Noah's Arc II / die Arche Noahs II

I wrote a similar blog back in February when we were stuck in a snowy-rainy spell, day after day being miserable and cold and making us feel like we were on Noah's Arc. A little warmer (though not much) this time around, we are yet again on Noah's Arc. It's been raining, pouring, all day, all night for eight days. The last break in the rain was on Sunday morning, though not for long. Nikolas is even learning about Noah and his ark at school and can tell you a very detailed account of it all. We are all going stir crazy, finding it hard to believe that we have only a dozen days left when it doesn't seem like summer at all.

The parking lots are flooded. The Salzach River is so unbelievably high that it's hard to believe that it hasn't flooded. Some of the puddles on the sidewalk have been there so long that there is rose-colored algae growing in them. The beautiful little brook that runs through fields along Hellbrunner Allee has turned into a lake itself. If we were in the Dachstein region where we celebrated Pfingsten in the snow at the end of May, we'd be sitting in 150 centimeters (5 feet) of fresh snow!!!

It's dull to talk about the weather, but there's little else going on. No parks, no pools, no playgrounds. We could be getting a start on packing, but have come to realize that the apartment is so small that there's no way to gather things and pile things and pack things up without it disrupting our lives completely. It will have to be a somewhat last-minute process. In the meantime, we've been playing a lot of knights and dragons, thanks to a great dragon disguise we picked up on sale at Ikea for 99 cents while trying to kill time on one of our rainy afternoons. There are, surprisingly, many places for a dragon to hide in our apartment, but ultimately, the knight always wins.