I bet you never thought about avalanches in the city!  I sure never did but as we walked around Graz on Day 3, we passed numerous potential avalanches.  Lucky for us, most of the snow season appears to be over!

warning for avalanche

In case you can’t read it, here it is close up!

We are getting somewhere on figuring out the washing machine/dryer and the dishwasher. But only as far as maybe what kind of soap we need.   Today, after doing at least 2 hours on-line research on where it was and how to get there, we headed across town, taking the street car first and then a city bus, to, of all things, a shopping mall where there was a big store that had groceries, and the possibility of household items as well.  On the list:  washing machine powder, dishwasher soap, a small clothes basket, clothespins and rope (because we hear that the dryer on these machines doesn’t really dry all that well) something to clean the bathroom and counters, a squeegie, a small rug for the foyer to trap all the mud we are tracking in, mustard, vegetables, fruit, and bread.   We ended up with most everything (substituting a drying rack for the clothesline) except the squeegie and the mustard.  I even went back again to look for the mustard.  What do they put on their bratwurst if not mustard????

So you  buy your stuff that is in your cart, unloading it onto the conveyer belt, then you load it back into your cart (for which you have paid 1 Euro deposit), and wheel your cart out of the store into the mall and continue to shop, or in our case, find somewhere to eat.

There are smaller grocery stores–one down the hill from us (think ‘Grizzly Grocery’ for you Missoulians), and another closer to the University–but this by far was the biggest we’d seen.  Not that bigger is better, but in our case, it had most of what we needed.

Then it was back to the bus, transfer to the streetcar

And back up the hill carrying all our stuff.  That’s where the sherpas come in, only there were none to be found!

Tomorrow, we may make a trip to the Hauptbahnhof to see how long it will take us early Monday morning when we go to Vienna for the Fulbright meeting, or head down to the Schloss (castle), or take a hike around the woods with our binoculars.

Thank you for reading, and grüß Gott!