Over Christmas I'd had a lot of time to think, and over the break decided to leave the British Council Language Assistants programme. This was something I'd been thinking about doing from October, and the reasons are two-fold. Firstly, I'd had several, quite serious, issues with my main school. I haven't mentioned these on the blog, as I think it would be unprofessional to do so, and so I will not be going into them now. I will, however, elaborate on the second reason, which was the improvement of my German. My three months in Paris had set the bar high for language improvement, as I was spending all day every day working in a French speaking environment, my colleagues were very sociable and so we would often go out for drinks after work during the week, and even when going out at the weekend with English friends, more often than not we would end up meeting other French people and thus spend the evening/night talking French. The change from that amount of exposure to a language, to teaching in English for my job and talking in English at home (although the children answered in German, and my conversations with the parents were always in German) meant that I was really quite stressed about my rate of improvement. I really did explore several other avenues, including signing up for lectures at the university, joining a German Conversation Course at the library, a Language Exchange Group of Couchsurfers, and finding several tandem partners, but as I am admittedly quite hard on myself, I still was not happy with my progress, and so decided to take more drastic action. I explained what had been going on with the school to the British Council, and they were very understanding, and wished me all the best. I then found a language school in Salzburg, and signed up for an intensive course with just 1 other person for the month. I instantly knew that this was the right thing to do, and I haven't looked back since.
The day before flying back I'd caught a really bad cold from my Dad, and so my first week back in Salzburg was quite an anti-climax. Apart from going to the language school on the Monday to do a test so that they could place me at the right level, I spent most of the week wallowing in my illness, and watching a lot of Scrubs (in German) and Austria's Next Top Model. Luckily the language school was still on Christmas holidays until the next week so I didn't miss a week of class. I finally made it out of my cave on Thursday evening, as it was the first dinner with all the TA's (since leaving the teaching programme I was technically a fraud, but no-one seemed to mind too much!). It was nice to all get together and hear how everyone's Christmas was. Rachel had had a particular exciting Christmas, and came back with a ring on her finger so congratulations again to her and Ian!
On Friday I had just about managed to shake the cold, and it was in perfect time as I was headed to the mountains with my host family for my first weekend of Schifoan (skiing) in Austria!! We drove about an hour outside of Salzburg to the family's house in the small alpine village of Wagrain. It has its own skiing slopes, but is also within a half hours drive of about 15 other resorts, so a really great location! We had a late dinner and an early night ready to hit the slopes the next morning. On Saturday morning, they got out the box of Christmas crackers that I'd bought them as a Christmas present, but they hadn't opened as they weren't sure how to use them. I explained how you cross your arms, take a cracker in each hand, and if you pull the bigger half then you win the toy inside. They seemed to like them, although I must say they weren't too convinced about wearing the paper hats afterwards. They have a few crackers left, so maybe next time they'll be more won over.We were up and out by 11am, and the nearest lift is less than a 5 minute walk from their front door, so we were on the slopes by 11:10am. I must admit that I nearly died with laughter when I saw the name of the cable car we would be taking. 'The Flying Mozart'. Well, what else could it be I suppose! The parents had tickets to the theatre on Saturday evening, so I was left alone with the 2 children and their 2 friends to make pizzas and watch a film. The pizza making left a lot to be desired, ranging from very soggy to very overcooked, but in the end everyone was fed and watered so we can count that as a success! We then watched a film about extreme skiing/snowboarding which was really cool, although I couldn't do what they were doing in a million years!
On Sunday just before our last run, we went into one of the many mountain Huttes to have Krapfen. The best way of explaining this is that it's similar to a doughnut, but can be sweet or savoury. Some people prefer them with Sauerkraut and bacon for example, others with chocolate sauce and ice cream. One of the most popular ways of having them is just with jam. I had a sweet tooth that afternoon, so went for a chocolatey one, and although it was amazing, it was so so filling that I only got about half way through before having to hand it over to someone else to finish!
We had 2 great days of skiing and it was so much fun to be on the slopes again after about 4 years. Of course, Austrians are born with skiis on their feet, and they take day trips in nursery to go skiing, rather than Bocket's Farm. Needless to say, the children and parents were running circles around me, both in terms of speed and technique. I was able to keep up with them if I stayed on piste, and they went off piste, and we just kind of met at the end. The mum's knees had been hurting her a bit so she joined me in staying on piste and we worked out a pretty good system by the end of weekend, where no-one was slowing anyone down and we got to enjoy the slopes together.
We got back to Salzburg late on Sunday night. I felt incredibly old as the last time I went skiing was for a whole week and I can't remember feeling a thing, yet when we got back I was aching all over and so hobbled up the stairs to bed and fell straight asleep, as I was absolutely kaputt!
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