At Home in Eisenstadt

My dad left yesterday and I miss having him here. This whole first week has definitely been an adventure; luckily, the bad part of the adventure was in the beginning and everything got better from there on out. I was originially planning to live in an apartment in Wiener Neustadt but it was still under construction so I would have had a small room and a bathroom. The landlady made it very clear that there would be no kitchen, no internet and no laundry for a couple months. She also made it very clear that there would be no guests, ever. Arthur, a second-year teacher in the program, sent out an e-mail that night asking the other teachers in the area if they were still looking for a place to live - he had a house with two bedrooms and two bathrooms all to himself in Eisenstadt. The next day, I called Arthur and left a message that I would take a bus to Eisenstadt and hopefully get ahold of him there and that I would be a blonde girl and with my dad. He approached us in front of the schloss Esterhazy and asked us if we were John and Anna.

The house is pretty great (it's the LITTLE ONE INSET, ON THE LEFT with the red roof). It's u-shaped with our bedrooms on one side, the front all in the middle and the dining room, kitchen and two bathrooms on the other side. We have to walk a few steps outside to get back into the bathrooms from our bedrooms. There's a really nice yard with an apricot tree and lots of flowers and vines, as well as a fire pit and big plaster bench and table out back.



Arthur mowed the lawn yesterday with the small, plastic, electric mower and the wheel fell off.

Eisenstadt is wine country and right down the street from us is a Buschenschank. The Buschenschank sells 2 liter bottles of wine for a few euros, Austrian food, has an amazing view of the valley and the vineyards below and is run by the Lehner family. It's only open in three week increments throughout the year and closes for the winter, but Frau Lehner told Arthur and I that if we ever got a group of ten people together to call and that they would open for us.

My dad did get to see everything I've described and it was really nice having him here. We "did" Salzburg, Innsbruck, Vienna and Mattersburg - where I'll be teaching. The school in Mattersburg and the teachers I met were very nice, I think it'll be a fun job. We also biked the edge of the Neusiedler See from Rust to Mörbisch, right to the edge of the Austrian-Hungarian border and my dad stepped over it.