November...

So! November... was my birthday!!

But that was at the end of the month... At the beginning of the month we discovered Bobby's, a store that carried American, Britisch, and Australian food (and Naan, of all things), and practically lived there for the first few weeks. I mean they have everything there!! Poptarts, Rootbeer, Reese's Cups, Oreos... it was like a mini-American culture embassy, and I got kind of a warm fuzzy feeling every time I went inside.

On the 27th was the school ball, which was really a great experience!! I mean, I got to wear a gown and chill in a palace--not really an everyday experience!! School balls are basically the big social function of the year for the school; all students, parents, alumni, and teachers, as well as anyone else interested is invited. For the Kundmanngasse Ball there were two rooms with music, one with classical ballroom dancing music for the adults (and very, very drunk teenagers who wanted to try waltzing), and a disco for those young whippersnappers like myself. It started with an opening show, which included teachers dressed as vampires, and then people separated off into groups, drank champagne and wandered through the various rooms. At 12 there was a show conducted by the "best dance school in Vienna," which didn't last very long, and then everybody split off again, and Agnes and I went home around 1 or 2 in the morning.

Since both Agnes and I had been out partying hard on Thanksgiving, we celebrated a day or two afterward. Although celebrating Thanksgiving has basically nix to do with Austrian traditions, we cooked up the full meal: turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread, stuffing, vegetables, and a pumpkin pie to top it off. We decorated the dining room crazy red white and blue and ate with the cousins.

On the 30th was my sweet sixteen. When I came to school and walked up the stairs, people yelled at me to run into the classroom. When I got there, there was a birthday cake for me with a sparkler-firecracker-type thing in it, and they had decorated the blackboards with streamers and such, which basically made my day :) In the afternoon, I got enough courage to invite people from my class to go ice skating with me, which was really fun, and then we came back to the appartment to chat and drink punch. All in all, a really, really, really good birthday, and a great close to November!