Hochdeutsch), and so it's harder to keep up with the conversation and contribute normally. It was good to spend time with them outside of school, though and hopefully I'll be invited to other events with them in the future.

During the past week,'Jazz and the City' has been playing in various locations around Salzburg. It's lots of different groups of jazz musicians, who take over a venue and play their different sets all around the building. On Sunday I headed to the Stieglbräu with the mother and daughter from my host family to check it out. There was a very chilled vibe, with lots of people nodding along with their eyes closed, completely lost in the music. I didn't get quite that into it, but I was definitely appreciating it as I haven't heard live music like that for quite a while. Stieglbräu is both a brewery and a museum, so it was interesting to have a look around while we were walking from one act to the next. As it's almost a completely wooden building, the acoustics sounded pretty cool, especially the saxophones. We stayed for about an hour and a half, and as we left the building and stepped into the bright sunlight outside I realised how relaxed the music has made me. Note to self: if stressed, Jazz fm could be a good option!

As all of my introductory lessons were officially over, this would be the first complete week of 'real teaching', so I had an early night in preparation...