Obligatory End of the Year Post

It seems to be a requirement that if you have a blog that you have to do an end of the year post, so here is mine. A lot has happened in the last year. A lot has changed. Graduating from university in May was a big enough deal on its own, never mind everything thing else. It was a little more than 10 months ago that I started interviewing for my job. After hours of phone interviews and a trip to Scotland, I accepted the position in mid March. Then all the visa issues came up. I studied for and took the LSATs while all of that was going on. There were trips to Hilton Head and Orlando. I finally moved to Scotland in the first couple of days in September. I was homeless for a couple of days too. I've been to London twice, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and drove through Bratislava quickly. In 2009, I got to meet a lot of interesting people and go to a lot of interesting places. It was an exciting year and hopefully 2010 is even better.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all my readers. I'm back in the US right now after flying home Tuesday. Its just as cold, if not a little colder, than Scotland. Looks like I didn't luck out.

The next morning after flying home, I had a dentist appointment to go to. Afterwards, I-83 was backed up and the on ramp was full so I had some time to kill. There is a brand new McDonalds nearby so I stopped there to eat and wait for the traffic to start to move again. If you ever need a reminder that you're in America, stop at a McDonalds during lunch hour...

Käsekrainer

Another thing I had to eat in Austria was a Kasekrainer. It is a klobasa sausage that has some cheese in it. It is served in a baguette that is cut open at the one end. Some mustard is added as the sausage is slid in.

Langos

In Vienna, I discovered Langos, which quickly became one of my favorite festival foods. A langos is a large, fairly flat piece of dough that is deep fried. It is then coated with a garlic butter spread. They're great and I had two of them from Vienna's Christmas Market.

The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York

Here is a another Christmas classic:

Shakin' Stevens - Merry Christmas Everyone

This has become one of my favorite Christmas songs, but the video is really strange/creepy. Why he is even trying to dance? Who decided that Santa was the way to go? The Santa is really creepy and not just in an awkward 80s kind of way. Check out the kids reaction at 2:50. Also, whats up with the weird female adult-sized elf that shows up at a couple of places? Is she wearing makeup or is she just that ugly?

Videos from Munich

I took a couple short videos with my digital camera of the Glockenspiel at Munich's Neues Rathaus. Everyday at the top of a couple of select hours, the clock has some mechanical figures that put on a show.

Munich and Austria Trip

I spend last Thursday through Monday in Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna. I was originally hoping to do a series of posts about this trip, but haven't got around to it and probably won't. However, it was a very nice trip that I enjoyed very much. For most of my meals, I went to the Christmas markets and got food from the stands, which was very tasty.

Animated All Star Band

This video is pretty good. It's a charity video featuring the voices of all the original actors. Some of the characters are pretty obscure though, at least for someone who didn't grow up in England.

Homeless and frozen to death

The past ten days or so have been pretty eventful. The lease on my flat ended last Friday so I had to move out. The problem was that I couldn't move into my new flat until Monday. The letting agent claimed I couldn't move in until they received a reference letter from my bank. I pushed them on this and they agreed that I could move in on Monday. Somehow this requirement disappeared with no explanation. I still don't know if they ever got the letter or not.

This left me basically homeless over the weekend. I had arrange for my one coworker to store my stuff and I was going to stay with another coworker. However, when he went back to his flat Friday night, he found out that he was being temporary evicted because they had to do emergency repairs to the shared wall between him and his neighbor. I became homeless twice in one day.

When I eventually moved into my new flat on Monday, I quickly founded out that night that the central gas heating did not work. The whole flat got very cold very quickly. Luckily I had purchased a new duvet early in the week. Without it, I would probably have froze to death in my sleep. By chance, I was heading to London for a conference for the next two nights so I only had to put up with it one night. When I got back Thursday night, it had been fixed.