This is our Bratislava update even though we have been back for a little over a week. We posted a new video and our first photo samples :) There are also journal entries for both Sarah and myself. We hope you enjoy the update and we will keep adding content from past trips.

A bit of a sad update this week. Sarah and I were scheduled to go to Amsterdam this week, but on our way there we had 2 of our bags stolen. We had a lot of stuff that we would normally use to update the website (camera & video camera) and some more sentimental items (the journal that we started the day we got married). In any case, we have dealt with it, for the most part, and are trying to look toward the future.

To that end we have been doing a lot of work on the site. Sarah has a new journal entry. We have finally put up all the photos from our year in Graz and you can expect photos from this year to go up before next Sunday. We have also put together an Audio/slideshow that we put together while we were traveling, you can find that here under videos. Just as a warning to the time pressed, this audio selection is 15 minutes long so listen while you are having your morning coffee or while you are wasting time on Facebook. Look for more changes as well, there will be a lot of tinkering under the hood to make the site run better and faster and hopefully have a few more eyecatching features.

For anyone who is looking at the site on a dial-up connection, we have something just for you this week. We are releasing our "video" as an audio only format which you can download here. Just download and then open with any media player. We know you are not able to get our videos, but hopefully this will bring us a bit closer. If you have any questions on how to download or open send us an email and we'll be glad to help you.

Skiing update. Well, Sarah just finished our Innsbruck video. We have a good time without any major mishaps. We are just waiting out the time before semester break. Next week we will post a new video about a new feature of our apartment that we have just now taken advantage of.

Merry Christmas! We have posted a Christmas Market video for you to see. It includes tours of Wels, Salzburg, Linz, and Munich. Hope you enjoy

We are finally caught up with our videos and we have put up our trip to Munich. Tomorrow's project, journal updates. We hope you are enjoying the site, send us an email, especially if you are not on our mailing list. You can send me mail at n.shirley1 [at] gmail.com

Well, we have one video down and one to go. We just uploaded our adventures in Salzburg. Tomorrow we will work on updating our journals and hopefully get the Munich video up sometime later in the week. Hope you like them. Happy St. Nicholas day!

Sarah just finished editing her video of her class sining the thanksgiving song, you can find it under videos, Enjoy.

We have a short update for you this week. We have put up a video we made of our local market here in Wels. Its pretty good in terms of variety and all the people that come. You can find the video here.

Our Video adventures will re-commence soon, after this short stretch of poverty has finished. In the mean time, you can find new journal entries for Sarah and Nick.

This week we are bringing you part 2 of our adventure from orientation. After we left we took a short detour to stay the night in Schlierbach, a small town about an hour outside of Wels. They are having a "Landesausstellung" or exhibition of local food and drinks produced througout Upper Austria. We picked a good weekend to go as the theme for last week was fruit, juice and schnapps. We have a new video of what we did there (including making and drinking the freshest apple juice that can be had) and other adventures.

We also have new journal entries in both Nick and Sarah's journals. We are starting on our second week of teaching and it has been going well so far. Most of our first classes are introducing ourselves, but we have also been doing some lesson plans. This week in Wels we found the farmer's market, which is really great. It has both inside and outside parts and you can do your shopping and then have a drink or snack at any of the bars that are there. If you want, many of the stalls even have little tables set up so you can eat what you buy right away.

And, as always, you can still look at pictures from Schlierbach and Hinterglemm here or you can land on the index here and see the rest of the collections. They were in last weeks update, but both trips are bundled together so if you haven't seen them yet you should look, they are pretty good.

We are back from our orientation and we started work in Wels! Our orientation went well. We had a great location, tucked away in the mountains with great views and good food. We learned a lot of stuff about teaching and we had a lot of fun with the other TAs. Aside from the seminars we also did a lot of fun stuff like climbing a mountain and putting on what I can only describe as a weird British/American variety show. You can see all that in the video section. There are also updates in Sarah & Nick's Journal.

The pictures of our trips are coming slowly. I'm having trouble working them into the format of the site. For the time being you can see some of the pictures on Nshirleyphotos.com You can also follow the long term photo essay that I will be creating from this year.

After our orientation we took a short trip to Schlierbach to see the food festival which was a lot of fun. That video will be coming next week.

Well, Oktoberfest is over and we had a great time! It was bit of a bust the first day with the rain, but Friday and Saturday were great. We have a new video up for you and 2 new entries from me (if you missed the one before last just click on the date and it will unroll, this is true for video updates also). We are off to Salzburg in a couple of days for our Orientation and we are taking a detour on the way home to Schlierbach to go to a food festival. Hope you are all doing well, more updates to come soon.

Update #2! This week we bring you video of our Mini-Moon in Vienna. We had originally planned to fly to Italy for our real honeymoon, but we unfortunately booked with Sky-Europe which went out of business before they could take us there. So, we made the best of it and took a short trip to Vienna and stayed in a real hotel for the first time (in Vienna). We hope you enjoy the video. Sorry, no pictures, but, next week we will have lots of pictures and video from Octoberfest in Wels!

Our new site begins today with our arrival video! I swear that we don't try to find trouble when we travel...somehow, though, it seems to find us even when we think we have dodged it. In our defense, this trip went relatively smoothly, we made it through DFW and Amsterdam very easily (on an only slightly related note KLM is awesome, you'll see why in our video), but when we made it to Vienna things started to go down hill. Of course, when we get there it's raining and it was only after walking through this rain for about an hour and a half that we find out that there are NO DeutscheBank ATMs in Austria. So our plan to get money out and avoid the fees falls through.The adventures will only continue from there as we try to find an apartment in Wels. In the end it took 4 days of hard searching, calling every single ad listed in the paper and endless frustration before we finally found something.

 

To see our new videos you can click on the videos tab on the right hand side, just like last year and you can see some of the photos we took on the photos page although there are not any this week. Also, this year we are hoping to make a lot more use of the journals pages so that you can hear about our adventures from our two different perspectives.

 

We hope you enjoy our first update and the old content will be coming back online as we have time to fold it in, it won't have the same presentation that it did last year and we won't try to make that fit into the new mold for the site, but it will be there in archival form if you ever wanted to see it again (I'm talking to you Kathleen, I know you watch that ice skating video when no one is around =)