Advent Singing / Adventsingen

An age-old tradition of the Program is Adventsingen at the Roggenbauer's. The tradition is so old that Peter took part in it way back when he was a student studying abroad in Salzburg. And so we all met at the Roggenbauer's house yesterday afternoon, the third Sunday of Advent and the start of the last week of classes before vacation, to sing and be merry and continue on the tradition.

The Roggenbauers live in a beautiful old house at the foot of the Rainberg, the castle's mountain. If you walk around the corner, you see the back of the castle rising above you across the Henkerhaus fields (cabbage house). Out their front windows, you have an uninterrupted view of the Untersberg. It is warm and cozy place, and while the weather wasn't at all Christmassy, it is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, so it was nice to hang about with good people in a homey sort of place. That's not to say that our apartment doesn't feel like home or isn't at all homey, because it's fine, but if it were really our home for the long term, there are many improvements that could be made.

We sang Christmas songs in English and in German and tasted a variety of Austrian holiday treats. Nikolas entertained us with his dancing, and stair riding on an electric stair lift, and fire tending (bellows are lots of fun), while he entertained himself by conducting a photographic study of an Austrian house which you can view here. At the end of the evening, we all headed off into the sunset, which had actually set many hours previous (as you can see in the first photo above), but that sounds like a fitting end to a lovely event.