Before I forget, I need to mention a few things.<\/p>\n
First, we bought a TV today. It’ll be nice to take in some culture, watch kid’s shows to learn some German, and have something to hook my Xbox up to. It’s small and cheap, but that’s all we need… and Mary Jo would let me buy. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Second, I’m not sure why I didn’t mention this until now, but Austria is a little weird. Dogs are allowed everywhere<\/em>. Ikea, the mall, McDonalds, everywhere. Just today Mary Jo saw two small dogs in carts at Ikea. I saw a guy with a rather large dog walking around the mall. We even had a small snack next to a big white dog with a group of old people. It’s kind of strange, but also not. I don’t know. It doesn’t really shock me to see them.<\/p>\n Third, have you ever noticed how unhelpful ATM error messages are? I had some issues today, and all I got was “Transaction cannot be completed at this time.” Yeah, thanks. Is my PIN wrong? Am I out of money? Did I hit my daily transaction limit? Is my account frozen? WHAT??!?!?! Really rather stupid if you ask me. To further complicate things, ATMs in Europe don’t accept PIN numbers more than 5 digits long. Not so great when you have a 8 digit PIN… yeah, paranoid, I know. One last annoyance on ATMs, when you do enter your PIN wrong, why can’t they just tell you immediately? Granted, it requires an extra network connection, but I can’t imagine that doubling the ATM traffic would crash the entire thing. *sigh*<\/p>\n Fourth, we successfully transferred our money from the US to Austria. This involved a rather complex international wire transfer. Funniest bit? We got double dipped. Wells Fargo charged $20 on the US side and Hypo (the bank in Austria) charged something like 25 Euro. Just like text messages. Lame.<\/p>\n OK, that’s it for the random bits!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before I forget, I need to mention a few things. First, we bought a TV today. It’ll be nice to take in some culture, watch kid’s shows to learn some German, and have something to hook my Xbox up to. It’s small and cheap, but that’s all we need… and Mary Jo would let me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-austria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}