I try to make the most of the extra time that I have with the kids and to enjoy all of the extra ways that I get to care for them, which sometimes helps us make it through and sometimes makes it worse. If we all have the energy and are of the appropriate disposition to enjoy our time together, it can be very nice. If one of those things fails, which it inevitably does, usually toward the end of the night and the end of the week, I have two layers of disappointed expectations to work through after the kids are in bed.

The nights have been very quiet around here lately, mostly because everyone but me is in bed by 8:30 p.m. When the last child is tucked in and the lights are all turned out, I walk down the hallway to see what awaits me in the kitchen. If there's one very specific and visceral memory that I associate with pregnancy, it's of cleaning up the kitchen and washing dishes late into the night. The kitchen is a minefield for Dinka in the first trimester and mostly needs to be avoided, which means that I have a variety of additional responsibilities, from the ordinary (loading the dishwasher, clearing the table) to the extraordinary (clearing the kitchen and refrigerator of potentially offensive smells, watching the expiration date on perishables likely to be problematic). So when I walk into the kitchen for the first time after putting everyone to bed, it sometimes looks as if it was abandoned in great haste due to some emergency. (Some nights it's easier to appreciate the humor in this than others.) My job, which I mostly do passably but not well, is to restore some semblance of order so that when Dinka walks in for breakfast in the morning, there is nothing that will unnecessarily trigger an immediate departure.

The combination of physical and emotional exhaustion from having more to do to take care of the house and kids and the solitude of spending my nights alone produce a unique wistfulness in me, which can be especially potent when combined with Christmas, as I remember from 2002. The other night I walked by the Christmas tree, which was about to be taken down, and it was almost too much to bear. All of our family's history, hopes and dreams seemed to be represented there. On one branch hung a baseball player, which Ivan picked out because that's what he wants to be when he grows up. On another hung a picture of Veronika from her first Christmas at four months old. On a low branch Nikola had hung his train ornament, the object of his obsession for the last year and a half, with care. Then above all, the elaborate glass ornament with the nativity scene, one of Veronika's favorites and the reason for everything being there in the first place. As I started musing on how the three theological virtues were on display in the tree, I recognized that I was getting carried away but I also knew that my exhaustion had opened me up to appreciate something that I might have otherwise overlooked, to take a moment to be grateful in the midst of everything.

So it is in the context of this stew of emotions and exhaustion that I present the following video of the most comforting sound in the world to me right now—our loaded and running dishwasher, quietly working away in a dark and sleeping house. It means that my work for the evening is done and that I can sleep well, knowing that it will be clean in the morning.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

A few weeks ago, I sent an email to Wiener Linien, the company that runs all public transportation in the city, with a link to our U-Bahn project, just in case anyone would be interested to see it and to thank them for everything they do. Two hours later I got an enthusiastic email reply saying that they loved the site and had fallen in love with Nikola. As if that wasn't enough, they also invited us to the Wiener Linien headquarters for a tour and offered to let Nikola check out the driver's cabin of an U-Bahn (not on the public lines, of course) and even drive it! We knew that a day like that would be the highlight of Nikola's year and we quickly accepted and set something up.

On Wednesday, the day finally came and it was wonderful. Nikola was emotionally overwhelmed for at least the first half and couldn't bring himself to do much of what he had dreamed of but eventually he was able to relax and enjoy it. He got to see the main control room for the entire city's U-Bahn network, push the buttons that open and close the doors of the train, and even sit in the driver's seat (some pictures will be appearing on the kids site in the next few days). At the end of the day, he got a bag full of Wiener Linien-related gifts, including a bus that is now his constant companion.

In addition to the personal tour and U-Bahn ride, Wiener Linien also asked if they could send a photographer along and have a journalist interview us, which we gladly agreed to and which turned into the article above (shorter online version here). I went out and picked up ten copies at our nearest U-Bahn station this morning so if you'd like a hard copy, let me know. Finally I know and understand the exhilarating feeling that my parents and grandparents had when I was in the local paper as a kid.

For all the non-German-speaking readers of the site, here is my approximate translation:

Little Nikola (3) is the biggest fan of the Vienna U-Bahn

In the last half year, Nikola (3) visited all 101 U-Bahn stations! "My son is thrilled by the U-Bahn. He watches the tunnel eagerly until the next train finally comes," said his father. He explored the U-Bahn network with Nikola and photographed him in every station.

Wiener Linien invited their youngest and most faithful fan to their headquarters in Erdberg. Nikola was even allowed to drive a train. "[It was] a tremendous exception," said the train operator. That was reason enough for us to make Nikola Vienna's Person of the Week.

We all loved Vienna's public transportation before this week but now we're also Wiener Linien's biggest fans. How many public agencies do you know that would do so much for a three-year-old that was smitten with their services? What a company! What a city!

There are limits to what we are capable of expressing with language and The Tree of Life bravely spends much of its time beyond those limits, meditating on the ineffable—man's place in the universe, the wonder of existence, and the source and destination of our deepest longings. It does all of this in the only way possible, that is, almost wordlessly. The communication of its ideas and story is almost completely visual and it is remarkable how much can be said without words. The imagery is always beautiful, abstract but purposeful, and the words that accompany it are sparse but memorable, whispered prayers of longing. In this aspect alone it was a singular experience for me.

Wrapped in this larger context is the story of a family with three boys growing up in mid-century U.S.A. Despite the shift to a more traditional narrative, the storytelling remains almost completely visual. The things that the camera notices—the power and nuance of physical contact, the expressions and reactions that often go unseen, the powerful sensations and memories of childhood that are impressed so firmly into us—invoke an almost unconscious state, as if the images were being pulled directly from one's memory. As a parent, I was moved by the father and mother, the two sides in all of us. As a child and brother, I identified with the boys and the way they acted and interacted.

For me, the film is a prayer, a beautiful and moving meditation on life. I recommend it unreservedly.

Papa, Can We Go on the U-Bahn?

Happy Easter!

For as nice as it has been to celebrate Christmas for the first time in Austria, especially with family that we rarely got to see around this time of the year, there's some part of me that thinks that we really ought to be in a cabin somewhere in the U.S., making hot buttered rum and egg nog, putting together puzzles, and riding sleds that are not nearly rated for the kind of weight that we put in them. It wasn't a family tradition yet but it was a good start and I hope that we will pick it up again soon in a year to come.

I put together some of the non-kids photos from that trip in the album below. The kids pictures start on the kids' site here. Enjoy with someone you love and a glass of egg nog.

Souzek Family Christmas '09 - Vermont

Larger version of the panorama above

Merry Christmas!

Fortunately we were able to get away for a short fall vacation in Styria, which satisfied most of the requirements of the season (hiking through beautifully wooded areas, eating wild game, drinking seasonal beverages, etc.). I even managed to watch the World Series, thanks to our new DVR and ESPN America. We also found nice moments in the city, particularly in our neighborhood park, where we collected chestnuts and once got pulled into a rather elaborate and lengthy leaf fight with the rest of the playground.

The pictures above and below are of my favorite moments in my morning commute this fall. When I exited the U-Bahn station every morning on the way to class, I saw Votivkirche glowing in the warm morning sun (above). When I left class two hours later, I saw the university green below, golden trees lit up by the sun. As it turns out, the most important part of enjoying fall may simply be to be out in it.

The changes that have delighted me over the past three months have fallen into three categories: changes associated with living in a new country, Austria; changes associated with living in a city for the first time, which we never managed to do in the U.S.; and changes associated with that city being Vienna. For our first six weeks here, we lived in a small, picturesque town outside of Vienna where we could entirely focus on the first change, living in Austria, and life was (and continues to be!) beautiful there. I could walk down tree-lined streets to work by day, sit outside at a Heuriger and drink excellent wine for less than two dollars a glass by night, swim with the kids in a pristine public pool, take the train to neighboring towns and parks, go hiking and generally enjoy our family and life in a small town. It was late summer and full, green vineyards stretched in every direction. What more could you ask for?

We found our apartment in Vienna on August 14th, the first one we looked at, and it was love at first sight. I still can't believe that we live here, that we had such luck in finding the place, or that it's even possible for a place like this to exist within our price range. Dinka posted all the details of the place, with pictures, but there are two details that she left out that continue to astound me: 1) we have room for guests, and 2) we're paying less in rent than we were in Danbury, CT. The place is looking better with each week, as we fill it out with furniture, paint some walls and replace bare light bulbs with actual light fixtures. We'll be posting a full set of pictures of the finished apartment once everything is done, which should be some time between now and when we move out.

Since we moved in a month ago, the simultaneous changes of living in a city and that city being Vienna have been a daily source of wonder. Small surprises seem to be waiting around every corner, like the chocolates hiding in each day of an Advent calendar. When I get out of bed in the morning or look out the window from my desk, I see the tower of St. Leopold's, whose bells ring every fifteen minutes during the day and for extended periods at noon and before a Mass: tempus fugit, mememto mori. At 12:00 and 6:00 p.m. every day, our building spontaneously fills with wonderful kitchen smells, like your grandmother cooking a chicken soup or making a roast for Sunday lunch. The market down the street fills up every Friday and Saturday with farmers and food producers from all around, offering fresh and mostly locally grown fruits and vegetables, cheese, meats and wine. As fall arrived, all the local restaurants filled their windows with signs advertising the availability of venison and squash and my seasonal beverage of choice, Sturm, which probably deserves a post of its own. There's a hair salon down the street with a fire engine chair that keeps Nikola mesmerized and a stylist that was thoughtful enough to ask Veronika if she'd like a braid in her hair after it was cut (of course she would!). A trip to the bookstore last week felt more like a sightseeing tour than an errand, since it required me to get off the train in the park and walk on wide streets past beautiful and grand concert halls and buildings. Speaking of the train, the kids—especially Nikola—love to take it anywhere and everywhere we can and since we live so close to a station, we can do things like drop by a palace a few districts away after work on a Friday. And the parks! The Augarten is down the street, with its tree-lined paths and gardens, four playgrounds, and a kids swimming pool that awaits us for next summer. One subway stop away is Prater, which is kind of like tacking a small forest with thirty small playgrounds dispersed throughout it onto an amusement park. I could go on.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me has been discovering that I enjoy being around people. In our car-centered life in the U.S., I felt like I saw the minimum number of people possible each day. At home and work, I saw the same people, and in between, I was riding in a steel and glass bubble that prevented any incidental contact with other people. Living without a car here, I walk and take trains everywhere I need to go and there are always people around. This isn't to say that I have a lot more contact with people than before—I still mostly keep to myself, apart from occasionally struggling to provide someone directions or other help—but I find it nice to be out among people and to be surrounded by life. I have a much better sense of the people and the place I'm in because when I'm around other people, there are things that I can't help but to notice: what kinds of people are out and when, how people speak and interact with each other, how people carry themselves, etc. It's been a nice change for me and has enlarged my perspective by forcing me out of my own head for at least a little while every day.

All of this being said, I feel like we've barely had a chance to really experience our new home yet because we've been so busy with the details of moving and everyday life. Things finally seem to be settling down lately and just in time. The international film festival starts this week and we'll have to go to that. Next weekend we'll finally be getting our first vacation of the year in with a visit to a farm in Styria. The nip in the air and the diminishing daylight are a reminder that the Christkindlmarkts are not too far away. Plus the negotiation/crisis phase of cultural adjustment is just around the corner! It promises anger, frustration and anxiety, three things I can never have enough of in my life.

I also put together a photo album that I think tells the story of our first three months here fairly well. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have:

The Move to Austria : Summer '10

That being said, there were a few things that I was sad to see go and that I know I will miss in the coming months. The first among them was our car, a 2008 Honda Fit. It was the first new car that we ever bought and it fit nicely into the long and storied Souzek tradition of small, fuel efficient, manual transmission vehicles: two mid- to late-80s Toyota Tercels, a 1988 Nissan Pulsar, and a 1989 Toyota MR2 (even though it was an automatic). We were as giddy as high schoolers with freshly pressed driver's licenses when we brought it home. After driving it a whole two hundred miles, I got it washed, took it up to a scenic overlook at dusk and spent an hour and a half photographing it from every angle. It was terribly embarrassing but luckily there was no one around to point it out. I had every intention of posting them too—who doesn't want to see a close-up of the freshly cleaned 14" hubcaps of a Honda?—but I never got around to it.

It was a great car for us, small and fuel efficient but four-door and surprisingly roomy. It was fun to drive around the scenic, winding back roads of western Connecticut, weaving around the corners and working your way through the gears. It was the car that we would take whenever we went anywhere without the kids, its tidewater blue metallic finish sparkling in the parking lot of whatever restaurant we were visiting. It retained the new car smell for what felt like a year, which was an especially stark contrast to the more "lived in" smell of our Caravan. It had a CD player. We were in love.

When it came time to sell it in April, I found myself in the same position as I had been a couple of years before—getting it cleaned up, meticulously taking pictures, and extolling its virtues to anyone that would listen. With the encouragement and guidance of my brother, car buyer/seller extraordinaire, I posted an ad on Craigslist and waited. To my great astonishment and relief, I got a call in less than a week and a half from the perfect buyer—a former owner of a small, manual transmission Honda looking for a new one at a good price. After a short conversation and test drive, we both knew it was right. One day later, we were proudly sending our Fit out into the world with a new caretaker and a new set of plates.

How could we ever replace it, apart from the obvious option of buying the European equivalent Honda Jazz? We couldn't, at least not so soon. For the foreseeable future we'll be attempting a car-free urban lifestyle and depending on trains, buses and trams to get us around. That will also be a big change for me, having relied heavily on cars every day since getting my driver's license. I have a feeling that I may begin to miss driving in the coming months, which will make me relive the joys and ultimate heartbreak of my relationship with the Fit each time I think of it. At least I know it's in good hands.

I took a few pictures on the way to and from work today to try to capture my enthusiasm about this arrangement. Here's a link to the album:

A Walk to Work

Also, here's a large panorama of the view of the mountain from the top of the street. Not a bad way to start and end the day.

And now, to the questions:

Wow! That is huge.
I know. I mean, I've never done this before so I don't know exactly, but I agree. It is simultaneously one of the most exciting and difficult decisions that I've ever had to make.

Do you know anyone there?
Yes, Dinka's family lives there, so we'll be moving closer to many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins.

So, is this a move for work?
No, it's a move for our family, on several levels. First, we are tired of having no family around to share our lives with. Connecticut and the Northeast are wonderful and have been great to us but with each passing year and each additional child, it became harder for us to justify living at least a few hours' flight from everyone. Going it alone has certainly helped us form a family identity of our own but I think we're done with being on our own for now.

Second, living in two countries and two cultures is an experience that I want to have and that we want our children to have. Again, I can't speak from experience here, but knowing that there are different types of people in the world with different perspectives, countries with different approaches to solving problems, or even just having to recognize that the world is larger than the place that you know, these all seem like good things. More specifically to Austria, it also will give the kids (and me) an opportunity to know the place where Dinka grew up and to understand their/our history a little better.

There are a lot of things that I think will be nice about living in Austria itself but the truth is that they're not the reason that we're moving there but an added bonus. More on those bonuses to come, hopefully, as they start to roll in.

Do you have a job lined up?
Initially I didn't but since I've started announcing our move I have found some contract work that should greatly help with the transition. Even so, we're going to be staying with family until we have a more permanent source of income in place.

That's another thing that's been difficult about this move and decision—I have to leave a great job in order to do it. It was only my second full-time job after college but I know enough to recognize that it was a unique situation and I'll have a very hard time finding a new role, company and team like the one I'm leaving.

Did you need to get some kind of special visa?
As the spouse of an Austrian citizen, I applied for and received a permanent residence permit. Our kids, children of one Austrian and one U.S. citizen, are allowed to have dual citizenship, which they have also applied for and received. Lucky them.

How long have you been planning this?
It's a possibility that we've been thinking about for several years, since we were first married, but we didn't start seriously entertaining it until the last couple of years, when we thought we were in a good enough position to potentially make the move. While it would have been great to move with a job and everything else worked out, we thought that waiting around for that perfect situation to arise might mean never moving there at all and we knew that we would regret that. So instead, we picked a date on the calendar and decided that we'd move at that time, whether a job had materialized or not. We started all the paperwork processes and investigations at the prescribed times and now here we are, two weeks from the actual move.

How long are you planning to stay?
We honestly don't know and we're ok with that for now. It depends a lot on how things go, on several fronts. Given the costs of an international move (which continue to add up, day by day), I hope it's not too short. We'd like to give ourselves the chance to get established there and decide if we like it or not, but that's also dependent on having enough money to support an independent life for our family. One important thing that we recognized early on was that even in the worst case, where I can't find a job for a really long time or we're really unhappy there, we can always move back but will never regret having taken the chance to find out if we could do it and what that life might be like.

Will you come back to visit?
Absolutely, yes. We plan on using more of my hopefully generous vacation allotment to visit the U.S., whenever it's financially possible. The fact that we'll be living somewhere else doesn't make you, our friends and family here, any less our friends and family than you already are.

I hope I've covered everything. Our plane tickets say July 13th and there are a lot of things that still need to be sold, donated and packed in boxes before then, not to mention all the things that the kids want to do (see below) and the people that we want to see before we go. With each passing day, it becomes more of a reality—after years of thinking about it and months of planning it, it is actually going to happen. I'm not completely sure what's waiting on the other side of this move but I am excited and eager to find out, to say the least.

I've been trying to think of the best way to express how the shared passage of time has changed how I feel. For as easy as it would be to say, "I love you more now than even before," I don't like how linear and comparative that sounds, like a line steadily climbing on a graph, marking progress. But there's no denying that feeling of ever-increasing fullness, of growth that comes with time. I think that a more accurate way to look at it is that at any point in a marriage, you love the other person not only with the love that you feel at that time but with all the love that has accumulated over your time together, with the weight of all your years together behind it. It's not two dimensions but three; there is a volume of love that grows over time.

I felt that volume was all I could ever know in the picture above. Since then it has increased in ways I could never have imagined and so has my capacity to know it. Here's looking forward to finding out how much more we both can hold.

2 oz. rye whiskey (Old Overholt is just fine for me)
2 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
1 tbsp Ricard
1 cube sugar

Fill an old fashioned glass with ice to chill the glass. Add the sugar, bitters and a bit of water to another glass and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the rye and a few ice cubes to that mix and stir. Empty the ice from the other glass, add the Ricard, and turn the glass to coat the sides with it. Dispose of any excess Ricard (however you choose!) and pour the rye mixture from the other glass into the newly anise-scented glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon and enjoy.

Must love anise.