Old Ladies with Beer, oh and finals

The last couple of times I have gone to Spar or Hofer or any of our supermarkets, there has always been this unbelievably slow old lady in front of me. Amongst the normal old lady things they buy, tea, jam, and crumpets, there is usually one or two large cans of beer thrown in. It always throws me off but then I remember, "Oh yeah, I'm in Austria."

So finals are finally over! After my last one today I suppressed the urge to jump up in an explosion of papers and start singing a very specifically choriographed song with my classmates we had been practicing for the past two months, "What time is it? February!" They were a little stressful since its almost impossible to study in this country. For example on Saturday I got a call from my Host Mom and they invited me to go skiing. Can't pass that up can I? It was one of the better decisions I've made, it was such a beautiful day and I probably would've sat around thinking about studying and not getting anything accomplished. It was fun except for the part where I was trying to impress my family and their friends with my ever increasing skiing abilities and I wiped out for the first time in like 2 months in front of all these cool Austrians.

The finals themselves couldve been a lot worse, and I really lucked out. Beforehand when studying, the Austrians would freak out when I told them I had 5 tests in one week, apparently IF they had a finals they were spread out over a one month period in January.

Saturday evening was also the UniBall, the largest social event of the year. Faschings time as I may have mentioned before is the time of balls and the University hosted one the last weekend of the semester. We (the ND kids) had a little pre-party before the dance here in Roessl and everyone was all nicely dressed up. Then we all walked over to the ball together as a group. The ball itself was so fun, there were about 3 giant ballrooms, and a couple other places to dance, each with a different style of music and each with a live band. There was one playing with an orchestra playing the waltz and classical dances. When we walked in, and you saw all these people dancing around, it looked like you were walking into some cheezy Rogers and Hammerstein musical, everyone knew exactly how to waltz and everyone was gracefully spinning and whatnot in their coattails, long gowns and gloves. A couple of us tried to join in and we found two things: 1. Nobody really knows how to waltz; 2. Its really easy to pretend to know what you are doing. In the crowd of waltzers we got stepped on, jabbed and someone was always crashing in you. It felt like I was in the middle of a fist fight, I didnt know waltzing was so intense, there is so much dirty underhandedness that goes on within the dance floor. There was another room with a blues/swing band. None of the Austrians know how to swing dance and just tried to awkwardly waltz to the music. I definately impressed some when we started to Lindy Hop. There was another room with a rock cover band as well as a few discos. The ball went on till 6am but I left around three because I was dead tired from skiing that day, and I was thinking about all the studying I needed to get done in the next week.

I leave in a few hours for London to visit many friends and I am extremely excited, I cannot wait. Then I take the Chunnel to Paris to meet Christian for a few days then train back to IBK maybe stopping a night in Strassbourg. Ill post my overall travel plans after this.

Ciao!