A Cookout

It felt like I was back home for awhile. The staff here had a cookout yesterday afternoon. Games and grilling. One of the guys made the target boards for Corn Hole. Now I'm from New York - alright LonGisland and if it wasn't for my two sons-in-law, one from Ohio and the other from Kentucky, I wouldn't have any idea what it was. But thanks to both of them who made their own boards I now know and play the game. All of us were put into pairs and we played double elimination. As you can see they weren't too far apart so it was not too difficult to get the bean bag into the hole. But it was fun for all. Notice what the winners were given, a box of ice cream bars called Magnums. Ice cream like this is almost gold around here. Not too many food items that are eaten really cold. Most of the ice cream is really soft by the time you get to eat it.

I have to say some of the meat was a little different than I was used too. A hot dog wrapped in ham (bacon) and injected with a cheese filling, it's called a Kasekrainer and it's one of Vienna's favorite fast foods. You can find Wurstelstands all over Vienna selling this. If you do decide to get hamburger meat make sure it's not meat already mixed with pork. That's good for a meatloaf, but not good if you like your hamburgs rear like I do. We did manage to find chopped meat to make our patties. Lot's of cheeses here and I mean LOTS, but you have to look a little to find just plan American cheese to put on top of your burger. Which only makes sense knowing that we are in Austria, and not America. It's called Toast Cheese. Just like your plain white bread, it's called Toast also. With so many other breads to choose from, why would you even consider wanting white bread anyway! I like my simmels! Very similar to the hard rolls we get on LonGisland!

Anyway here are some pictures from the cookout. Notice the two playing boards one is the American side and the other is the Austrian side.

Also,I took some pictures of some snails crawling up a wall. I noticed them when we were leaving. You can see one of them on it's way to some "food" that was growing out of the wall. I can't even imagine what that stuff was, and I don't want to know either.

Okay the pictures: Look at the third picture and then the fourth. If you look real close you can see the two red bags that Pam got in the hole

Oh yeah, one more thing, we finished moving ALL the books in the library this morning. I guess between Yulia, Pam and me we moved about 30,000 books.

Tomorrow is my last day of getting all my stuff together before I leave for Minsk on Sunday.

John