Opening of our Chocolate Shop in Knittelfeld, Austria

Finally!

After weeks of preparation, we celebrated the opening of our chocolate shop in Knittelfeld last Saturday. It was a lovely event with a good crowd of people who are interested in our products and the good stuff from our suppliers.

Josiah, the master coffee roaster from Jamila Coffee a local roastery, was present as well to hand out coffee. Michael and Gregor Regner (world champion pastry chef) were there to inform about their delicious ginger bread and filled Lebkuchen (Sekauer Lebkuchen). And, with a brief delay, Gerhard Frewein joined us to present his products made from and with our famous local pine tree called 'Zirben'.

I've started a new blog to represent the chocolate shop. Although it is in German, I've posted heaps of photos there:

Check it out at:
http://konfiserie.blogspot.co.at/2015/11/willkommen-in-unserem-schokoladegeschaft.html

And we made it onto Facebook, thanks to Heimo from Regionaljournal.at
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1262802853745195.1073742568.108960055796153&type=3
So for all you people on Facebook - feel free to like us!

I'm quite pleased with how the shop turned out. Now we need to get going!

The busy Christmas season is upon us and the days at work get longer and longer.

Autumn in Austria

Another few weeks have gone by and it feels that we've made progress on many fronts. The opening date for the chocolate shop creeps closer and closer, but so does the completion. I'm supposed to get the keys to my apartment in Knittelfeld this week, my wooden crate with the things from Australia has finally arrived and I feel very much welcomed by pretty much everybody I know. It's fun to train karate again and play in the table tennis club.

Autumn is a wonderful time in Austria, very colorful with a crisp blue sky (when the fog lifts and the clouds are gone). Took some photos yesterday when we were hiking along Ingering See, a small lake in one of the mountain ranges close by.

Ingering See

I met Will, a former colleague from Sandvik in Perth, who is from New Zealand, last week for lunch. He and his colleagues had the final exams for Sandvik Mining School in Leoben. Was great to catch up, and I'm still very happy that I made the change in my career.

Finished reading Irvin D. Yalom's"Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death" and Milan Kundera's "Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins" ("The unbearable lightness of being").

Both of them are great books from my perspective. Yalom, a psychiatrist with many decades of experience, works through the fear of death – appartenly one of the major drives of us humans. Very insightful and well written.

Milan Kundera's book is an excellent read, a novel, written in an interesting form, where situations are looked upon from different perspectives. Proably one of the very best novels I've ever read.