Bad Gastein to the Emergency Doctor

Well, we did at least make it to Bad Gastein. While the worry was that Heinrich would be too sick for us to make the trip in the first place, in the end we got there and then he got so sick while there that despite one visit to the town doctor and another emergency doctor intervention resulting in antibiotics from the emergency Apotheke on a Sunday, we had to cut our full trip one week short (the original plan was to spend the second week on the warm shores of the Austrian lake Zell am See) and drive home to spend a week wallowing in our small home with 75% of us just barely clinging on to life through the depths of a severe bout of illness.

The bad news is of course that we missed out on a week of vacation in the mountains by the lake, but some of the good news is that finally everybody is slowly starting to get better (and somehow Pemulis never contracted the dreaded illness). Other points while viewing a glass half full in the context of the current discussion area are that we get to look forward to another holiday as the second-week hotel allowed us to re-book for some time in the Fall (which was really quite decent of them considering that the official policy as clearly stated on the bill and the website is that if you cancel within the last 7 days you are SOL and have to pay in full and I called them to cancel literally a couple of hours before we were to arrive); it will be the first week of November so potentially it will be freezing cold and miserable, but at least we will be in the mountains and eating breakfasts and dinners without having prepared them or having to clean up afterwards. And the other noteworthy good news is that the first week in the fashionable luxury Austro-Hungarian Empire town of Bad Gastein was really quite pleasant.

Somehow Mr. and Mrs. Pemulis continue to fool themselves into thinking fantasy thoughts like "we will have so much time together on this holiday!", "Helga will want to spend all of her time in the kids club", "Heinrich is probably old enough now to be happy to go with the caretakers so we can go do some things on our own", "he probably won't get sick in the mountains", "he's over screaming at the top of his lungs all night long now that he's 2 and a half", "because of Covid the hotel won't be very full", "with all of the good food available there Helga will stop being so picky and will actually eat something on the holiday", and other such silly imaginings.

Nevertheless, the place was really quite nice. The hotel sat at just above 1000 m and we both got to undertake a handful of trail runs / hikes up into the environs of 2000 m. The landscape was quite breathtaking with mountains and waterfalls and old world architecture and nature. The food was good and the bartender made a mean Negroni. We both got to do some yoga and spend some quality time with the offspring feeding the local squirrels, going on hikes to the llamas, baking bread at a nearby farm, spending hours in the swimming pool, and I of course got to do some extra bonding with Heinrich by walking him along the mountain path to the town to take him to the doctor. Good times.

But upon our return, and Heinrich screaming throughout the night, and Covid continuing to haunt our plans, Pemulis has started to wonder what in the world we're doing here in the Southern Europe of Germany and do any of these life decisions really make any sense whatsoever? To put one of these factors in North American context, we are a family of 4 living in an apartment of about 850 square feet. That comes out to two bedrooms and a living room, basically. Now I know that many people -- most people in the world -- live with much less, but the fact that we have the very easy possibility to have a nice big house back in the land of Trudeaus, where the screaming from one child wouldn't every single night wake up and disrupt the sleep of the other, is just one of the factors that helps make me wonder what on God's Green Earth we are up to.

Bad Gastein to the Moon

It might be considered strange to write the blog post about the place you're going before actually going there, but all's fair in the world of blogging especially because I don't even think people use that term anymore. Blogs used to be the Feuilleton of the early 2000's: kind of short, easy to digest, not full of complex or important thoughts, etc. But now, even Blogs are too long. We have dumbed-down even the standard information-point from Books to Magazines to Blogs and now to pictures (Instagram) but even that required you to read the caption sometimes to get more full content so now the current it verb is TikTok-ing and it's like a 15 second video. I'm sure there's some study that says 15 seconds is the perfect amount of time for someone to watch the whole thing even if it's not good and then it's so easy to go on to the next one and you just never stop. But anyways, though it's not updated that often, we still have the Blog and there are currently no plans at GWMD headquarters to put anyone on the TikTok file.

If all goes according to plan (a big "if" with most parents sending their small children as sick as dogs to the daycare everyday resulting in Heinrich being perpetually ill and our headfirst sprint towards the 4th [or is it 5th?] wave coming on strong) then the Pemulis Family will soon find themselves high in the Austrian mountains at the historic spa town of Bad Gastein. Bad Gastein was of course the fashionable 19th century resort frequented by European monarchs such as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria and the German Emperor Wilhelm I with his chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

Before our Austrian trip arrives, we have 14 months of chores to catch up on. Helga has just finished her second swimming course of the summer, and we took out a second mortgage on our apartment so that we could afford the specific backpack that kids are supposed to have for starting grade 1 / erste Klasse / CP ("cours préparatoire"). Interesting life experience Helga and her parents are getting in this whole school thing. As most dedicated readers will know, while Helga is according to international law a Canadian Citizen, and meanwhile was dismayed that Andre de Grasse blew away the field in the 200m finals ("awwww I wanted the German to win!"), she also for some reason attends school through the local Lycée run by the Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de la Jeunesse et des Sports. Quite a mix of France and Germany you get there. One recent humorous example involved the list of required items to start CP. Amongst items that one can only obtain in France (or, thank goodness, through amazon-dot-F-R), there is the bullet-point entry "1 SH noir pour les évaluations". The list is written in French (as you can see). We had no idea what an SH was. So we asked a friend in France. She had no idea but asked a friend of hers with children. The guesses came back: "Steak Haché; Super Hero; Soupe de Hérisson; ...". None seemed likely. We eventually somehow realized that this was a classic example of mixing German with French. SH means "Schnellheft" (or "leaflet") and is basically what I would probably call a "duotang". Lo and behold, no one has ever heard of a duotang and thanks to the Internet I know why: "Duo-Tang was a brand name for paper folders made of cardstock paper." Who knew!?