Silvester: The Aftermath

Be sure to read the post before this one first.

So after our quick break inside after our private fireworks session, we left to go to the big party in town for the countdown and fireworks show. It was absolute madness.

Before the fireworks were cute, and were being set off in empty fields and parks around the city. Now they were being set off literally all around us by crazy drunk Austrians. It had quickly become terrifying. A couple of times a stray rocket would come our way and luckily explode before it got to us and the whole situation was reminiscent of the Weasleys trying to run Prof. Umbridge from Hogwarts. It nevertheless made for an extemely exciting walk. One instance we passed by a few Austrians on the bridge outside our dorm with about 20 large rockets, setting them off one by one, and all smoking of course.

We actually corked and started drinking our large bottle of Champane before midnight in order to calm our nerves and got through most of that last hour. We actualy had drinken most of it by the time midnight came around so much for our fireworks game. But we werent really paying any attention to the huge fireworks show anyways, we were already high off of gunpowder fumes and jumpy from the firecrackers people kept lighting at our feet, we had had more than enough rockets for the holiday. Plus, the show wasnt that terriffic in the end and was hardly noticible in the midst of all the other rockets going off around the city. We werent really sure when exactly the new year hit, since there wasnt really a countdown in the strange place we were standing. Afterward, we all agreed it was right around the awkward time the two dudes in front of us started making out.

I love this picture, it gives all of the sentiments we all experienced together in the evening from left to right: Monika is a little drunk, Julie, Betsy's friend is excited about the party, Kevin is, well, Kevin, Choy is looking forward to the new year, I am a little sketched out by the people around me and Betsy is afraid that a firework is about to explode in her face.

Well after we waltzed to the Blue Danube (in our heads) we headed to Marktplatz to listen to the band there. The main singer was kind of confused as to what language he was speaking in, a wierd mix of English, German and Italian but we had fun singing overplayed American Rock songs. We got kind of embarressed when all of the Austrians knew the words to "Born in the USA" better than us. We also made some friends, like this guy:

Who danced with us a lot but somehow ended up having no pants by the end of the evening. We stayed until the band stopped after 2 hours and planned on staying out a little longer until we realized that there were even drunker Austrians setting off fireworks around us and after one incident that may have permanently damaged all our eardrums, we felt that perhaps it would be safer to head back to the dorm. I am still thanking God that I still have all of my limbs attached after this evening.

Silvester: The City of Innsbruck is under siege

It is now about an hour and a half until it hits midnight here when the Blue Danube Waltz starts to play and the drunken Austrians start to waltz in the street.

Right now, all Austrian children from 4-90 are preparing themselves for the huge 25 minute fireworks display that is supposed to go off at midnight with fireworks going off all the mountains around as well as down the Inn river by creating their own mini fireworks shows throughout the city. Actually, this has been going on for the past week. 5 days ago, you would hear the occassional firecracker go off on the other street or you would see some 8 year old boys scaring some girls with the poppers you throw on the ground. It gradually grew in the past few days to seeing a flash over some rooftops out of the corner of your eye and hearing a faint explosion, but it has all escilated to this evening. The Inn river valley is currently echoing with explosions; we're being attacked. Plus, these fireworks are also more than your average, smuggled back from Mexico light in the desert, wimpy fireworks. Some of these (most of which are extremely affordable) are very awe inspireing and would make Disneyland jealous. Even now, in the alley outside my window, I hear the slightly disturbing and hopefully gleeful screams of children as they set off a multitude of exploding rockets, most of which are exploding a good 10 feet from my window. We brought a few sparklers, some bottle rockets we found in the buro, and about 15 euro of fireworks ourselves and had fun with them this evening. We weren't so bold to set them off in the city so we took a hike a little ways up the mountain behind our dorm and found a nice hill to set them off. It was worth it just for the view of all the amiture pyromaniacs' work throughout the valley. Every second there was at least two or three explosions. Walking back we came across a group of 7 year olds dropping some firecrackers down a manhole, I love this country.

Tiramasu and Fireworks

Tonight for the fireworks we have decided on a fun game for the 25 minute show. So everyone gets a color and a firework sound. Every time they see their color or hear their sound, they must drink. (I bought a 1.5L bottle of sekt from Hofer for 6 euro). IF they hear their sound and see their color in the same firework, they must dole out a drink to someone else. This has the potential to be very exciting during the grand finale.

Christmas was amazing, that's all I'm saying now.


Ever since we got back from Kirchberg, I was planning on going skiing and exploring the city and whatnot but I have ended up just sleeping in real late and not really doing much. I think the trip wore me out and I am getting over a cold. The only time I got out of bed before noon was for today when there was a big band playing on a stage in the center of town which meant a possibility of swing dancing. Unfortunately, there were just old American tourists kind of swaying and attempting to dance every once and a while but giving up when they got tangled in their purses. One time they did play Tuxedo Junction and I couldnt help myself but I may have started to Shim Sham in the middle of a crowd of Italians, not one of my prouder moments.


Tomorrow we're heading off for a grand tour of Tuscany before classes resume on Monday. Kevin and I are leaving a day earlier than planned and we really have nowhere planned to sleep on the night of Italy's biggest holidays, and we might just end up having to sleep in the train station in Florence. It should be an interesting time. Getting our tickets was a major issue:



So if you are a European, you can get these special Interrail passes which is like unlimited train travel for a certain number of days in a country for a really good deal. Well if youre not a European, you have to have lived in Europe for at least 6 months. We figure if we walk in and act like we know what we are doing, they would give it to us no problem. So we go to the ticket office, and the person who opens up is a trainee being trained... bad sign. Well we ask for the passes and the minute they see our American passports, her manager trainer person asked us for proof we had been living there for 6 months (we have only been here for 4, its a little rediculous since we'll be here for 9) and we said we didnt have it and we would go get it. So an hour or two later, we go back, and get someone next to the evil trainer lady, and since she was just observing her trainee she could easily see our second attempt to get the ticket and made sure the guy asked us for our tickets. Thanks devil woman... So we go back the next day and the princess of darkness is still there, and I end up getting the person next to her again and the moment I wispered "Interrail" to the guy she looked up like an antelope who heard a lion in the savanah and made sure the guy asked us for proof. So we say okay, we need to discuss what we're doing. So we go outside, decide to buy just a ticket to Florence, and get back in line, we end up getting some guy on the other side of the counter, a good 50 feet away from the devil red haired woman so we decide to try one last time. He gets our names about halfway into the system and the lady looks up, recognizes up, and marches over to us and screams (in German so it sounds 5 times as angry) "This is the fourth time these Americans have tried to get this ticket!!! Do not let them get it!" Bitch. Defeated, we just bought a ticket to Florence. Then, of course, Anthony goes today to buy his ticket and gets an Interrail, first time, no problem.



I plan on writing our Kirchberg adventures on the train to/from/around Tuscany, hopefully I'll fill you in on my Christmas when I get back.


Happy New Year, and a Gute Rutsch! (Good slip!)

Small Kirchberg Update

I unfortunately will not be able to internet so well while here because of a silicone keyboard with keys nearly impossible to press.

Kirchberg is amazing. The skiing is fun with a huge mountain and many different trails. The people who have showed up are awesome, we just got back from moonlight sledding. And I want to take Maria and Elizabeth home with me to cook for me and tell me to eat so that tomorrow will be beautiful.

Tomorrow we go on a horse drawn sleigh ride to a small alm or mountain hut/bar to drink Glühwein, the next day we go to Salzburg, then midnight mass at a small Alpine church, and more skiing, sledding and suprises.

Expect a more extensive update when I get home.

Frohe Weihnachten!

Sorry

I apologize for the lack of recent updates, hopefully I will catch up in the next few weeks.

I have been very busy, I had a couple of projects to give in last week, one of which we were working on up to the last minute and we had to run across the city with freshly printed handouts, dodging street performers and yelling Italians in order to get to class for our presentation on time.

Ive also been preoccupied with Krampuses roaming around and hitting me with sticks and St. Nikolaus going over my behavior for the last year. More on that later.

Finally Christmas break is here and I thought it would be more relaxing but we have been frantically trying to prepare for our big Kirchberg Christmas trip. Here are my plans for the break:

December 18th, those of us planning the Kirchberg trip arrive to get everything settled, everyone arrives on the 20th.
December 26th, we all sadly leave Kirchberg
New Years I will be in Innsbruck
January 2, a few of us depart for Florence to go explore Tuscany for 5 days
January 6th we return from Italy
January 7th classes resume

Hopefully more updates later (maybe I'll even finish our eastern europe epic adventure)

Another Thing to Cross off my List:

Skiing in the Alps! I have absolutely no idea what else is on this ‘list,’ probably some chores I never did this summer at home and a couple of things I need to buy from Spar. In retrospect, it was probably the wrong list to put ‘ski in the Alps one day’ on and I realize now I need to re-organize my listing habits. I’ll put that on my list.

Back to today, it appears that the third time is a charm, and I finally spent a day on the slopes! Now I must tell you that this has been a big deal for me, deciding how much money and time I want to spend on skiing this semester. Deciding whether it was worth it to buy my own skis, which ski-pass to buy, and worrying whether my gloves matched my hat. In the end, I did buy my own skis, they were really cheap only 60 euro with bindings. Everything else was at least twice as much. They were so cheap because they were a 2004/2005 model and thus are ‘unfashionable.’ I got some ski-boots from the Büro and some ski poles for really cheap at Hofer, an amazing grocery store that can only be described as a Costco but everything is not in bulk and a small random sample of the non-food items, really random sample, as in they’re selling skis and bed sheets between the baking goods and the juice. Once I had my equip., I had to figure which season ticket to buy. I’ll spare you the boredom of my long decision process but it was a relief when I finally figured it out. Once I had everything, who knew that the most difficult thing would be getting out there to ski?

I tried once about a month ago. Aaron and Mariel were going to the glacier about an hour and a half outside of town. There wasn’t much snow in the mountains at the time but since it’s a giant river of ice you can pretty much ski on it in the summer. We had planned on getting up early and catching the early bus out of town. Well what happened was we woke up early, but I had not waken up yet, my evil other personality had waken up in my place. This is actually quite common, Jake usually takes over for the half hour to hour after I wake up or when I haven’t eaten in a while and my blood sugar is low. He’s the one who turns off my alarm or convinces me that I don’t need to go to class because we probably weren’t doing anything important that day. Anyways, Jake told Aaron and Mariel to go without me probably because “I’m really tired” or “I don’t feel well.” Since I wasn’t there, I don’t really know what he said. I woke up a few hours later to realize they had left without me.

The second time was last weekend. It had been snowing in the mountains for about a week and Christian, Aaron, Mariel, and I got really excited about fresh snow. Unfortunately, the glacier was the only place that was open since it is so early in the season. We made another plan to wake up early and take the bus out there. I warned Aaron not to listen to Jake and we got up early and Aaron and I were able to fight Jake back. We hiked across town to the train station and got on the bus to the glacier, finally on our way!. So this time we actually made it to the mountain. The further up the bus climbed and edged around tight corners with breathtaking sights all around, the windier and more blizzardy it got. When we arrived, they said we couldn’t buy our tickets (I was planning on buying my season ticket) until they opened the mountain which would be in about an hour. It was closed due to extreme weather conditions. We waited around for it to open but at the time they said it would they told us it was too dangerous for the gondolas. So we had to take the 2 hr expensive bus ride back to IBK, unsuccessful. Should’ve listened to Jake.

Finally, today on my third try I made it! Since many of the closer, more local, places have opened up, we decided to try one of those. We went to Patscher Kofel, where they had the slalom ski races for the Olympics, near the bobsled track. The entire mountain was not open, there were only two lifts and pretty much only one trail open but it was better than nothing. We decided to go a little later in the morning so we didn’t have to deal with Jake and it got scary for a second because when we arrived they told us that the lift was having issues so we had to wait a half hour for them to fix it. In the meantime we bought our season passes, the Freizeit Ticket, which meant taking a picture which also meant jumping in Aaron’s picture at the last second which also meant him freaking out at me for the next ten minutes how I ruined the picture. I think it definitely improved it, but that’s just me. Finally they opened the mountain and we made our way up with the other cheering Austrians.

I was nervous at first and seriously doubted whether this investment into skiing this year was a good decision. This was mostly because the last time I seriously skied was about four years ago, not counting the time I went with the Cattern family and we were forced to sustain ourselves for half the day on a small piece of lemon bread. Also, there were seriously 5 year old kids wizzing by me. It was insane! Like I’m pretty sure it’s a bigger deal when an Austrian child is able to sustain himself on skis by itself than when it can stand on its own. Not to mention the fact that Austrians ski way different in general than they do in America. Americans spend a lot of time turning and making pretty s-shapes with their tracks but it seems that the Austrians just point their skis downhill and don’t stop until they hit the bottom, or it seems unless someone else has fallen. One time I stopped to adjust my goggles, lost my balance and fell over and within 4 seconds, 4 Austrians all came in out of nowhere asking if I needed help. After my first run though, I got the hang of it and it became really fun, but I was defiantly shown up by everyone on the mountain over the age of 6 today. It also seemed like it was the ‘teach your child to ski’ day. Parents had their Austrian children all dressed up in 15 layers of clothing so they could barely move their limbs, a massive helmet, a pair of goggles that is twice the size of their face to match, and tiny 1 foot long skis. The would essentially go to a relatively mild slope, stand the kid up, and gave him little nudge, he would go about ten feet, then kind of lazily succumb to gravity and flop over. Then you had the 6-7 year old girls you had to watch for two reasons, if you looked directly at their matching pink sparkly snow suit you would go blind and they were doing the 2 mph ski-plows down the entire mountain in the middle of the trail.

In the end, we skied for about 3-4 hours and I was really enjoying it by the end and I look forward to doing it many more times in the future.

Austrian Oktober

Okay so I really should be writing a Theo paper right now about one of the most mind-numbing 20 pages of reading in the world but I’m afraid I have much more important things to do.

I apologize for the lack of recent posts. There’s no good excuse but it’s a mixture of the horrible internet hookup, class work, and settling in. I guess I just keep waiting to get into the swing of things and develop a daily routine but it seems like I always have a paper to write or food to shop for and cook or a nonexistent trip to Italy to plan for. Life in IBK has been nonstop. In fact, the couple days we’ve had off to do whatever we want I’ve spent like a log sleeping in our dorm. Just last Sunday I found myself waking up at 2 pm.

I know I promised the tale of our eastern Europe encounters soon, it’s a masterpiece in the works, I didn’t want to get behind. I know you are all on the edge of your seats… Actually, I’m not too sure if anyone but my mom still reads this

So a lot has happened since my last post. One weekend, about 3 weeks ago, Mariel, Lizzy, and I went to Kirchberg to check out the Sporthotel that would be hosting our Christmas trip this year. It is the responsibility of the Innsbruck students to plan an unofficial trip to the same hotel (every year) in the middle of a small Alpine, Tyrolean village. We host the trip for any ND or SMC students abroad for Christmas so that we could all be with at least our Notre Dame family for the holiday (I know its mega-cheezy but we’re allowed because it’s Christmas). The three of us are planning it and the owners of the hotel invited us to visit them for the day to check out the hotel and talk logistics. I just want to say beforehand that our invitation came to us by a call at 6 am on my cell where a very old but excited woman’s voice asked us to come visit that weekend. In my half-asleep brain, at first I had absolutely no I idea who this sketchy granny-creepster was and where she wanted me to meet her, got kind of paranoid, and stepped away from the window but I finally figured it out. The hotel was very quaint, on the side of a mountain and it got me really excited for the holiday. The owners of the hotel include sisters Elizabeth and Mary and Bernd who we assumed was somehow related to them. The sisters were about half my height and were that indistinguishable age between 80 and 150 years old but they were very lively and excitable. Bernd is about the only man who has been able to pull off a handlebar moustache for the last 100 years. He was nice but a little intimidating with his very Austrian frankness. During our 6 hour visit, we must have eaten enough food to feed a small nation. From the moment we arrived to the moment we left, there was a huge plate of food in front of us. They even sent us home with an entire homemade cake! When you weren’t hungry anymore, the sisters would insist that you eat another schnitzel or more wurst and when you refused they would get this hurt, offended look on their faces (totally unwarranted since the food was amazing). Then in the tough decision between making two old women cry and getting a little acid reflux, you choose the latter and force down another piece of schnitzel. They would still insist you eat more, and at this point you would absolutely refuse, not falling for their deceiving watering eyes again. When they realized you weren’t falling for it a second time, they would give up and put more food on your plate for you. It seemed as if they were fattening me up to be next week’s schnitzel. Aside from the painfully bloating stomach for the next week, the trip was fun and we’re looking forward to our trip as we frantically try to get everything organized.

Another exciting event that happened was that it snowed here for about a week. Not just in the mountains, actually in the city as well. It was really fun while it lasted, the big Charlie Brown kind of snowflakes that just kind of lazily smack into you. It didn’t stick in the city but after the clouds left the views of the surrounding mountains were pretty awesome. Our German class has a wonderful view of the Inn valley and its very hard to concentrate during class. Now the weather is back up and sunny at a nice 10°C. On the first night it was snowing, I dragged everyone outside to take some first snow pictures and it turned into a dangerous game of “catch snowflakes in your mouth but try not to get run over by the speeding Austrians when you wander into the street to try to get the extra fluffy looking snowflake.” We made it back safe.

Last weekend we had a 3 day weekend, thanks to Neutrality Day, Austria’s Independence day. The day when the American, Russian, French, and British troops left Austria so it could become a neutral state over 50 years ago. We celebrated by having a Halloween party that night. The Austrians don’t really celebrate Halloween to the extent that we do, apparently it was gaining in popularity but 10 years ago it kind of declined so now it’s more of a storefront window kind of holiday. Some students went searching for pumpkins to carve and after several attempts they finally found the right kind at a supermarket entitled “amerikanische Kürbis” or American Pumpkins. There are many pumpkins around but they are more squash-like, very fleshy and hard to carve since people here, go figure, eat them. The party was held here in Rössl in one of the kitchens which meant that the random Germans/Austrians/Swedes in the dorm would wander in to witness what the heck was going on. We invited them to join us but they kind of just sat on the outskirts and stared at us like they were at a zoo. Everybody dressed up in a costume and it was fun seeing people improvise from what they had. I realized about 4 minutes before the party began that I needed a costume so I just looked at the flannel shirt and jeans I was wearing and fortified it by tucking in my shirt, rolling up the pants, donning a cap, and writing “Brawny” on a toilet-paper roll I grabbed from our bathroom as I left and went as the Brawny paper towel man. My toilet paper roll actually became quite handy in the end to clean up various spills and messes made throughout the evening.

The following is a list of what everyone else wore and my impressions:
Kevin wearing a kimono: Some could argue that he dressed up as himself right before or after sleeping since, as the few who have witnessed it will tell you, is what he wears but I think the goal was to be a Japanese man. Although, halfway through the evening, I grabbed a marker and drew a dirty moustache on him and he became a porn star
Katie wearing Kevin’s clothes: She went as Kevin
Lizzy wearing PJ’s: I think the aim was field mouse but by the time I arrived, the whiskers had worn off and like Kevin just looked like she was ready for bed
Al wearing black and a witch’s hat: Al likes to scare small children in her spare time
Mad wearing, um, normal clothes: I guess the consensus was that she was a rainbow since she had microscopic colorful stripes on her shirt? Oh and she was wearing rainbow sandals. I said she went as LAME.
Betsy in green with dead leaves draped over her: Mother Nature or a compost heap. I prefer the latter.
Monica in all black: A ninja, while a good choice (most popular costume from my childhood) she didn’t quite have to moves down and the only thing I saw her dominate that evening was a candy apple
Anthony in a suit and a red cross on his arm: I think he was a red-cross Swiss inspector or something? Not quite sure but he kept posing the same awkward ways in all the photos of him that evening
Christian in pulled high pants and glasses: “Christian, are you a nerd?” “Yes, well he’s also dressed like one” okay so we found that a lot funnier last weekend.
Mary in ‘the Shirt’ and other ND clothing with bruises and cuts: The ND football season, especially fitting after this weekend’s game
Mariel in normal clothes: She claims she was a tourist, but I think we all are for a good part of this year so she may as well had been “someone too tired from skiing to put on anything different”
Hayley in a black unitard?: I don’t know where she got it but she said she was a shadow, very creative. Nobody got my SNL allusions when I kept calling her an invisible pedestrian
Aaron: He showed up in normal clothes then disappeared after an hour then came back. Turns out he was meeting Gürtler to borrow his shirt. Aaron came in with this best impression and everyone started laughing hysterically and he had a fresh 50 euro note in his hand. We all assumed it was a prop since that’s pretty much all the big G ever does to us, give money. The man actually gave Aaron 50 euro for our party fund!

The rest of the evening was fun as we taught some of the Swedes how to play Kings and other American games and we were also teaching some of the other international students on our floor the proper methods of pumpkin carving. We also managed to scrounge up some Sturm (wine that tastes like lemonade, only available in the month of September) for the party which everyone was happy about.

So that’s all I got for now, hopefully I’ll get down to writing about our adventures in Nürnberg and Rothenberg ob der Tauber soon and post pictures.

First Week in IBK

Oh wow, so haven’t posted in an extremely long time… So I’m gonna make it my weekend goal to get back on track with this whole blog thing and let you know what exactly happened when we were skipping around Eastern Europe.

But, now, while it’s fresh on my mind, I’ll give you a little update on life here around Innsbruck… So I’ve been here for a little over a week and for whatever reason, maybe it’s the giant mountains on either side that are walling us in, or the fact that all of the streets curve while they seem to be straight, but I get so turned around in this city. Its really frustrating because after about one walk through Salzburg and its immediate surroundings, I pretty much had everything’s location down.

Rössl in der Au is the name of our dorm, my address, btw is

Charlie Vogelheim
Höttinger Au 34, Zimmer 321
6020 Innsbruck
Austria

The dorm is situated a nice 10-15 minute walk from the Goldenes Dachal, the city’s most famous landmark and the center of town. I was really quite disappointed with this sight, imagine a wooden balcony on the second story of an old building with a golden roof and frescos of poorly drawn warriors overlooking something that’s supposed to be a square but is really a wide, cobblestone street. Don’t get me wrong, I love the city and everything is so close and we walk everywhere and it’s the perfect college town, but it seems that this town could have maybe something more going for it for tourisms sake. Well I guess that’s the cue for the world-class ski resorts and high mountains towering 5000 feet above the city to step in. But it is fun walking through the throngs of Japanese tourists and doing my best to secretly make it into as many pictures as possible as I walk by the Goldenes Dachal on my way to class.

Me and the less-than-imposing Goldenes Dachal

But back to Rössl. I believe it houses about 400 students, and while most of them are Austrian or German, I think there are some other international students here. I think there’s a pretty sizable Sweedish group since I did walk into our kitchen one night and a bunch of people had decorated the room with balloons and small paper sweedish IKEA flags and they were making tacos while listening to ABBA. They seemed nice, but I didn’t want to get into another awkward conversation where start speaking German to me in some crazy fast dialect and I have no idea what they’re telling me but the only words I can understand are ‘dishtowel’ and ‘pickle’ and I have to use my imagination as to how they both could be related. Then they would ask me a question and I would nod and then I get a ‘are you retarded?’ kind of stare. Sometimes its best not to ask. Not to say I’ve been avoiding the other people on my floor, I will converse with the Austrians if they start the convo or if there’s nobody else in the room and there’s awkward kitchen silence, the worst kind.

Home Sweet Home

Its probably one of the uglier buildings in the city, but it’s a pretty nice place to live. The ND kids are kind of scattered around, but it hasn’t been a problem, the dorm’s not too big. We also have to get used to weird things like always closing/locking doors, no talking in hallways, actually using our dorm kitchen, and doing homework (I still feel like I’m on vacation…). Also, I strangely miss having a public bathroom, I didn’t have to worry about it getting dirty or getting half the shower-water on the floor because since maniacal shower-curtain comes up with a new plan every day as to how it can make my mornings more interesting. The one negative thing about the dorm is that our internet is really faulty. I wish they would just give us Ethernet cables, we have to use wireless. It seems to be survival of the fittest, my poor machine will have a string of connection, in the middle of emailing a professor, and in comes my roommate with his dandy new iBook and signs on and steals all of my internet, causing my computer to freak out and start doing all kinds of crazy things. Once it froze, I don’t think a computer’s done that for at least 5 years. This is also why there’s a lack of pictures, I’m afraid if I try uploading something, the computer will give up and implode.

Our room

Last week, the Büro was finally opened to us, its essentially the ND Innsbruck home base. It has a few computers with internet (allowing me to upload photos) a printer and other goodies. On the day it was opened, there lying at our feet were all of the things that previous students had left behind. Imagine a really small thrift store that was free and EVERYTHING in it was something you really needed or didn’t know you needed until that moment. Everyone went crazy and it was a kind of a Oklahoma Land Rush as everything/anything was for the taking. People were fighting over pillows and pots and the Gürtlers were having fun watching us and would start even egging us on. Over the huge mass confusion of us trying to stuff everything in sight into our backpacks and Spar grocery bags, you would hear them yell, “Wer braucht Regnenshirmen??” (who needs umbrellas?) and then about 7 people would madly dash to that corner of the room, almost tackling Anita in the process to fight over the 4 umbrellas. While everyone was distracted with the basics you could buy cheaply at the nearby stores, I got away with some gems, including a small but surprisingly working Guitar, Ski boots, and one of the few table lamps, it definitely was a success.

Gürtler and Betsy excited about her find

So in the midst of trying to get settled and getting used to the city, our classes finally started last week. They are anywhere from a 5-20 minute walk through the altstadt away from Rössl, and I find it really fun being a university student here. It’s very unlike in other cities where even though we were speaking German, they could tell we were American and we were treated as tourists. Here, though I’m sure they can sense my American accent through my German, they know that we are actually students and treat us in a different more cordial way. And (hopefully its out of politeness) those that speak English actually speak back to us in German and only resort to English when asked to repeat themselves multiple times (which often seems to be the case).

The classes themselves will prove to be interesting. Most are in the university’s oldest building, about 400 years old which allows one to feel all scholarly and whatnot when walking old baroque hallways. Here are my first impressions:

-German: Our professor is the most laid-back person I’ve ever met. He always wears some blindingly colorful outfit plucked from the early ninties. Our favorite has been a multicolored sweater with patterns of seashells. Its nice because he keeps working on our pronunciation, but I’m afraid he’s making us all have crazy Tyrolean accents. Plus when you get something wrong, or make a joke he sticks his tongue out at you in a silly way.

-CSEM: Roots of Reason: Prof Kennedy is a crazy little Scottish man who is very funny and very frank. He’ll randomly stop class when someone coughs and say “Coughs and sneezes bring diseases…” He seems like a Mr. Rhodes with a more normal sense of humor and high off of caffeine. I knew I was going to enjoy the class when on the first day he pretty much threw the syllabus out the window and said, “this is just to make Notre Dame happy.” I think I’m really going to enjoy the discussions here and the subject matter as we attempt to discover the basis of our values.

-Art History: Our professor can only be described as a cool metrosexual European with his long hair and Italian leather boots. Last year’s group described him as “seeming like he just had a quickie in his office” and having a “catwalk-like strut” and this description cannot be more spot on. His class will be interesting, but like all of our other classes, is entirely in German, and I’m not too familiar with vocabulary relating to art too well, so hopefully it’ll get easier as the year wears on. He seems to get on a roll when lecturing and has this, “I know so much more about everything than you could ever imagine so its probably not worth even asking” kind of look when you ask a question and interrupt his lecturing groove.

-Political Science: I hate this subject in English and hate it even more in German; I can tell already this class will be difficult. Our teacher has an extremely thick Tyrolean accent and talks very fast and I cannot understand a word he is saying. When he finally writes points on the board, he does a little twirl and what results on the board seems to be the result of somebody holding chalk while falling down a staircase. He also assumes we have a wide German vocabulary pertaining to all things political and when I finally got the guts to ask him what a certain word means, he explained the role of the voters in that specific context rather than just tell me “it means ‘voter.’”

-Theology: This subject doesn’t seem like its going to be too painful, the most difficult thing about it will be trying to stay awake during the class, especially when the class is after lunch during which most of us had eaten something quick and greasy and the sun shines in the room making it feel like an armpit. He speaks slow so is much easier to understand which is a plus, but he’ll give out 40+ pages of old German Theology to read for homework.

Last Thursday, I met my Gastfamilie. In our program, they set us up with a host-family who lives in town but they aren’t paid anything and we aren’t living at their house. It’s merely a family away from home since we will be without one for a while. It’s also another great venue to practice German. We had a really nice dinner at an old restaurant in the altstadt (thanks again ND) where we each met our different families. The meeting of them was strange since the students arrived early and the families arrived a little later. It was seriously like being picked for a team in gym class, a family would arrive and Anita would announce who’s their Gahstsohn or Gastdochter. As my fellow students got called off to sit with their families, the slowly lessening number of us left nervously huddled together in support as we wondered if our families even cared enough to show up… Finally my family arrived, and we sat down for dinner together. They are unbelievably nice. I was nervous my family wouldn’t be too friendly since my family got changed, randomly at the last moment (long story) allowing for Anita to beg this family to host me but they have been unbelievably nice.

Gabi and Hermann work at a nearby mall (not in retail, but I’m not exactly sure what). They are all vegetarians (I didn’t quite understand why) but I’m pretty excited about it. And Hermann is a huge cycler. They have a 31 year old son who is a drummer and he has a really nice girlfriend who is a university student studying ancient history. They also have a 17 year old son who’s nice but doesn’t talk much. I haven’t known them for more than a week and already they’ve taken me hiking and had me over for dinner. The hiking trip was amazing, we hiked to a little random bar halfway up one of the mountains near Innsbruck and the only way to get there is to hike or bike. There we ate Knödl (Tyrolean dumplings, a fried patty of cheese and potato) and drank beer. The Knödl looked really good, but when I tasted it, I realized it was full of Bergkäse or Mountain cheese, a Tyrolean specialty. This was my first and hopefully last experience with this cheese. I love trying new things and enjoy most culture’s specialties, but this cheese seriously had an overpowering aftertaste of cow crap. Okay so I’ve never tasted cow crap, but it tasted like the smell of it. My Gastfamilie had paid for my meal so I felt bad not finishing it so I forced myself to eat what now seems like a gooey, fried, white cow patty. The worst thing was is that now that I had this image of cow crap in my head, every bite made me gag. I finally got through one and a half of the 2 Knödle before I had to stop, I told my Gastfamilie that it was extremely heavy and I was full (it was and I was). Otherwise, the day was really pleasant and they told me we would go back there to hike up to the same spot, drink Gluwein, Austrian spiced wine, and go back down on sleds! When they had me over for dinner, they had told me how they were researching things that I had been asking them earlier, such as where I can buy guitar strings or if I could find a place to go swing dancing in town (I have searched and searched, and come to the conclusion that it is nowhere to be found here, I had hope since its popular in Germany but I guess not in Tyrol). They are actually taking me to a music shop to get guitar strings on Friday, I am trying my hardest not to get too much in their way but they keep insisting.

My Familie and me

Okay so that’s a lot, there may be pictures coming up too. Look forward to our eastern Europe adventures…

Pictures are up!

Get excited...

They finally opened our Büro which means that I have access to computers with a faster, better connection to the internet so now all my posts are riddled with what you really want to see! Check back the past three or so posts and you can see what I am talking about.

Oktoberfest: oh my!

Since Munich is only a 2 hr train ride from Salzburg, we found some amazing tickets that cost only €6.50 round trip for the day (which cost about €3 less than any beer we bought that day). Well let’s see what I have to say about the experience. Note that pictures will be uploaded soon... The following was scribbled on our journey back from this interesting event:

8-22
So we’re on the train back from Munich and oh what an interesting visit it was… The day started out with a painfully early 6:00am wake up. In one of the boys’ rooms, two alarms failed to perform and they were woken up about 10 minutes before our bus left to the train station, I feel like this kind of stuff happens way too often to us. Once on the train, we thoroughly enjoyed our cheap two hour ride to Munich by sleeping the whole way. We arrived and followed the massive crowd of dirndl and lederhosen outside the station and it appeared we got there just in time for the opening of the fest parade (this was the first day of the Oktoberfest). Essentially every brewery in the city hosted their own section of the parade. Each had a marching band clad in lederhosen, a carriage hosting some important person and family, an uncovered wagon led by horses carrying durndl-clad women throwing flowers to the crowd or drinking heartily, but usually both, and finally a wagon full of the brewery’s Festbier led by horses with hooves the size of a prize-winning turnip. Strange similies aside, there was a strange habit I realized I developed. Whenever the band would start to play, I would instinctively lick my lips as if I too was going to play with them. I feel like this habit will haunt me the rest of my life. I guess it’s my secret dream to put on some leather shorts and a funny hat and march around with my trumpet. Well it’s not a secret; I openly admit this is my ultimate life goal.

We kind of entered this trip cold-turkey, no Rick Steves to guide us, terrifying, I know. I only Wikipedia’d it last night in order to get an over-all history of this international event infamous for debauchery. Most of my research said not to go on the first or last weekend of the two week event (especially the opening day) as there would be too many people there. Well, we were leaving in 6 hours so there was nothing we could do about it, plus it was the only day we could leave our new prison, the Heftie. This information proved to be accurate since we faced some major crowd problems the minute we reached the fest. Pretty much all of the Bierzelts (beer-tent) were full and we couldn’t even look inside one. The whole event looked like a large county or state fair with large beer tents instead of the carnival of products and deep fried ox tails instead of deep fried Twinkies. After wandering around the fairgrounds for an hour, searching for food and a place to sit for over 3 hours in the burning sun (we were in desperate need for a cold beer), we finally found a place outside one of the tents in the ‘Biergarten.’ During one point in all of this, Madelaine made a friend with a piece of trash named ‘Albert’ consisting of a napkin, cardboard, and some mustard who refused to leave us alone.

Al and Albert

Four of us squeezed into a spot, previously occupied by 2 people and we ended up sitting next to a group of German students from Munich. They were not too excited about sitting next to us at first but they soon lightened up once we started speaking to them in German (and after they finished their first beer). Plus we finally got our beer! It was fun and amusing talking to them and they gave us some rather interesting advice such as: you can check out other girls without your girlfriend knowing by wearing Al’s headband over your eyes, (as one of us was putting on sunscreen) putting on sunscreen 3-4 hours after being in the sun is like putting on a condom after 30 minutes of sex – pointless, and they taught the girls in our group a word to tell a man that they just want to sleep. Essentially the important stuff Frau Offenberger never taught us. Other events during our trip included the fact that Al had a rather fat-bottomed girl literally sit on her for about an hour and was thoroughly abused as everyone in the vicinity kept sweeping their crumbs into her shoes! The poor thing.

Fat Bottom sits on Al's bottom

Oh and at one point a pregnant woman sitting near us randomly fainted. She was okay but we were overall kind of confused why a pregnant woman would even go to an event glorifying alcohol, Mad would also like me to point out that she was awkwardly wearing 4 inch heels. Nevertheless, we finally got our much-earned beer.

We discovered the hard way that the beer at Oktoberfest is actually twice as alcoholic as normal beer, so a Maß (liter) of beer is equivalent to 6 drinks. Unknowingly, most of us drank two in about two hours. Specifics of the next few hours aside, let’s just say it’s a real lucky thing we managed to find the train station and that we’re on our way back to Salzburg now (at least I think this is where the train is going).

We were on the right train and celebrated our arrival back to Salzburg with Doner Kababs

In conclusion, Oktoberfest was quite an experience, while really hot, sweaty, crowded, and stressful, it was still a lot of fun to join our Bavarian neighbors in the joys of fermented grain sludge. As I watch drunk lederhosen-clad Austrians stumble around the train car, I think that while I’m in no hurry to get back to this touristy, expensive event, I’m glad I got to experience it once in my life.

Well there you have it.

Hungry for Hungary!

Again, I’m really behind… This is the end of our Hungary trip that happened ~ 3 weeks ago. I just got back from our little Eastern Europe trip, but more on that hopefully later this week.

9-17
Being in Hungary has been the strangest experience in my life. For the first time ever, I can not understand a single thing anyone is trying to communicate to me. At least the germanic/romantic languages I have had experience with you can understand some words or get the gist of what is going on. But whatever, Hungary is awesome. After waking in our loft rooms, I was uncertain on the time of our meeting that morning so I yelled to Christian in our bathroom (our bathroom walls were extremely thin, allowing us to conveniently communicate without going into the other persons’ room). Then we wandered aimlessly around campus since nobody told us our meeting place, feeling like we were horribly sticking out. But Gürtler found us and took us to breakfast. Afterwards, we began the academic part of our trip with a lecture about Eastern European economics, while not the most interesting subject, was amusing because of how excited the professor was in teaching us and I guess about the subject. We then went on a fun tour of the small campus. The campus was built only 15 years ago and was designed by a famous Hungarian architect whose name I can’t remember at the moment. It was built on an old Russian Army camp and many of their old buildings were artfully renovated or built upon into new classroom and administrative buildings. Most of them symbolic of Hungary’s rise out of communism and poverty, some were also extremely whimsical. They call it the Hungarian Disneyland.
We then took the train into Budapest, ate lunch in a creepily western food court in a creepily western mall. Our wonderful tour guide Láczló, a grad student of American Lit., took us on a fascinating tour of his home-town. His hobby is architectural history so it was really interesting and an awesome mix of pointing out cool looking buildings and showing how those painted the fascinating history of the city. This tour lasted 5 hours but it could have gone on much longer. He coined a phrase ‘plaster archeology’ in which one looks at the plaster peeling off of old buildings allowing you to see what is underneath, whether graffiti or advertisements, it allows you to get a sense of parts of the city in the past. I think we only went to one really touristy spot most go to when they visit the city, the rest were small little cool sights, some that Láczló himself discovered. I suppose we’re just going to have to come back… For example, there are little metal doors on the sidewalks in some parts of the city, apparently these were escape hatches for bomb shelters from the world wars. But since they were on the sidewalk level, if there was rubble, people could not get out, so they painted white lines on the sides of buildings above so that rescue teams can find the openings. He pointed out a couple of these and you can still see the faint white paint almost all peeled off above it on the side of the building. People walking in and out of the buildings were giving us weird looks as if their building was of any interest, but some (I guess the English speaking ones) actually stopped to listen sometimes and were just as fascinated as we were.

After a tour that rivals all of Rick Steve’s self-guided tours (even with his amazing puns, I don’t give out such compliments lightly), we ate dinner in a funky restaurant in the old Jewish Quarter with more authentic Hungarian cuisine (my dish came out with a slab of pork fat on top; they eat lard like we eat butter, it’s amazing). Next we were taken to a favorite nightspot of the Hungarian students called “Szimpla.” On the outside it looked like a simple, shrapnel-riddled, run-down condemned apartment building in a small sketchy looking alley. When you walk inside, there is a series of rooms (one specifically to park bikes), each one different but funkily furnished and each having a bar. Finally at the end of the building, a large open courtyard opens up before you full of young people (this was on a Monday night). It’s surrounded by crumbling buildings covered in ivy. When we arrived, many of the Hungarians we had met the previous two days greeted us and had saved us some tables in the middle of the courtyard. We all enjoyed a thoroughly magical evening, chillin in this courtyard under the stars. Since the place was a little more expensive than the pub near the university, it was obvious that it was a treat for the Hungarians to go there and they were really excited about taking us there. It was really unfortunate when we had to leave, but we had to make the last train back to the University, and so begins one of my strangest experiences using public transportation in my life:

So the 11:30pm train from Budapest to the middle of nowhere Hungarian farming towns already has some interesting characters on a Monday night. Add some Americans who just left a bar, a broken train bathroom, beyond repair, and you have quite an adventure. First of all, as usual after drinking, many of us needed to use the restroom and the only WC on the train was in our car. It had some orange sign with a crazy Hungarian phrase written on it that was half stuck on the door and half stuck on the wall and it was obvious previous similar signs had been there prior but had been ripped off. People were going in so I figured it was okay (note that my seat was literally 2 feet in front of this door so I got a front row ticket to the evening’s events). I patiently waited my turn to use the bathroom while others went in front of me. Hayley, who was right before me came out and for whatever reason, her pants were soaked up to her ankles in God knows what toilet water. As we were laughing on how she managed to accomplish this, two of the creepiest men shove in front of me and both go into the small, wet, dripping bathroom in front of me. Together! I was so shocked and yet amused by the situation that I could not be angry. We were hysterical with laughter by this point. But it gets better… After 10 minutes of us nearly wetting our pants, a young Hungarian woman comes in and doesn’t realize that there are two men, together, in the bathroom, she then opens the door (no lock, I guess that’s what the sign said) and since we were all facing the bathroom, in a fit of giggles, we got a full view on what was going on inside! Fortunately, they were just awkwardly standing in there, I don’t really know what was going on, but when she opened the door they just kind of walked out, and she went in to use the bathroom. Finally she leaves, and I have the toilet for myself, and I calm myself down enough to pee. When I’m finished with my business, wary of what would happen after seeing Hayley’s pants, I opened the door, pressed the flush button and we watched what happened. The contents of the toilet all disappeared suddenly after a few seconds in a huge suction noise (as is normal in trains) but then after a beat as if dissatisfied with what it just consumed, the suction noise sounded again and we all watched as the toilet spit back up the contents about 2 feet in all directions around the bathroom. It was a good thing I had just relieved my bladder because I would have peed my pants in laughter right there. Perhaps that’s what the orange sign was about. Well after my little adventure with the toilet, in go Chuck and Larry AGAIN together for another 15 minutes! When they finally emerged in a cloud of smoke, I guess that they weren’t doing anything more than smoking. By the end of the ride, after multiple uses, the contents of the toilet had spilled out into the train compartment and the whole floor of our car was soaking. The whole situation now seems so surreal since we were cracking up the entire 45 minute ride back. Goofiness continued until we arrived at our station.

The next day, we had two more classes before we had to leave back to Salzburg. I can’t really recall what they were about which I guess gives a clue as to how interesting they were. The lectures overall could have been really cool and interesting about eastern Europe’s economy, religion, and culture after the fall of the Iron Curtain but they seemed to be a little haphazard, too common sense, or the professors were talking so quietly you couldn’t hear them. We then had to say ‘goodbye’ to our newly made Hungarian friends and take the 7 hr train back to Salzburg.

Hungary past

Note: The following events happened two weeks ago, I wrote them down then but am updating them now because I have been so busy. I had my final for our Salzburg German class today (easy), arrived in Innsbruck (beautiful), and will be leaving tomorrow for a 10 day trip around eastern Europe (Krakow, Prague, Berlin, Dresden) until classes start in two weeks. It was sad to leave Salzburg, but it’s been a little overwhelming arriving in Innsbruck and trying to get my bearings before we leave tomorrow. Oh well, back to what happened two weeks ago:

6-19 First Day in Hungary

So who can say “best field trip ever?” Apparently the Nanovic Institute at ND since they set up and sent us on this sweet trip we’re on now (no charge for us). So expectations about Hungary: a cold, wet desolate communist-stricken country trying to piece back together its government. Only notable for a peppy dance whose many interpretations can be found on cell phones worldwide and a fictional dragon named Norbert from J. K. Rowling’s imagination. So far, it’s been my favorite country. Ever.

A few days ago, we were given an itinerary about our stay and it included things like lectures and other boring stuff, allowing us only a half a day in the large capital of Budapest (Ricky suggests at least 2 days). We were expecting a depressing country and an even more unbearable field trip ‘education’ experience. Today started early with us waking up in our Viennese hostel, grumbling about the French group of girls who would not shut up the night before, and enjoying another hearty hostel-breakfast. We then took 3 modes of transportation to the train for the 3.5 hour ride to Budapest. There were no compartments in the train unfortunately, so no HP time. During the ride, we brushed up on the fascinating history of the country, customs, and we tried to memorize some key Hungarian phrases (I keep forgetting them and when I thank someone I usually mumble something between English ‘thanks’ and German ‘danke’ it seems to do the trick).

Arriving in Budapest was really cool. The city has a fascinating mixture of all baroque/classical structures with paint poetically peeling off, communist functional structures and new, modern, western-influenced office buildings. In the train station we were unexpectantly greeted by a number of friendly, English speaking Hungarian students from the university we are staying at. It was really nice of them. We then rode on a 40 minute bus with them to Estergom, outside the city. On the way the students chatted with us as they were excited to practice their English on native English speakers. We arrived at a basilica randomly in this small town, took a tour (in German, much to the dismay of the Hungarians) and climbed the tower (it was there and had to be done) to view Slovakia across the river. This part of Slovakia used to be Hungary but were taken away after WWI as punishment to Hungary for fighting on the losing side. The Hungarians here (and in Czech and Transylvania, Romania) have always associated themselves as Hungarian, refusing to change their language, and really held onto their traditions. Therefore Hungarian traditions, folklore, and music are most preserved in these areas.

Afterwards, we drove to the small catholic university we were staying at of about 5,000 students in the middle of nowhere. We were given some teacher apartments to stay in (with a loft with beds and a bathroom) which we were really excited about. We had a few hours to spare, so some students invited us to the local and only pub in town that all of the university students go to. There we were able to get a hefty pre-dinner buzz for only about 2-euro! We also discovered palinka, essentially a fruit flavored vodka that all the locals seem to love. Imagine vodka with a smooth fruit aftertaste. During this time we had finally discovered the score to the Michigan ND game (it was Sunday afternoon) and we all started to get depressed. But then we realized we weren’t at ND and there was nowhere else in the world we would rather be than right there in this middle of nowhere Hungarian pub with these students. It was an interesting environment. Drunk old men kept trying to talk to me but I had absolutely no idea what they were trying to say. The Hungarian language is complicated and every word is at least 3 syllables long. Their toast is something like 10 syllables long.
After pubtime, we went to the welcome dinner at the university. Traditional Hungarian fare and fun were served as we were accompanied by a folk band. Then a traditional dancer man with a sweet handlebar moustache got up and started doing a dance that involved a lot of jumping and slapping. He then invited us all up with him and he attempted to teach us to dance, it was pretty amazing. Here are some of my favorite parts of that experience:
Gürtler trying to stay in tempo
The fact that the only English words he knew were “left, right, okay, and nice to meet you!”
A Hungarian conga line where the leader got to swing a broom around and slap people on the but with it
Fiddler on the Roof-esque circle dances

We closed the evening with another unforgettable visit to the local pub. There I tried Unicum, Hungary’s national drink. It’s essentially a grappa, made from 50 some herbs that was (and still is) used as a stomach settler. Imagine every herbal flavor in the world mixed with potent sinus-cleansing liquor. Top it off with a harsh bitter aftertaste that punches your taste buds numb for the next 15 minutes. We also learned three different ways of saying cheers: 1. Not clinking glasses because some Hapsburg emperor clinked beer glasses when executing favored Hungarian rulers. 2. Clinking glasses anyways and saying ‘screw it’ because it happened 200 years ago. 3. Clinking glasses and saying something that sounded like “Balsamic Highno” essentially ‘F*** him, Highno’ in Hungarian. The latter was of course our favorite. By the end of the evening, some of the people in our group couldn’t remember what the cheer was and ended up giving up and cheering “Fuck-achino!!!” We’re not really sure what that came from, I guess a mixture of the f-word and an Italian based food. Tomorrow should prove to be even more interesting since our schedule has the evening planned out as being “Budapest nightlife with Hungarian students.”

Wieners in the Opera!

So we’re back in Vienna! Yay! Again I can laugh about all of the Wieners walking around me (since Wiener is German for ‘Viennese’)! Today we woke up from our first night in a European youth hostel and we got to experience our first free breakfast. Essentually stale bread and some vegetable oil product resembling butter, a wide assortment of jams of fruits you would never expect to see in jam-form such as cranberry and apple, cheese, and some kind of meat product. It was just what we needed to start our long day.

Our first hostel

Such an amazing picture of such an amazing man

After we were refuled, Gürtler took us out on his personal tour of the city. As I said earlier, I really love Vienna. Every building whether two or two-hundred years old has the same baroque charm, even in the buildings that are more than a half hour walk from the altstadt city center. Unfortunately this was the only full day we have to stay in the city. Last night we left after our class and got in the city in the evening with just enough time for Gürtler to take us out for a late night snack/drink, his treat, at a little known, local place. I swear this man is amazing. Anyways, one day is definitely not enough time to explore this grand capital of Austria. We took pictures of the neo-gothic Rathaus, pictures in front of the neo-gothic Rathaus, and pictures of people taking pictures in front of the neo-gothic Rathaus. We saw some other buildings too, I’m sure. At one moment in time, few were there to witness, Goethe and Gürtler were standing side by side. After our tour, we were given 5 hours of free time to wander the city and do whatever we wanted. Going to a flea/farmers market, I discovered my new favorite meal, kebabs. Essentually a giant column of meat (lamb or chicken) that’s constantly turning and being roasted and constantly dripping with fat in a rather enticing puddle. When you order a kebab, the meat is shaved off and falls in the fat-puddle. The shaved meat and fat-puddle are all then delicately swept into a pita with lettuce, onions, cucumber/yogurt sauce, and red pepper powder. Its essentially a Turkish Gyro. There were also rather exciting barrels of sauerkraut. Then Christian and I broke off to take a tour of the Stattoper or city opera which was really cool to see. Unfortunatly most of the theater was destroyed by a bomb in WWII and it was so important, the city quickly rebuilt it in 10 years, but it wasn’t to its original baroque glory. Nevertheless, this little story proves that the Viennese like to follow my credo: “Don’t fix it if it ain’t baroque!” I met some quite nice ladies there and got the digits. Being in the lobby though, I swear I saw a group of theater-managers complaining about a bunch of notes they had received. I wonder what that was all about. After the oper we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museen (Museum of art history) to see some art! Yarb! In te Egypt section, I definitely found a strange green box with no label and awkwardly made eye contact with the girl standing next to me, don’t really know what that was all about…

Christian found his Egyptian Twin

HI from the Kunsthistorisches Museen

We met the Gürt for dinner at another really nice restraint serving more authentic Austrian fare, including my favorite noodle-dumplings Spätzle. After dinner, a group of us wanted to go check out the Opera (a different one plays every night). By the time we got to the opera, it had started a half hour prior and the two euro standing room only tickets were all sold out. Not to be discouraged, we waited outside the doors to see if any bored opera SRO attendees were leaving early and willing to surrender their tickets to us. Luckily after pantomiming “Pardon me Madam and Missour, may we procure your Opera tickets if you have completed your visit to the opera house and are currently vacating the premises?” to confused asian tourist couples and offending Austrians by immediately mistaking them as American tourists (he was wearing an Illinois Harley Davidson hat! …to an Opera!) we finally collecected enough just as intermission was ending.

Inside, we had excellent seats with a bar to lean on and a little screen for a translated libberetto! The opera, however, was very strange. It was called ‘I Puritani’ by Ballini. At the beginning we were kind of confused with the plot as the set looked rather like the lobby ofo the Hesburgh Library and there were (we assumed) Pilgrims wearing Pleather costumes who were watching a rather fat lady drunkenly stumble around the stage. Being many of our first operas, we found the whole thing strange. I especially liked how any time a character had an inane thought pop into their heads, they would sing about it for about 10 minutes, but then the plot would quickly move along real quick between these moments in quick a-melodic dialogue-singing. In the end, you think everyone’s all happy, the couple’s together and he doesn’t have to be burned (horay!) but literally in the last two sung lines of the opera (as the female is singing “I’m so happy, I’m confused”), the jealous third party of the love triangle comes and strangles the girl’s love and she reacts by singing another hefty line of “I’m so happy, I’m confused” and the curtain closes. I think that last line wrapped up how we felt about the end of the opera “I’m so happy its over, but I’m really confused.” Though I poke fun, the performers were excellent and talented. We definitely had fun yelling “brava!” as the singers bowed and flowers were thrown onto the stage.

We then managed to find our way back to our hostel and are preparing for our trip to Budapest tomorrow.

Vienna's little walk of fame

Pope in Vienna

I'm about two full weeks behind in my posting so I'll give you a quick update on what happened two weekends ago. Essentially we went to visit our homeboy, Benidict, in Vienna.

On Saturday we still had class (and a test) which really sucked. But we had a half day so after class some of us went to europark to check out Salzburg's mall which was interesting to see the Europeans version of a shopping mall (about 3 H&Ms and a couple of grocery stores). They don't seem to have it quite right, but it was an interesting experience since for the first time I was not in a big touristy spot and everyone was expecting me to speak German which was really cool and fun. But I do have to say that their waterfalls are pretty awesome.

After the mall, a group of us went to go see a performance in the student church of the Salzburg University of Mozart's Requiem. We figured we had to see a Mozart symphony while in the city of his birth. Requiem is famous because its his last work and he never finished it, ironically it was a funeral mass. The performers were excellent and it was really fun. However since it was in a church, a lot of the nuances in the music were lost in the 6 second echo which kind of sucked and it was a little too minor and slow for me.

The next day we had to get up at the peach crack of dawn and walk to the train station for a 7am train to Vienna because all of the buses don't run that early on Sundays. Therefore you have Guetler leading 14 half asleep students through the streets of Salzburg at 4:30 am at his infamous walking speed that rivals the land speed records of most species of African gazelles. This was just as the bars were closing after a seemingly successful Saturday night and Guertler had to ward off the drunken hordes from attacking us with merely an umbrella. It was pretty intense. Once we got on the train things really picked up as it was our first European train ride and we had little 6 person compartments to sit in. As you can imagine, I immediately going from compartment to compartment asking anyone if they've seen a toad named 'Trevor.' Then we enjoyed ourselves the rest of the journey by quoting every line we could remember from the Harry Potter franchise that took place on the Hogwarts Express. Wait that's incorrect, it started with quoting, then ended with acting out whole scenes. I think the dementors attacked us about 3 times and various pairs of glasses were repaired throughout the trip (Occulus Reparo!). We were extremely slap-happy from a lack of sleep. As you can tell, we're probably the coolest group of kids you could come across.

We (I) tried dressing up with the materials we had available.

Once in the city, we had a long walk to St. Stephan's Platz to the Dom or Cathedral in the city. Vienna is a pretty amazing city and every building matches one another in a whimsical baroque way. Plus there are just random museum/palace things and monuments all over the city who's architecture are all crazy ornate and detailed. The Hapsburgs were really successful in making their capital city impressive. More on that later, we would be coming back to the city the next weekend to receive Guertler's personal tour of fun and giggles at another breakneck speed.

Once at St. Stephan's Platz, there were so many people in the square, we couldn't get more than 200 meters from the church. Fortunately they had set up all these big screen televisions all over the square, unfortunately it was raining. I began to get grumpy because I hadn't eaten much all day and I figured we could've just watched it on TV at the Heftie rather than cough up 27 euro to come here if I wasn't going to even see the pope. The Austrians were freaking out about this event. There was nonstop news coverage concerning it weeks before and after the event on 8 different channels. Mass was a little boring because it was all in German and I don't know very many biblical words in German yet, we had to stand, and it took like 3.5 hours because the choir would randomly go off and sing half a symphony any chance they could. Communion was pretty neat as all the priests poured out into the square and placed themselves amongst the crowd with personal altar boys holding umbrellas for the priests.

It was surprisingly efficient and probably the shortest part of the mass. Gotta hand it to those Austrians... After mass, Benedict did come out on the stage really far in front of us, and that was pretty fun. The crowd was going nuts and they kept screaming "Benedicto! Benedicto!" and waving their respective country's flags around on umbrellas. He spoke to the crowd which I unfortunately couldn't hear but it was kind of funny because the wind kept blowing his robe over his head. Not his whole robe, but his red stole part. After the frustrating 20+ year old girl got off her boyfriend's shoulders in front of us got down I was finally able to get a picture of him:

After mass, we were given an hour or two to walk around the city before we had to catch our train back to Salzburg. We mostly just walked around and enjoyed the free pope-presents offered to us during the day such as pope-water, pope-bread, pope-ponchos, and pope-bandannas.

Mmmm Pope-bread!

In the end it was a fun trip that proved to be much more fun than I was anticipating.

Horay for the pope!