I am happy to announce that my hostbrothers from Californ-I-A are visiting and staying with my family for a couple of days. We do have a tight schedule, because our time is limited. However, I am so glad that we could work something out. This weekend we are going to tour in Vienna, meet up with another friend from San Francisco.

New Year’s Eve we will party at my place. If you want to get to know them, call me and I’ll tell you where to meet.

Next week Wednesday, I’d say we go for the buy one get two cocktails. Sounds good to me. Ice skating, Ulrich sitzen (sitting, this term is wayyyy too Austrian for me to put it into English). Los geht’s!

NEW: See the gallery for pictures of Vienna, Krems and our Night Activities. :)

Scotland is such an overwhelming place in terms of scenery, people and culture. Arriving in Edinburgh Airport I didn’t expect to enter the land of Harry Potter and kitschy old buildings that are just mesmerizing. Follow my logbook about my trip to St. Andrews including a one-day trip to Edinburgh.

In today’s edition of Lingo Bingo, we will cover some commonly used idioms in everyday’s language. Im sogenannten Alltag lässt man es gerne mal laufen und greift auf bekannte Sprachbilder zurück. So that’s exactly what we are going to talk about. Are there certain “Floskeln” (empty phrases that are pretty hackneyed) that both the German speaking and English speaking word use repetitively?

It happens to be quite entertaining to mock somebody because of a funny slip. Tongue twisters (in German called Zungenbrecher [tonuge breakers]) usually play with (un?)intentional slips. In today’s issue we’ll talk tongue-twisteria.

Notice that this entry is filed under English vs Deutsch, where Lingo Bingo is usually posted too.

Wow. The weather in Austria really sucks right now. There’s nothing you can do but hang indoors doing TV show marathons, watching new movies (Kinky Boots — which I highly recommend, it is a fun flick and pretty funny in a pretty kinky way). So I can’t wait for the weather to be more decisive. Rain and cloudy sky OR sunny with cleared up sky. Please. So in the meanwhile (waiting for the weather to be more picturesque), I have to post some pictures of sunny Californ-I-A.

Gut’n Morg’n!

In today’s Lingo Bingo, I would like to take you to a special place in the German speaking world: Austria. I am not sure if you know that Austrians love going their own way. So guess what, they also like to distinguish itself from other German speaking countries; Germany in particular (I would like to drop a line or two on that issue*). Enjoy, leg’ di’ auf die faule Haut (lie on your lazy skin) and let’s go!

Picture by premshree on flickr.com

Being in an “All-English” working environment, reading something like this just feels like fingernails scratching on a chalk board (This link answers all your questions about running fingernails down a board — I had to add some eduactional value to this blog entry).

Anyhoo, our ex-Vizekanzler der “blue-black-government” wrote the following “application” seeking for some job abroad, because (as he said) “the world in Vorarlberg is too small.”

Graham Norton, Irish Comedian with his own show. The Graham Norton Show. BBC 2.