finally friday!

Today has been quite an exciting day....for well many reasons.

to start with, I will be in France visiting my wonderful boyfriend in exactly a week from right now. It has been a month since I've seen him. So the start of the one-week countdown is pretty awesome.

Secondly, I went to have a practice baby-sitting afternoon today with the family that was interested in hiring me, and it's SO ON. I applied for five babysitting/English practice jobs through the university of vienna student-job search website, and 3 out of the 5 wanted me....I'm going to do 2 of them. The family from today has 2 beautiful little girls, Helena age 6 and Alice (pronouced Al-ee-tsay) age 3, and I will pick them up from their respective schools 3 afternoons a week and hang out with them until the parents get home. These girls are AWESOME. They love going to the park, playing UNO, playing board games, tickling, and they love teaching me things in German and working on their English. The mom was home working today, and we had tea-time altogether with a cake and the grown-up ladies had coffee. (we both needed it!). This family's apartment is also beautiful, on the top floor of the building, and just three minutes down the street from me, so could this gig be any more of a dream?

I hope that they need me to babysit on the afternoon of my bithday in May, so that we can all go to the zoo together and get ice cream (I feel like having a 3-year-old and 6-year-old with me with cover up how excited I would be to be doing those things...on my 21st birthday!)

My other job is going to be hanging out with two little boys for a few hours once a week to practice their English. They lived for a few years in the States, but are now back in Austria for good. I'm going to meet them/have our first session on Monday. They better be cute, because the girls have raised my standards.

So after hanging out with two awesome, giggly little girls (who are by the way, the best of friends), I met up with a friend I haven't seen since January at our favorite dive, the Wiener Deewan, where it's a pakistani buffet-style menu. You just grab whatever you want, and then when you walk out, pay whatever you want. They always have my favorite dish, spinach and lamb stuff. I always pay 5 euro :)

On the way home I decided to stop at the closest thing Vienna's got to Kimballs: Zanoni, Zanoni, the best Italian gelato in Vienna. For 2,50 you get a huge cone with three flavors!!!! I went for poppy seed (they use it in desserts here...it's crushed up and wicked sweet, you'd never guess it, as an American used to only encountering poppy seeds on bagels or in old-fashioned novels set in an "oriental" land, or Tin-Tin books), chocolate, and hazelnut=the best way to celebrate scoring 2 jobs (the three flavors represent the 3 that I was offered....).

And now, it's raining and miserable outside still, but I have tea and warm blankets and lots of movies to watch and fingernails to paint. It may be Friday night, but there is no club or party exciting enough to possibly tempt me away from the warm, dry interior of my lovely dorm room.