Auf Wiedersehen, Graz & Oesterreich!

As you have figured out by now, by my absence of posting or from seeing me back home, our 3 months in Austria is over - we came back stateside at the end of February.  I had a few more posts I wanted to write - like about Doener Kebap, which is this amazing sandwich that's like the Turkish version of a gyro.  (This photo hardly does it justice, but it's the best I have.  You can browse images from a google search for better photos.)

It's in a pillowy, pita-like bread that is hot and often fresh from the oven, with mouthwatering meat that they shave off a twirling cone of layered bits of meat that continues to roast (and you really want to go to a shop that has real, unprocessed meat, versus the cone of pressed meat that I think we often identify with gyros), and then the fresh veggies - tomato, onion, lettuce, sometimes cucumber or purple cabbage.  You can get it scharf (spicy) or mild (mild), or a little of both - the mild gets you an amazing minty, garlic-y yogurt sauce, and the spicy adds a little red chili paste.  So amazingly delicious!  I think there is really a market for Doener Kebap here in CA.  This sandwhich version of Doener actually originated in Berlin in the 90s, and only over the past 5 years have Kebap stands proliferated in Graz, where they are very popular.

I have to show 1 more food photo - this is a really great example of the richness of a lot of the traditional Austrian dishes.  This is called Geschnetzeltes mit Schwammerln und Kräuterspätzle, or "cut meat with mushrooms and herb Spaetzle", but a better translation is, pork in an amazing creamy, wine-y sauce, and yes that's bacon, next to a sprinkling of fried onions... The bowl adjacent is Spätzle, which is one of my favorite things, it's a kind of akin to pasta with a more satisfying texture - the egg-and-flour-based dough is grated into boiling water, and here it's also been pan fried with herbs (Kräter).  (Käsespätzle is spätzle baked with cheese - like European mac and cheese; talk about amaaaazing comfort food) 

And related, unfortunately, to culinary experiences, I was also going to post about the crazy amount of smoking we encountered.  It seems like on the street, as many people are smoking as not.  Most restaurants still have smoking, although not all, and *some* have good nonsmoking sections that are actually separate enough not to be smoky.  A couple of times we had our own private dining experience when we were the only people in the non-smoking room.  But public transportation and shops at least are smoke-free, and the hotels we stayed in when we traveled were on the whole not smoky.  The (non)smoking thing is something you realize you take for granted here in CA, and most places in the US now (and increasingly in Europe) where there are restrictions.  It was pretty depressing to see so many people smoking, especially really young people.

And I also had a post in mind about our governor, Arnold, (I hope you read that in his Austrian accent!) who hails from a small village just outside of Graz.  We learned about this from a lot of different people, who upon finding out we were from CA asked if we had visited Thal (pronounced 'tall') yet.  Apparently there is a museum there.  And sometimes we'd also get the story about the controversy over the eponymous sports stadium in Graz - when people heard about Schwarzenegger's stance on the death penalty in CA (the 2005 execution), which ran counter to Austrian values (the death penalty was outlawed there in 1950), they protested and were debating renaming Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium. Arnold asked to have his name removed, and it's now called UPC-Arena, after a telecom company, I believe.  I tried to impress (or amuse, for the non-Austrians), with my AS claim-to-fame of having his signature on my UC PhD diploma.

Which reminds me of one more comment, the low-key rivalry between Austria and Germany.  I say low-key because it has an ostensible all-in-fun kind of feel, but I think the undercurrent is a long and somewhat significant tradition.  I also am pretty sure that it's more acute on the Austrian side than the German side.  This Facebook page I ran across, I bet AUSTRIA can reach 1 million fans before GERMANY, and the accompanying I bet GERMANY can reach 1 million fans before AUSTRIA, is a really amusing example.  (If you're not on Facebook, what this is about is designating yourself a 'fan' of particular FB pages, which people set up for organizations, ideas, themes, etc).  These particular pages are really funny in and of themselves, but what says it all is that the Austrian page has 154,218 fans as of right now, and the German page has 23,054.

Well, I think I'll have to wrap it up there.  Thanks to all of you who followed my blog - the consensus is that you all really liked it, which I am so glad about! :-)  It was a lot of fun for me to do, and I hope to continue something here now that our 3 months of life abroad is over.  Our next big adventure is the garden/yard transformation, which will happen over the next few months, so I think that will be plenty of blog-worthy adventure to continue with...

Bis bald!