New friends and accidental crimes

On Saturday we went to Walensee, a lake nearby in Switzerland. We parked in the wrong place but it all worked out, because we got to see a lake and a waterfall (and we also got to drive through the most terrifying one-lane tunnel while our friend driving screamed I’m a mole!).

We also learned that “See” means “lake,” which explains why Liechtensteiners keep inviting us “to the sea” even though this is definitely a land locked country.

I became obsessed with buying a house by this lake, because everything looked like a fairy tale. However, you can only drive in/out of this part of the lake for 5 minutes twice an hour. The tunnel is so narrow that it can barely contain one lane of traffic. This would probably quickly become inconvenient after the romance wore off.

Monday, my new Liechtensteiner friends took me out to lunch … and horseback riding!

It was a really fantastic day all around, and here’s me smiling my face off on a gorgeous horse.

Monday I also established care with a primary care doc, and got my first FSME vaccine (it’s a type of encephalitis caused by tic bites). The doctor was worried that we wouldn’t want vaccines because we are American… I guess I can’t blame her for that. We did explain that we are pro-not-dying-for-stupid-reasons-when-preventative-medicine-exists and she seemed relieved.

On Sunday we had English tea with one of Derrick’s coworkers and his wife, and their adorable cat and dog.

On Wednesday, I decided to show our new British friend around Austria. I may have projected a lot of confidence and acted like I knew what I was doing. Poor girl.

It turns out that I filled out some customs forms wrong, so when we stopped at the border, I got a pretty thorough tongue-lashing from the customs agent. He didn’t say what the punishment was, but he was very clear that he could punish me if he wanted.

For a moment I thought I was going to get arrested and thrown into Austrian jail (which is probably not so bad compared to American jail but I don’t want to find out!).

Luckily he decided to just cover my forms with red stamps and scribble really aggressively all over them.

And that was my poor friend’s first experience in Austria!

I learned absolutely nothing from the encounter and proceeded to hand the customs agent a second form, which was also filled out incorrectly (but a different kind of incorrectly).

It’s really remarkable when you can see someone’s pure hatred for you on their face, even though they’re wearing a mask.

But anyway, we made it home, and we finally have a rug for our living room.

Unfortunately our shipment has been delayed again, so all our possessions are still in the US and won’t get to Liechtenstein until at least September.