Lost in Austria

Winding down

2008-05-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

I have a week left.

Twenty four hours from now I will be on a plane over the pacific ocean. I seem to be the least excited person in the group to go home. I have seriously considered moving under the bridge over the Inn outside our dorm and making a living off of posing with Indian tourists in front of the Goldenes Dachl, I am pretty sure I can make a way better living than that stupid silver "statue" who is always there. God! Statues don't wear ski gloves when it gets cold out! I hate her so much. Anyways my plans were thwarted when the strange 90 degree weather we've been having is melting all the snow in the mountains which raised the level of the Inn which flooded out my potential home.

Perhaps its the fact that I just saw my parents and don't really feel "homesick" or perhaps its the fact that I am stressed out about this summer since I still have no idea whatsoever what I am going to be doing research on in Montana. I suppose Ill just have to make the most of this next week. I have a feeling that "making the most of next week" is going to mostly include studying for finals and packing.

Immediately getting back from the Baltics I had to scurry in finishing 2 economics projects (one on poland and one on romania and together about as interesting as a barrel of sauerkraut) among other work before my family got here on tuesday.

On Tuesday, my sisters, mom, and grandma arrived fresh from Julia's graduation. We chilled in Innsbruck for most of the week and it was really good seeing them. We wandered around the city, hiked around alpine villages with my gastmom, and I got to show my life for the past year to my family. On Thursday, dad came and we got to be together for the first time in almost a year.

On friday, fresh out of boring the ears off my classmates about the current economic situation of Poland, we hopped on a 6 hour train ride to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia and one of my favorite cities I have visited this year. When we arrived, our hotel seemed to have booked us for a different week, so we were left to find somewhere else to stay. We ended up staying in the attic appartment of the hostel we stayed at when I was there 2 months ago. Although there were sketchy bathroom facilities and the beds didn't always function (which is a rarity since pretty much any horizontal surface about 1 by 6 feet can be considered a bed) I really enjoyed it and I think the 'rentals did too once they got used to the situation. I am trying to remember exactly what we did in Ljubljana for 3 days but it seems that all we did was just chill out, which this city is perfect for. We chilled out at a goulash festival, we chilled out watching Indiana Jones 4 (in a previously communist country), we chilled out in between chilling out. Most of our time was spent sitting at outdoor cafes or looking for the next cafe to go to. It was very relaxing. Not to mention I finally got the most bitchin' t-shirt imaginable. When we got back Sunday afternoon, my Hostfam invited us over for dinner and she made us a feast of home cooked Tirolean fare.

Since I put my family on an overnight train to Italy (they were on their way to Cinque Terra), I have mostly been involved in "studying" for finals.

Recovering from the Baltics

2008-05-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

So for the past week we embarked upon a field trip and a kind of traditional farewell trip to Estonia and Latvia. We were all looking forward to multiple aspects of the trip, including receiving a stipend for the entire trip and having the whole thing funded as a part of the program and the fact that Gürtler planned it all so we wouldn’t need to worry about narcissistic train conductors with superiority complexes telling you that you are on the wrong kind of train going in the wrong direction or barely making your airplane back after getting lost from horrible airport directions from the overenthusiastic incomprehensible Japanese woman sitting at the front desk of the hostel. We were all looking forward to escaping the stress of the end of the semester work in Innsbruck and relaxing on the Baltic sea, a place that we all agreed we would probably have never thought of going before. I don’t think “relaxing” would really be the best term to describe the excursion. We spent most of our time in the past week trying to keep up with Gürtler’s disturbingly breakneck pace. After a day of marathon five hour city tours in German, awkward embassy visits, and mind-numbing university lectures Gürtler would encourage us to go out and experience the local nightlife even though we had to get up the next morning at times so early, I forgot they existed, to start the whole cycle again. As such, we spent most of our limited free time passed out on whatever somewhat horizontal surfaces we could find. And free time was very scarce, a few days we didn’t have time to stop for lunch and Gürtler told us that if we really thought we needed to eat lunch (which apparently to him is a foreign concept) we could steal food from the hotel’s breakfast resulting in vicious glares from hotel staff as we tried to secretly wrap up our improvised sandwiches in napkins. I think we all figured why Anita, his wife, prefers not to travel with Gürtler. But maybe I am being a little too critical, we did have a lot to see and little time to see it. I have definitely matured in my traveling and at the beginning of the year would’ve thought that our pace was frustratingly slow, but now I feel like I get a better feel of a city by slowing down a few times a day and relaxing at a café or watching people from a park bench. So overall conclusion: I enjoyed the trip but did not get enough of the aforementioned moments to get a feeling like I truly experienced the countries.

If I have enough time in the next few weeks I will hopefully document a few more of the specifics of the trip.

Springing

2008-05-09T16:58:00.000-07:00

I knew something was changing when I began to see only the lower half of all the Austrian men's calves... Yes, the man-pris are in full bloom and you know what that means, spring in Austria. After a few weeks of ugly rainy days where it was too warm to go skiing but too cold to do anything else, spring has finally arrived in full force. It really sucks that we have to leave this country (in less than a month!) just as its in its most beautiful. Nevertheless I have been taking full advantage of the beautiful weather and this amazing place.

I discovered that I could be in an alpine meadow overlooking the Inn River Valley in less than 20 minutes from my dorm. From there stretch out many other trails that wander in and among the Alps. Because of this I have made it a point to go on a 1-3 hour hike at least once a day and I can't get enough of it. One of my favorite things about hiking here is the fact that sprinkled among the trails are a number of Alms and Huette which are essentually small traditional log cabins that serve food and beer to hikers excusively. Some of these places don't have roads leading to them and need to get their supplies hellicoptered or hiked in. There is nothing like an ice cold beer and/or a crisp apple struedel in the middle of a hike.

One of my favorite places to hike to is called Hoettinger Bild which is a small baroque chapel about a hour straight up the mountain behind my dorm in the middle of the wilderness that people like to make mini pilgramages to. Apparently its main feature, a sketch of Madonna and Child, is in some way holy or miraculous when some student found it or sketched it on that spot (I'm not really sure but thats what I got from all of the paintings in the chapel). Along the way I always say hi to the cows, sheep, and cream-colored ponies that are always roaming the hills of the alps. In my living here, I have come to appreciate the smell of manure and I will probably always associate it with this year (in a positive way).

Last weekend I realized was going to be really my last free weekend to travel while here and so I decide to make it to a place I always wanted to go to, Hallstatt.

Hallstatt is in the Salzkammergut, not very far from Tirol but not very easy to get to. It is the tiny town on the alpine lake that pretty much any travel book on Austria or any travel book on western europe usually has on the cover. The town was founded several thousand years ago as the salt in the area was the currency of the world until the past couple years. Since we have a buttload of projects due about possibly the most boring stuff imaginable, and spontinaity in this group is severly lacking, I was unable to recruit anybody to join me in my journey. I was determined to go regardless.

Although the city was amazing and totally worth it, I have totally lost faith and feel somewhat shocked, cheated, and slightly hurt by the things the Austrian train system did to me during the trip. We used to be wonderful travel-buddies, they were always on time and good to me with clean cars and comfy seats but apparently something went terribly wrong as the entire company seemed indictive towards me the entire trip. Getting there was not so much a problem, the first few legs of the trip were fine, but then came the last leg, only a 20 minute train ride. I got on the train that arrived at the track and at the time that my train was supposed to take. I didnt realize that I had gotten on a train going in the wrong direction until 20 minutes later when the ticket guy informed me. Apparently a few other Austrians made the same mistake so I didnt feel totally dumb. The wierdest part about this (and why I am telling you this part of the story) is that when we finally got on a train going in the right direction (an hour later), the whole train was a serious party. Everyone seemed to know each other and they were all dancing in the hallways and singing and it wasnt like they were going to the same place, people got on and off at many different stops. When we finally got there, some girl on a unicycle pointed me in the direction of the youth hostel where I played poker with a strange group of Czech cyclists (who were in a very large group that had a very cult-ish feel...bongo drums and bad guitar singing into the night) until I got tired and packed it in. More on the crimes of the train company later.

In Hallstatt, I visited some ice caves (way cool!) where I met some Australians (not Austrians) who were friendly enough to drive me back into town so I didnt have to walk. (I just want to say at this point that I love Australians, EVERY one I have come across this year has been almost disturbingly friendly and unbelievably fun, I dont know what it is about that continent but they are doing something right.) I also saw a church with a ton of painted skulls, had one of the best "interactive" museum experiences on the 'thrilling' history of the city complete with a 3-d journey back into time, went on a salt mine tour with long slides (they take your picture like at Disneyland), difficult to understand miner animitronics telling stories, laser light shows across subterranian lakes, mannekin cavemen with oddly placed body hair and salty walls, I licked them.

Okay so back to the trains, on the way back, I caught a 6pm train that was supposed to get back to Innsbruck by 10. Once in Salzburg I get to the platform where the train back to Innsbruck was supposed to leave. It said on the computer that it was leaving at 9pm, it said on the board in the station, it even said it was leaving on the platform. I got there a few minutes early so I started to read as I waited for the train, then I looked up and the sign on the platform that had just said Innsbruck was blank. I run down to the ticket office to ask the man which track the train was leaving from and Herr Grumpy told me that this train does not run on saturdays. He said that the next one was at 12:44am, great, thats about in 4 hours. So now I am stuck in Salzburg for 4 hours and after living in this city for a month I knew it was already about 3 hours past the time that about everybody in the city decides to run inside and hide from the darkness resulting in almost no nightlife or even just people walking around. I managed to kill 4 hours so I got back on the train (which now should arrive sometime around 2am) and as I am getting on, the man informs me that the route the train usually takes is being worked on so we have to take a 2 hour detour. Great. So I arrived back in IBK at about 4 am Sunday morning, exhaused and about ready to kill the next person I see happily wearing a red scarf and Austrian train uniform... I arrived 6 hours later than I meant to turning a 4 hour trip home into a 10 hour one.

Although the transportation was extremely frustrating I was glad I went but I wish I could've convinced a few others to come with me since I was kind of lonely at parts and didnt really meet any travel buddies in the hostel.

On Wednesday for Gemeinsames Essen, all of us with Trachtenkleidung (Lederhosen and Dirndls) decided to suprise Guertler by all wearing them. It was basically me, the lederhosen pimp, with 6 other dirndl ladies. We thought it would be fun to embaress him at the restruant when he is forced to associate himself with a whole bunch of Americans wearing traditional Austrian clothing. We weren't doing anything else embaressing other than just wearing the clothing. It was fun and though he didnt show it, he was a little embaressed or suprised (we decided that Guertler likes to give suprised but does not like to be the reciever). However the walk to/from dinner was a different story. EVERYONE on the streets was staring at us, making comments or laughing. A group of Indian tourists actually stopped to pose with us when we were walking through the Altstadt! Usually an Austrian walking through the streets in traditional garb doesnt get a second glance, its a part of everyday life, but for some reason, they could tell we didnt belong wearing them or something. I guess they couldve just heard us talking....

Anyways, we are leaving for a field trip to Estonia and Latvia tomorrow and I am excited to check out these Baltic states. Itll also be nice traveling on someone elses adjenda and not having to worry about issues AND we get to stay in hotels. The concept of a private bathroom while traveling is still kind of foreign to me... Anyways the internet is supposed to be great and I can easily take my computer so I think I will so expect more posts in the next few days.

This semester

2008-04-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

So we are currently hiding in our rooms from our Stocksprecher (Austrian form of an RA) because we have a floor meeting that none of us want to go to. Basically we sit there for an hour and sort of become his audience as he enjoys explaining to us for the 5th time how to properly seperate trash among other simple things that would take a normal person 5 minutes to say or type up in a sign to post on the door. We all told him we would be at our weekly Gemeinsamenes Essen, our dinner all night and we wouldn't be able to make it. It was a true excuse but we're all back and OH now he's knocking on our door now!

...

Phew, good, he went away.

He's nice but I feel like they think we're lazy or something because we're American and tend to be almost condescending and strict to us. Like the time they told us to take out the trash on the floor a few days after me and my roommate's trash week was over because there was still some trash in the bags when the week was over. It's a trash schedule, not a rental car. I secretly retaliated by correcting the grammar on a sign they made sure to include an english translation on a sign telling us to lock the kitchen when we leave "even on day."

So maybe I'm making mountains out of molehills but we really hate going to those meetings. Anyways while I am exhiled in my room, I thought it would be a great time to give my impression of the scolarly aspect of the semester thus far.

We are 4 weeks in and already halfway through this short semester as we finally finished our midterms at the begining of this week. So here are my classes:

German: Prof. Giacomuzzi
Pretty much the same as last semester, early in the mornings three times a week. He is just about as dead and bored as us in this seemingly everlasting 1.75 h class. This semester we are reading a book and while I enjoy the fact that I can read it without having to refer to a dictionary every two seconds, I do not enjoy the fact that the book is unbelievably odd. We also have to give a 45 min long presentation on a subject having to do with our major. I did mine on the evolution of sex which sounds a lot worse than it is (my intention). I was discussing the benefits of sexual organisms vs. asexual at the genetic level.

Psycoanalysis: Prof. Kennedy
Another repeat professor, but this time the course is much more interesting both by the subject matter and by the things our prof (a priest) tells us he believes (ie his great aunt being a witch???). But he is really a fun prof and is one of the classes I probably look forward to the most. While I find it hard believing everything he says to be exactly true, such as every dream being a disguised important message from our subconscious, its still an interesting subject. We have also discovered that he's cured cancer at least once by having the patient talk to him.

Philosophy: Prof. Loeffler
Professor Loeffler is a huge intimidating man with a "I just killed a puma!" look always on his face. But after talking to the man and learning about the impossible subject he teaches, I see it more as a "I just read some 18th century Austrian philosophers and actually kind-of maybe understood what they were talking about!" kind of look. Class is humorous since the subject is extremely difficult to comprehend he will often jump back and forth between english and german so that we understand the difficult aspects of the philosophy. He often does this many times in the middle of a sentence so class is usually taught in Deunglish. His english is excellent but we spend most of class between giving ourselves anurisms in trying to comprehend what he is talking about and stifling giggles on the hilarious english phrases he comes out with ("Why do cows make moo?"). As you can tell, I really do not enjoy the subject matter and find Austrian philosophy often very pointless and unnecessary and also very self inflated. This makes this class very difficult for me. I also am really missing taking natural science courses.

Habsburg History: Prof. Guertler
So the Guert decided to don some professor pants this semester and teach us about the history of the country in which we are residing. I am also having a few problems with this course since I was never very apt at history, find the history of this family often boring (mostly marriages and treaties), and I am so used to tuning out this man when he talks since he is famous for repeating himself about 50 times that I find it difficult paying attention in class, not to mention the fact that it starts at 6pm. Class though can be hilarious since Guertler gets even more excited when talking about his favorite subject (if that was possible) and he enjoys jumping around the room, giving us bug-eyed stares as he explains the intricacies of the royal family. He also likes bringing large maps in of Europe over which he'll run to and point out countries in a very good Vana White impression, "BOEMEN!!!" I did write one of the most difficult papers I can remember writing in this class as I had to write 6 pages in german about Franz Stephan who was only famous for being married to Maria Theresia (famous emperor queen). He is mentioned briefly only a few times in any history books about the family.

Economics: Haigner and Sendelhofer
Randomly our econ class is seperated into two parts taught by two teachers, Monday is Haigner and Friday is Sendelhofer and both are teaching entirely different aspects of the subject. Haigner assumes we are grad students of economics, even Katy, our econ major walks out of class confused sometimes. Luckily the class is taught in english but a dialect I am unfamiliar with since it is filled with economic terms I have never heard before. He also enjoys putting complicated equations on the board without explaining what the variables are as well as graphs with unlabeled axies (killing me as a scientist). Sendelhofer is much lighter. He explains more the history of European economics (namely the EU) and has clear slides that he follows pretty well so that when you stop paying attention to what he is saying since you are so amused by how much he sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can easily catch back up.

So those are my classes for the semester, nothing too too exciting but I am looking forward to taking some science classes again next year.

Not much has happened since my last post. I went skiing on Sunday (rather than study for econ) and it was really nice. I went to Stubai Glacier which is the only place still open around here (its a glacier so you can ski there year round) and everyone else in Tirol thought it was a good day to ski too so it was a bit crowded and though I was skiing on mushy moguls by the end of the day, I was still happy to be on the slopes again and I realized I am going to miss it a lot next year.

Only 44 days left and I am already missing Innsbruck.

Fön with Fünferschlag and ...COOKED OATMEAL???

2008-04-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

I am so happy that week was over. Here is what I have been up to the past three weeks:

Fön
Yes, he came again in full force and whenever this dry wind decides to rip through the city, every time I feel its affects worse and worse. It started with insomnia and headaches, but this last time it culminated to vivid day-dreams that would last minutes and by the time I finally snap out of them I find myself somewhere with no recollection as to how I got there.

Concerts:
My host family and I have been having trouble finding times to meet since our class this semester is rather wacky (class begins at 6pm on Tuesdays), so rather than dinner they have been inviting me to some strange events, most of them being concerts in some form. First, two Monday's ago, my host-brother's band Stichprobe, had a concert at the Weekender. While their experimental rock music wasn't to much to my liking, it was fun to finally see him play. I had never been to the Weekender before and really liked it, but it strangely reminded me of an Austrian Legends. Then last Saturday, as we were having a group Knödel dinner (traditional Tirolean bread dumplings the size of pool balls with cheese, bacon, or spinach) my host mom gave me a call to see if I wanted to see a band at Triebhaus (concert venue) with her because she couldn't convince anyone in her family or her friends to come. The band sounded interesting and it turned out being really fun. They were called Fatima Spar und die Freedom Fries and they played a really interesting mix of dixeland, swing, baltic folk, pop, among others. Plus the trumpet player of the group harmonized with himself by playing two trumpets at once, one of the most amazing trumpet feat's I've seen! Then the next day my host mom's cousin in law (???) who was in a chior had a concert of Haendel's "Messiah" which she invited me to. I said yes regardless of the two mid-terms and 6 page paper in german about one of history's most boring figures I had due that week. I did enjoy parts of the symphony but 2.5 hours is a long time for me to sit still.

Oatmeal
I have been eating a lot of it lately since its cheap and filling. About three times I have been asked by curious Austrians in the kitchen what I was doing when I was cooking it. I was really confused why they were asking since they sell large bags of it in the store, they must also eat it, but apparently they don't ever cook it... One time one girl was really interested and I told her what I was doing and then she announced to several other very interested Austrians in the kitchen, "So you add milk and water and oatmeal and you cook it, then add sugar, cinnamon, and fruit!" And everyone was very amazed at this fascinating looking grey mash I was consuming and I now feel very self conscious when I eat it.

Schuhplatterl
So a few of us signed up for this weekend-long dance course at the university sport institute. I was looking forward to it all month. It's called the Schuhplatterl and is the hysterically nerdy bouncy slap dance that they do in Bavaria and Tirol. There were about fifteen other students in the class and our tiny southern tirol teacher and his accordian-playing sister in law taught us about six different dances. The dance itself is suprisingly difficult, and after doing 8 hours of it that weekend, my thighs were extremely raw from all their slapping, and my hamstrings were worn out from all of the "hochsprungen" (high kung-fu-esque kick jumps) we had to do. The entire experience was really fun and we ended up making a lot of Austrian friends, but I often find myself jumping and slapping myself around the streets of the city to practice.

Search for Lederhosen
So I was greatly inspired after the above course and decided that it would be fun to own a pair of lederhosen, the only accepted wear when doing the Schuhplatterl. I was starkly against buying these when I first arrived here since they were unbelievably expensive - 300 euro for the cheapest pair - but I've grown a liking to them in the past 7 months. I went to one of the really nice places just to try on a pair and see how they felt and when I put them on, it felt like I was born to wear them and I became obsessed. I started checking Austrian Ebay as well as the the poor excuses for second hand shops they have in town and even visited a giant flea market and I came across almost nothing. I had every Austrian I knew (Host fam, Guertlers, teachers) helping me out with this search. Finally my host mom pointed out that a Trachtengeschaeft (traditional clothing store) in town was having a sale with lederhosen half off). A lot of boring things you dont care about happened and then I found myself paying only 99 euro for a brand new pair that fit me perfectly. It was over my budget (I told myself I wouldnt pay more than 60 euro) but they fit me, were exactly what I wanted, and weren't unreasonable. And now I have no remorse whatsoever, I'm obsessed, and even though the Austrians in the kitchen are snickering at me, I can't stop wearing them, I'm actually wearing them right now.

I think that's all the interesting things that have happened recently.

Spring Break (woo!) parts 2 &3: Die Verrückte Verwandten and French Fries, Waffles, Chocolate and Sprouts

2008-04-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

Wow, time is really flying by this semester. Finally I have time to sit down and update my life. I was unable to document the rest of spring break during the spring break because of the amsterdam hostel we had had one internet and I barely had enough time to check my email until the angry spaniards behind me in line for it started making impatient angry grunting noises that I was already taking too much time on the computer making for a very awkward and uncomfortable blogging session.

Well I was able to use my unbelievable skills in Microsoft Paint and create the complex map of my very busy two week travel schedule:

Note: Blue is Airplane, Red is Train, and Green is Driving in some sense

Where did I leave off last time? Oh yes. When we got off the airplane in Cologne, there were my two relatives (who, I just looked it up, are my 4th cousins, once removed) Mannfred and Mechtild waiting for me at the gate. Luckily I recognized them from my visit with them 3 years ago. Immediately they were extremely friendly as Mannfred, jolly as the head Kiebler elf, started chatting away as Mechtild, kind as ever but still with a typical German frankness, tried to calm him down. They are too young to be my grandparents but too old to be my parents. They drove me (and Aaron who was on the flight but taking a mighnight train to meet his parents in Munich the next day) to the city and started to show us around, and then they took me (and kindly invited Aaron too) to their son's house for dinner. There I had one of the best home-cooked meals I have ever had this year. It was Sauerbraten, or litterally sour-roast. Its a typical Rhineland meal where horse flesh (we ate pork) is marinated in vinegar for days then cooked in a sweet and sour sauce. So delicious. Aaron's and my embaressingly low alcohol tolerances were revealed that evening as they kept producing various sorts of alcohol to drink and us being polite guests refusing to refuse. The limits of my bladder were also tested that evening on the hour long ride to Aachen.

The next few days were really fun as they excitely took me around Aachen, Cologne, and the Sauerland (where the earliest records of my family come from in the 13th century). Some highlights include:

-Aachener Dom- My favorite cathedral in Europe, a collage of Romanic, Gothic, and Baroque and with some of the most vivid mosaics I have seen, plus the remains of another great Charles, Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne).

-Cologne Chocolate Museum- Interesting but a dissapointingly low amount of free samples

-Coincidental swastika patterns in a 2000 year old Roman Mosaic in the Roman-Germanic Museum

-Visiting the spot where Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands all come together

-Holy Saturday seeing the blessing of the Semmel, a special double fish-tail shaped bread in Attendorn, after which you go home and eat with butter and ham. As well as witnessing the post semmel blessing lumberjack contest. The young men of the town split into 4 teams and pick 4 large trees to cut down and have a mini competition on who can fell theirs first. The trees were used the next evening for their easter fires (shaped like burning crosses?).

-A delicious Easter Dinner in Cobbenrode, in the Gasthof where my great-great-grandfather, Josef, was born before emmigrating to America.

-Seeing the exact spot the where an ancestor had a farm in the 1300s, named by the locals "Home of the Birds"

-Learning just about everything to know about that finger of my heritage

-"Improving" my German by speaking it nonstop for 5 days straight

-Being able to relax and take it easy

Some lowlights include:

-Catching a cold from the constant rain/hail/thunder/lightning/sleet/snow/wind

-Constantly playing "the guest game," one of my least favorite social traditions where you are required to argue on who will pay for your dinner/museum ticket/cough drops

-"Improving" my German by speaking it nonstop for 5 days straight

On that last note, I just wanted to say that it was really interesting coming back here. I had visited these relatives about 3 years ago in high school and it was this trip which actually inspired me to take German in the first place at ND which was where I was inspired to come here to Innsbruck. It was really cool that I could effectively communicate with them this time around (their english is very slim). Also, you would think that my German would improve after speaking it nonstop. Well, no, it didn't. First of all, it was kind of hard to understand what they were saying at first since they speak a different dialect, and I am so used to trying to decipher Tirolerisch (English's equivalent would be a Scottish person with turrets). I will admit that my comprehension did improve by the end. Then having to concentrate so hard all day, at the end of the day, I was so exhausted I could barely communicate in any language. Finally I think my subconscious was so fed up with having to tolerate this foreign thought pattern that it started slipping in small semblences of English in my German such as adding an "s" when I wanted to plural a word or even just speaking in English when I meant it to come out German, it was so dstrange. The worst part was, when I met up my friends in Belgium after leaving my relatives, I couldn't even really speak english to them. I remember staring at the lady's face at a Brugges TI for 30 seconds when I couldn't remember how to ask for a map in English or German.

Unfortunately, in all too short of time, I had to say "Auf Wiedersehen!" to my relatives and hop on a train to Brussels to meet my friends.

Part III

I called Katy (with Monika and Kevin) on the way to Brussels and we decided to meet at the Mannekin Pis (18 inch tall peeing boy fountain, you know the kind of fountain that is naturally seen as a symbol for a european nation) at a certain time. I wanted to see two things in the city before meeting up and taking the train to Brugge: the building shaped like an atom (Atomium), and the worlds largest Art Deco Church, also the Basilica of Brussels. They didnt care for either so I had to see them before our meeting. Getting off the train, I discovered that in everywhere but America, they seem to celebrate the day after Easter as much as if not greater than the holiday itself. As such, no TIs were open, and I had no map. With no help from the 6 euro guide to Brussels from the one newsstand that was open, I managed to find both. Being a huge Art Deco fan, I found the basilica to be a real treat, like some sort of space-port ripped from a 1920s Sci-Fi comic book. The Atomium building, built for a 1970s world expo was also amazing. It looks like a giant atom model (shaped like an iron crystal). I was standing among the amazing chrome structure, taking in its scientific beauty when the ice that started raining from the sky reminded me that I had to meet my friends soon. A series of events fell into place including, my cell phone running out of money, a delay on the subway, meeting two nice Americans on the subway, and my friends not being there 15 minutes after our meeting time that resulted in me finding myself in some stranger's house. I later discovered that they decided to book it to Brugges without me and not to wait in the raining ice when I called them on Skype 5 minutes later in a really nice flat owned by the afore-mentioned Americans. I really dont know how I find myself in these situations.

So, long story short, we ended up meeting in Brugges (miracuously since I did not have any directions to the hostel [called 'Hostel Snuffel' btw]).

Brugges was fun, we ate a lot of chocolate, waffles, and french fries as well as some of my favorite beer in Europe, each in their own specific glass goblets. While there, we decided that Flemish was our favorite European language. It was also nice being in a city for once that was not almost completely destroyed in a recent war (Unlike Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Cologne, and Aachen).

The crappy weather unfortunately followed us from Belgium up to the Netherlands as we went to Amsterdam. We found the city overall to be extremely dangerous. There was so much to see but you could never look up at the distractingly quaint old buildings or disturbing prostitutes because you might wander into the street, fall in a canal, tread on the streetcar tracks or (God help you) tread on the bicycle path. After 48 hours in the city we had been Pavlovianly trained to get a surge of adrenelane when we heard the jolly (or in this case, life threatening) chime of a bicycle bell so that you could sprint to the safest bicycle-free location in the area. I also did the Amsterdam things like walk through the red light district in which I was informed that I looked ready for sex, as well as meeting up with two goons (Al and Mary) for a trip in a coffeehouse. Because of poor planning, (and a fast-pass sort of ticket distribution system) our stop after the coffeehouse was the Anne Frank house (sobering in more ways than one) which I was overall a little dissapointed with. It was so empty (no furniture left, just the rooms). It was a good presentation but I've never read her diary which I think would give the place a lot more meaning to me.

After a few days in Amsterdam, we headed over to the west side to Haarlem (namesake of the neighborhood in New York which was once called New Amsterdam), to relax in a B&B in the Dutch countryside. Besides running around the city pretending to be in a gang, we took a day trip to Keukenhof, which is supposedly the most photographed place in the world. It was what would happen if the Rose Parade had a bastard child with Disneyland after a messy one night stand. Its a giant garden, open two months of the year in spring when all the daffodills and tulips begin to bloom. Although we were there a little early and there wasnt as much color as there were in the postcards, there were tons of flowers out and it was really pleasant (even sunny for a few moments). We were able to go crazy in hedge mazes, tiptoe through tulips and play giant chess. When traveling I find that spending day after day in the major cities can get old, fast, so it is nice to mix it up with some nature. Note that Kevin refused to go and is forcing me to read "The Dictionary of Manliness" because I decided to pay to see some flowers. Oh and the Dutch know how to do it: chocolate sprinkles on buttered toast for breakfast. And I found out I slept in the same bed as Rick Steves.

Well we had a pretty painless flight back (direct to Innsbruck, so easy) and started classes again this Monday. After a week, I can tell this semester is going to be tough (I already have 3 projects due by Tuesday) but not impossible. I'll give a review of my classes soon.

Spring Break (woo!): Part 1 - Dalmation Vacation

2008-03-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

Wow, that was quick, I just had a whirlwind tour of some of the old Yugoslavic nations (thanfully without any landmines) and have already started to settle in here in northwestern Germany.

As I stated below, I am still in love with Slovenia and espeically its tiny capital Ljuibjana. If Disneyland decided to squeeze in their own repilca of Salzburg between the Matterhorn and It's a Small World, something resembling Ljuibjana would come out. Between the quaint castle on the hill and the way the tiny little river lazily wanders through the small canal between colorful markets and classical buildings there is a feel that just makes one want to stay there forever. Maybe next time since we had to hopon a train to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia after being there for only 24 hours.

When we arrived in Zagreb, we followed the suprisingly complicated directions to the hostel that used three different modes of transportation as well as took one hour to get there from the train station. HostelWorld definately said that it had a good location. HostelWorld lied. It was definately in the 'burbs, a good 45 minute walk from the center. When we finally arrived, we found ourselves in front of an appartment complex over which the door someone had written "Hostel Carpe Diem" in spray paint on a board. It was about the feel and size of if someone had taken their TC appartment (or choose random college appartment complex) and had put 4 bunk beds over their room. We were kind of baffled why it got such good reviews on the internet, maybe because others had the same/similar experiences as to what happened next. After getting settled, we ask the guy at the desk a good place to eat, but in the process he invites us to a birthday party they are having in the basement. At the sound of free food, we go downstairs, and discover a group of older twentysomething Croatians sitting around a table, creaking with the weight of numerous unmarked bottles filled with alcohols a variety of different colors. It was not the birthday of a felow hosteler but of a friend of the owners and they were using the hostel common room as their prepatory room slash hashish hot box before going out. Though we could barely understand what they were saying in their thick accents, they started shoving all these different drinks in our hands. I got halfway through a glass of something sickeningly sweet when someone said it was a special liquor made from mistletoe berries "You know, like what you kiss under at Christmas!" ... I asked him if he was sure since the boy scout running around in my head reminded me that mistletoe ironically is a very toxic plant. He said yes and in the end it seemed okay since I did wake up the next morning with full feeling in all of my limbs. After a few drinks on an empty stomach we finally get up and ask the guy to point us to how to walk to the center of town. He pulls out one of those maps hostels always have to give out they get from the TIs and circles where we were on the map. It was somewhere in the margin between the title and the edge of the page. I felt like I was in the middle of a Kevin Nealon bit. We then stumbled out of the hostel and by this time the the grappa had almost completed its task in dissolving all rational thought. We manage to wander to somewhere that was on the map and make it into town, but the whole time I was freaking out that I would have to make myself drunk to find my way back again (this came from one time when I helped my roommate study for his psycology final freshman year). Since the interesting part of this story has long gone, I'll just say that we found the center of town, ate, sobered up, attempted to have a St. Patty's day* Guinness at a bar named and inspired after "Tolken" and found it closed and so settled on a place called 'Oliver Twist' (England was closer to Ireland than we were and at the moment it was as close to an irish pub we could find), and we managed to find our way back (sober!) just as the birthday party left to go out.
*Note it was the first St. Patty's day of the year since Pope Benedict kindly granted us two this year

Impressions of Zagreb: a suprisingly nice, clean capital of what was once a war torn country only 15 years ago. The nightlife there is incredible since theres such a large student population. Like any city it was nice to walk around for a few hours and get the feel for it but there is really not much to do there otherwise. An example is that Ivan Mestrovic's house was a highlight of the visit. He is the famous Croatian sculptor who sculpted all the statues (of actual people) around ND campus, including the much disputed over First down or We're #1 Moses and the well-loved Pieta in the Basilica. The ND tour guide in me got really excited about that museum.

Next we hopped on a flight over to the Pearl of the Adriatic, Dubrovnik. The city was breathtakingly beautiful and really is like a foritfied fairy tale village floating on the electric blue waters of the Dalmation Coast. Like with any other medieval village, it is really fun to wander the streets and imagine the city 700 years ago without all of the kitch tourist shops or scaffolding. But this gets old after about a half a day. Though the sun did shine in the two days we were there, it was not quite warm enough to go swimming or really lay out in the sun, but we did spend most of the time sitting in cafes sipping pivo (beer) and taking lazy sun-naps on the rocks between the large sun-bleached city walls and the Adriadic. It seems like the perfect place to be as a destination for a week where you could just unwind and relax and which was not too condusive to our style of travel at the moment (4 cities in 5 days). Oh and the weather did not keep me from swimming in the Adriadic. No warnings that I'll get sick from the cold from the mother of the family running our hostel would stop me, and I did take a chilly dip in the calm waters just before the sun set on our second and final evening there.

We then took a bus to Split, 4 hours up the Dalmation coast (I dont know if the dogs have anything to do with the area but I think Roger meant something different than a giant place in England to house 101 dalmations when he suggested moving to a "dalmation plantation." To me a house on the Cratian coast sounds much more pleasant.) The bus ride was our only option (no trains) but was really neat. We stayed on the winding coast the entire time which lead to 4 hours of amazing views and nasuea.

Split was really neat since its basically an old roman palace complex that people just kind of moved into and made into a small village 500 years after the guy who built it died. Because the original building is so incorporated with the later medieval village, it is now one of the best preserved roman ruins. Since it was raining and the nightlife lacking, we decided to see 10,00 B.C. (only thing playing) in english with Croatian subtitles. All I have to say about it was that I got $4 of entertainment out of it but at the same time I was cringing from all of the canned dialouge, anachronisms, and geographical errors the film had. In the end, the movie gets two thumbs down but two thumbs way way up for Croatian theater.

After a few hours in Split, I flew off to Cologne or Köln, to meet my German relatives. I had met them 3 years ago and in a sense since that trip inspired me to take German, they are the reason why I am here today. But this is the end of the first part of my Spring Break adventures. Tune in next time for part two - Die verrückte Verwandten

Fanging the March an and arrival in Ljubljana

2008-03-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

So I still find it a little sad that I am currently sitting in the Slovenian capital and I am in a city whose name I am still unable to pronounce. Ljubljana (Note: NOT pronnounced "Lu-did-your-mama-") has been just charming, but more on that later.

What has happened since I was stuck in Munich trying after a two week excursion to desperately seek a nights sleep in my own bed. Well after spending a rather expensive time at the internet cafe, I jumped on my train (earliest to IBK) in a fairly empty compartment 10 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. Immediately the train is filled with rather, colorful characters, and a very large woman in fishnet tights, a jean shirt, colorful sweater, and pleather leopard skin jacket squeezes in on my right as a skinny man with hair the same shade of red as his blindingly bright crimson leather pants slithers in on my left. Well we sat there watching the sign outside the window showing how late the train was going to leave "5 Minuten verspaetet...15 Minuten verspaetet..." Note that during this time, the woman got up and went to the bathroom and after about 15 minutes a very large, old, sweaty man, wearing the same clothing as this woman came back with a wig and make-up in a bag, sat in her place and took her luggage as his own. After about 70 verspaeteted minutes, the train finally jerks forward and we were on our long and slow way back to Tirol.

I got back on saturday, the 1st of march, and even though we did not have class until the 10th, I was very busy.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, we went to a Hauptschule, the austrian equivalent of a middle school, and helped out for half the day in their english classes. This was an amazingly good time. I was assigned about 6 13 year old boys and we spent the three days, making paper airplanes, making them "American" cuisine, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (which recieved a suprisingly high reception), teaching them nation ball, among other activities. I'm not really sure how much english they learned since the teachers didnt really tell us how advanced they were and never really gave us a lesson plan, but it was really interesting for once being on the other side of the classroom. Learning a language, you realize how much you take for granted your own language is, and how millions of people all over the world are struggling on how to conjugate the past tense passive plural 1st person version of the verb "to be" while I can immediately conjure up "I was being" in seconds. On the other hand, I suppose I did devote the first 4 years of my life to the subject. On one rather humorours note, another group in our classroom found my name rather humorous after I wrote it on the chalkboard so that my group could remember it. Mary, who was the group leader of these hooligans, would tell me every day of the shenanigans they would get into over my name. Like when they needed to come up with a group name, they begged her to be my name, and whenever I left the room, they would jump up to the chalkboard and start writing it all over. At one point I cornered one of the little buggers, and asked him what he found so humorous. He said in a very good young Terminator accent: "It ees like a leetle parrwot dat lives in a haowse und ees wery silly!" Well I have always known that the word "Vogel" is always associated with craziness in German, an insult is calling someone a Vogelkompf (bird-head), and saying someone's screw is loose is "He has a bird." But I guess I'm now proud of the fact that my name has become a legend in this Austrian middle school.

The days after that until classes started on Monday, I traded off skiing and sleeping. I also tried cross country skiing with my host mom and found it rather fun.

Monday, March 10th, our classes for the spring semester started. This sesmester I am taking: German, Physcoanalysis, Economics of the EU, History of the Hapsburg Empire, and Philosophy of Austrian Philosophers. I have only had a week of the courses and will give my impressions of each after I get a better feel for them.

So after a rather short week of classes, Austria got tired of school and work and decided to give us two weeks off for easter break. Hours after our Economics course ended, Aaron, Kevin, and I jumped on a train to Slovenia to begin an unfortunately short trip of the Adriadic coast. We will be traveling down Croatian coast over the next five days. On Wednesday, I found a flight up to Northern Germany to meet the original German silly house-parrots and I will be traveling around Aachen, Cologne, and Cobenrode where the family name was founded. After easter with the family, I will then jump on a train to Belgium to meet some friends as we hit Brugges, Amsterdam and whatever we find inbetween.

Ljubljana seems so surreal to me. I feel like I am in Disneyland or something. Everything is so clean, quaint, and laid-back. Hovering above the city is an interestingly lit bright blue castle guarding the small city, as asthetic art neuvo buildings dance with one another down the quaint pedestrian streets. The city breathes with groups of young students strolling the streets and a small river silently runs underneith it all. I have been here only for a few hours, enough time to wander around the small center of town, get a buzz of Slovenian beer, and step on a disturbinly squishy toad (it lived) and I have already fallen in love with Slovenia. In retrospect, I wish I had a car and a week to explore this tiny country. Unfortunately tomorrow, we must take the train over to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, after a long day of Ljubljanaian sightseeing.

Most Relaxing Day Ever

2008-03-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

I am currently in Munich awaiting a train that'll take me back to Innsbruck. It's been exactly two weeks since I left on a Sunday night and I am really looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight.

My final day in Marrakesh was amazing. I slept in a little, and had a nice breakfast on the beautiful rooftop terrace feeling like Indiana Jones looking over a 1940s Cairo. Then I wandered the souqs for a few hours, snacking on orange juice and the cheap dates and nuts all around. During this time, I stumbled across a very small local looking barbershop. Since our hostel had a lack of hot water making it almost impossible to shave, I was already looking pretty grizzly so I wandered in and asked (or pantamimed) for a shave. The man was a professional; it was my first straight razor shave and by far the closest shave I've ever had. Afterward, I momentarily mistook it for a baby's bottom. Soon it was time for my hammam.

In a culture where running water is not common in households, the Moroccians rely on large bathhouses or Hammams to get a weekly cleaning. I would have preferred to go to one of the ones the locals use to really get a sense of it but I didn't want to go alone and no one in the hostel was willing to go so I chose to go to one of the little more 'expensive' places that cater to foreigners a little more and lead them through the whole process. I soon learned that a traditional hammam involves a very steamy room where one sits, and applies this oily buttery substance to soften up their skin. Then you find a friend (or in my case, the lady working the place) to get some abrasive black soap and a glove that seemed and felt like it was covered in steel wool. You can imagine what came next and through the winces, I could see small pieces of my skin falling to the ground. After a quick rinse or bucketfull of hot water in the face, it was all over and I was left in an invigorating feeling of tingly cleanness. I decided to slurge a few Dirhams and paid for a short relaxing half hour massage afterwards. It being my first full body massage, it was relaxing once I got over the awkwardness. When I left the place, I was in such a hypnotic state, I could barely muster up the energy to get my oily self back to the hostel.

At the hostel, I enjoyed a wonderfully filling 5 course lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping mint tea while lounging in the sun on the terrace like a pampered poodle.

I took an evening flight back to Madrid, spent a sleepless night worrying that I would miss my early train the next morning. Ironically I think the only time I did get sleep, was in the 15 minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off. Needless to say, I made it to the train station in time for my short high speed train to Barcelona.

I really liked the city of Barcelona and would love to go back there at some point. Unfortunately after traveling almost straight for a month, I was ready to be back in my own bed. Also, unlike Lisbon, I was unable to meet any people at the hostel with whom to travel the city so I was alone most of the time. I take that back, I did meet people but it was only last night, the night before I left. It was nice since I had so much freedom and could do so much, but I missed having someone to talk to or to hand the camera to when I see a rediculous photo opportunity (as opposed to the pair of giggling Japanese tourist girls). I did have a lot of fun just randomly sitting places and people watching. I thought the city was beautiful and I think Gaudi is a genius.

The hostel (called Mambo Tango) I stayed at was also really cool but I have been so spoiled by the Traveler's house in Lisbon, that nothing can compete. They also had activities every evening and one of them was watching 'Motorcycle Diaries' which the hostel had said embodies their philosophy. I thought it was really good and felt stupid when I didn't realize it was a semi biographical film about Che Guevara until the very end. The name of the hostel 'Mambo Tango' actually is a refrence to the film and that lead me to wonder if the hostel was run by a bunch of commies. Well at least they had toilet paper.

I'm a nerd: Part II

2008-02-28T16:18:00.000-08:00

With my unsurmountable expertiese in Microsoft Paint, I created this as an account of my journies in the past two weeks:

Portugese Mornings, Spanish Afternoons, and Moroccian Nights

2008-02-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

Wow, certaintly a lot has happened since my last post. I'll try to provide a brief digest of what has happened in the past week.

Traveling to Lisbon was not too bad. Skipping the boring details, I was stuck in Munich at 10 pm until my flight that next morning at 6 to Lisbon. It was a Sunday night and so all of Munich's famous beer halls had closed early, so I uncerimoniously popped back a can of beer I had bought at a convience store at the metro station as I waited for the train to the airport. Sleeping in Munich's airport was about as uneventful as sleeping in an airport could be, I woke up at 4 am totally disoriented, and the whole flight to Lisbon is now kind of a haze.

When I arrived to Lisbon, I had only one night at the hostel booked, planning on spending one, maybe two days in Lisbon and head down south to the coast and explore southern Portugal/Spain until I had to meet Aaron, Hayley and Mariel in Madrid in three days. When I arrived, I was so exhausted from the flight and from Egypt I just decided to stay there and relax, rather than just check cities off a checklist. Best decision of my life. Lisbon may be one of my favorite eurpean cities I've visited this year. Part of it may have just been the amazing hostel I stayed at. Its called 'Traveler's House" and it is worth going to Lisbon just to stay there. They made us the best free scrambled egg breakfasts, had knit sheets, an amazing lounge with bean bag chairs (makes all the difference), a comfy TV room, and nightly activites including a pub crawl that lasted until 6 am. The city itself is amazing. Between some of the most beautiful, unique archetecture I've seen in Europe and pastry shops selling the best custard pastries EVER (fresh out of the oven with cinnamon and sugar) are old women hanging out the window yelling conversations to each other between hanging laundry amongst a labyrinth of ancient structures. The other amazing thing about the hostel was that it was perfect for me as a single traveler. Since the place only had about 40 beds and the common space was so condusive to chilling and conversation, everyone knew each other. Also rather than the wasted girls from some state school studying in Florence for the semester, my hostelmates were an interesting mix of Europeans on holiday in Lisbon for a week. I guess Lisbon is not exactly the list of the average student in Europe who has a week break off to travel. I ended up making many good friends ranging from Brits, Canadians, Austrailians, Germans, and Austrians. I spoke more German in Lisbon than some days in Innsbruck. On my last day, when I left, a group of my new friends actually walked me to the metro station. It was really sweet and sad that my time in Lisbon was over.

I took the overnight train from Lisbon to Madrid and decided to splurge on a couchette since we had such a sarcastically awesome experience in Egypt. It allowed me to randomly meet an Austrailian on month six of his year long around the world trip, something I can only dream of doing.

Madrid was lots of fun, like Lisbon I took it easy, a new travel philosopy which after trying it out in Lisbon I am really starting to enjoy. I love traveling alone since it allows one to meet new people so easily, it was nice traveling with friends again. Since the city is so much of a metropolis, we found ourselves spending most of our time in the large Retiro park, picnicing, boating, and wandering around. I overall found the city to be kind of forgettable; I enjoyed it but it seemed to me to be like any other large capital but without any specific character. After hearing of the 15 euro cover charges and 8 euro beers, we decided to opt out of trying the city's infamous clubs. But we did see an awesome Spanish cover band in the bar under our hostel.

After 2 relaxing days in Madrid, I boarded the plane for my second trip to Africa in the past week. Expecting the relentless touting and untrustworthy people I came across in Egypt, I was pleasantly suprised. When we first got here, it was a little stressful since our hostel is in the maze of the old city and small children kept trying to show us the way but we didn't have any money and didn't want to pay them so we spent most of our time swatting them away like annoying flies (who would then scream "Fuck you, sex!" at us and run away). Other than those first frantic minutes in the city, I've found the people here are always smiling, even when you decide not to go into their shop, they will smile and wish you a good day or joke with you. I still have the feeling like I am a walking wallet a little bit, but I am much more comfortable and I feel less like I am sticking out like a clown at a funeral. My favorite thing here that Egypt, in my opinion, was lacking is the food. It is unbelievable, I could just sit here and eat all day. Marrakesh is centered around a large square called "La Place" french for "the square" and there is always activity there. Marrakesh is proud of the fact that it is the largest African square. During the day its filled with snake charmers, acrobats, belly dancers, men with monkeys that will throw them on you if you get too close, musicians, and other street performers. On the outskirts are men selling nuts and dried fruit (I'm obsessed with dates now) as well as other carts selling glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice for the equivalent of 40 cents in large carts that will frantically try to get you to go buy their juice if you go within a 30 foot radius of their cart and since there are often 5 carts next to each other, it results in a quite amusing display of gestures and cat calls that we would either split up to multiple or pick our favorite performance and patron him. At, around dusk, the entire square turns into the most amazing food court ever. Entire open air restraunts are wheeled in and seem to pop up with the delicious smelling smoke that starts to rise around dusk. Between the smaller stalls selling Moroccan delacacies such as snail soup and boiled sheep head, giant displays of raw skewered chicken, beef and other meats lie atop a colorful selection of greens. Walking through the place is wonderful amusement as the waiters try everything to get you to eat there from highly amusing American and British catch phrases to tempting offers such as free mint tea (berber whiskey). Once we pick a place no sooner do we order is our food served, freshly cooked and all enfused with the wonderful rich yellow color of saffron. We feast and wobble away as our stomachs are uncomfortably full on only 5 euros. After dinner, I enjoyed walking around the square stopping at various storytellers or musicians, understanding nothing but just as amused as the locals at the crazy antics the man is performing. I also enjoy a post dinner spiced tea, so spicy with cinnamon and cloves that it hurt to swallow.

Our days here have been a mixture of wandering around lavish palaces of Marrakesh's glory days of being the capital of Morocco and their beautiful gardens, as well as walking and barganing at the many souqs here. Just steps from our very comfortable palace-turned-hostel are the many wonderful souqs, arabic for markets. They have everything here from tea to hookas to chickens to giant barrels full of colorful spices. Wandering around I was really wishing I had a lot of money, a need for half the things in the market, and room in my backpack to bring it back to IBK since I am seriously addicted to barganing. My favorite was when the guys would bargain with themselves. A great example that happened to me was that I just wanted to know the starting price for a pair of sweet linen pants an man had in his shop, here's how it went:

I was just looking at them, not even interested in buying them and the man swoops over and starts telling me about the amazing things about these pants. Not remotely interested in buying them, I ask him how much he wants for them
-300 dirham!
-okay, thanks, I'm not interested...
-Wait wait wait, 280 dirham! Special student price!
-Um, I dont even want them
-Gimme a starting price for you!
-I said I dont want them
-Just tell me how much you want for them
-Um, okay I probably wouldn't pay more than 80 for them, but I dont want them
-No no no! way too much, you need to be serious!
-Okay, bye!
-okay okay okay! 250!
-I said I dont want them!
-230!
-Look crazy man, stop bothering me with the stupid pants!

The conversation pretty much went on until finally he's bargained himself down to 100 dirham already has them wrapped up and handing them to me.

-I said I don't want them!
-Okay, 100 final price!
-No (and I walk away, after which he chases me down)
-Fine, 80!

And before I know it I have given him the money and am walking away with these pants I didnt really want in the first place. Half of me is like "shazam! I just unintentionally bargained these pants for a great price!" while the other half is kicking myself for even paying for the dumb things.

I could spend a month wandering the souqs and markets watching the people or coming across random ones such as the olive souq, where there are 10 different stands selling amazing looking olives after which I accidentally discovered that I could get about a pound of olives for the equivalent of 30 cents (wanting a small snack, I gave the man the change in my pocket and said this much worth of olives, expecting 10 or 20, he gave me a giant bag full of them). Or getting lost in the old, labyrintine, residential part of town during which the children kept following us trying to show us the right direction back. But since we didnt want to go back, we just kept ignoring them. Every dead end we hit, we would turn around and there would be one or two more in their gang, until about 10 were trying to lead us the way. Then one pushed the other one into Betsy, and it distracted them long enough for us to run away.

I am sad that I have to leave this wonderful country tomorrow, but I am excited since I have heard so many wonderful things about Barcelona, my final stop before Innsbruck. Since I have a late plane tomorrow, I think I am going to try out one of the traditional Hammams, a Moroccian bath. It involves a lot of abrasive soap and painful scrubbing but I have heard it leaves one feeling unbelievably clean and relaxed. Like an expensive spa treatment but at one tenth the price.

Time to pack it in for my final Arabian Night.

And he's off! ...again

2008-02-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

I apologize for that post, it was kind of an unfair outlook on an interesting country. We somehow managed to get back to Cairo again even with the shady dealings of the travel agency we were dealing with. I really think its a front for some kind of mafia. Our train tickets back were actually crumbled pieces of blue paper with scribbles all over it (I dont understand how people can communicate through writing in that language) that we never actually ever had in our possession. Two other egyptians on the same 'ticket' carried it the entire time and actually moved to a different compartment than us but I think the police didnt give us any trouble since we were caucasian or something. The rest of the trip was amazing and I really enjoyed myself and am glad I went. I have some thoughts on the country in general that I would like to write down so maybe you'll see them in the future.

We got in at 5 am in Munich yesterday and I've had about 30 hours to recoup until now I leave for a huge 2 week trip to Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. I have an early flight from Munich tomorrow so I need to take the train in a few minutes and am going to spend an interesting night at the airport. www.sleepinginairports.net says its a pretty decent airport to sleep in, so that should be good.

I'm excited for this trip because much of it is going to be alone. I'll keep you updated as I go and as I find internet. I get back to IBK on March first.

Adios!

Egyptian Mistakes

2008-02-14T11:01:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here in a tiny interntet cafe in the middle of Luxor, southern Egypt. Outside there is an endless chorus of car horns due to a mixture of the Egyptian's already high propensity to honking horns and a local wedding that is occuring this evening. What can I say about my experience here in the past 3 days that would not bore you in its length?

We arrived to our hostel in Cairo at 2am after a long day of traveling. Outside, there was a military officer with an AK47 hiding behind a bulletproof panel. The entry way to the building was a tiny alley, covered in dirt with old plastic bags and other assorted trash in small piles against the wall. We stepped up into the lobby of this almost derelect building and entered an elevator that has been miraculously working since the 1800s; a cage on a string. As we ascended the building we could see the years of age as the concrete was severely cracked and there was plaster chipped out of the walls and trash strewn about. "what have we gotten ourselves into for the next four days?" I asked myself. However when we arrived onto our floor, turned the corner, we entered into an oasis within this building of comfortable furniture, friendly lighting, and comfortable beds.

I really wanted to head down to Luxor at some point during our trip (an 8 hour train ride from Cairo). This is where the Valley of the kings is and some of Egypt's really cool temples lie. By the time I had everyone convinced, we found it nearly impossible to get any of the night trains from Cairo while we were there both because Egypt's train system is unbelievably difficult and we were told that they were all sold out. It looked like we were going to have to spend all 4 days in Cairo. When we arrived at our hostel at 2am, the man there said he could get us tickets down to Luxor no problem because he has "connections." Also for a relatively good price (considering the fact that we didnt speak a word of Arabic and it would lead to less stress to us) he said he could also hook us up with a driver and an english speaking guide for a day in Cairo (to show us the pyramids) and in Luxor. I was wary of this since one thing I had read in my tour book was "Do NOT book travel arrangements through your hotel, we cannot emphasize this enough." If only we had listened... In our exhaustion and naivette, we signed on for everything.

After an amazing night's sleep, we got up to meet our driver and tour guide. It started out being really awesome. They were able to drive us around and see the smaller pyramids (step, hanging, and red) pyramids at which some of the 'nicer' kids in our group, okay mostly Christian, got swindeled into riding donkeys and camels at unbelievably steep prices. These guys are professionals at even forcing tourists to take a picture of them after which you're obligated to give them something (and they will yell at you if its not enough). I started getting a little wary when they took us to a carpet school to see how egyptian carpets are made. It was actually kind of interesting but I felt it was wasting good pyramid seeing time. I also was waiting for them to take us to the back room so we could unload our wallets on them for some carpets. They did and they were very good salesmen. I refused to purchase anything, but it was really annoying because as I waited for the rest of the kids in our group to finalize their purchases, other salesmen kept coming up to me trying to get me to buy something. It was like being in the market but in a closed room so I couldn't walk away or be rude. One guy was trying to show me that their carpets are fireproof as he lit his lighter on it, then quickly smudged his finger over with his finger as the pungent smell of burning wool wafted into the air. Then they distracted us by taking a group picture as out of the corner of my eye, I could see our tour guide collecting her commission.

When we went to the Pyramids at Giza, she took us to a stable so we could see them on a camel ride. It was definately something on my list but due to our horrible group haggling skills (Christian's niceness) and the fact that the Pyramids themselves were closing and camels at this point were our only option, we ended up paying what I later red at least 3x as much as we should've. Albeit a tad uncomfortable when they ran, and once I got over the sinking sensation that I had just been swindled out of my mind, the ride was really fun and awesome as we got to see the Pyramids at sunset and actually go up to and touch some of them.

That night, a man from our hostel escorted us to the train station and gave us our 'tickets.' They were small pieces of cardboard with arabic writing on one side and "Cairo-Luxor" printed on the other; there was nothing official about them. Well they ended up passing and we got on the train for a very long night. We had no beds, just the ancient train chairs and the jerky rocking to lull us into a wakeful sleep. Arriving in Luxor, we were bombarded with hotel touts and taxi drivers, that were begging us to come along with them. We managed to find our contact in the chaos but it was difficult (as he was one of the sleeziest men I have ever come across). Without telling us what we were doing, he popped us into a van and we went to meet our tour guide. They took us to valley of the kings and a combination of all the tourists also there and him rushing us through a few tombs (amazing - wouldve liked to spend more time there) I felt like I was on a tourist conver belt: get off the bus enter the ever moving que of tourists through the sight, get back on and repeat. He said we had a lot to do so we raced out of the valley (with some new random tourists, half arabic speaking, we seemed to pick up in the valley). And he takes us to an alabaster factory. We were all sick of the whole thing and it felt like a waste of time and as soon as they were done with their lame demonstration, the 6 of us waited outside for the other randos to finalize their purchases. We were tired, we weren't doing what we wanted to do at our pace, and nobody was telling us anything as to what we were doing next. I felt like I was seeing Egypt through a window. At this point we decided to ditch the losers and asked him to just drop us off at our hotel before he could take us to a horrible and expensive restraunt with bus boys wearing king tut headdresses.

Once we broke free, it was as if an immense weight had lifted off, we could relax and do what we wanted, it was amazing. The rest of the day we walked around the city, enjoying saying 'no' to the street hawkers (Me: "Oh crap, this buggy driver is following us" Hayley: "Good! Waste his time!"), watched the sunset on the nile, and enjoyed the mystical Luxor temple in its nighttime dramatic lighting.

Aaron, Mariel, and Hayley left that night (more shady dealings with train tickets and meeting the proper people) because they wanted to spend more time in Cairo, but Christian, Anthony and I stayed behind for one more relaxing day here. After an amazing nights sleep, we lazily got up and spent most of the day at Karmak temple, one of the largest temple ruins in Egypt and we walked around the city, enjoying ourselves. I was really enjoying Egypt all day today; we had thought that having someone else worry about transportation and touring, it would give us less stress but it was quite the opposite, no one was hurring us along so that they get us to a Papyrus factory and collect our commission.

We jump on the long trainride back to Cairo tonight, spend all day there, probably visiting the Egyptian Museum and walking around downtown, then take a late night out of Cairo back to Munich. Its going to be a long, long next two days.

I apologize for this post if I seemed a little negative, but I just needed to vent my frustrations, even though they were all our own fault. I am having an amazing time here, and it will be sad to leave tomorrow evening.

Oh and Happy Valentines day everyone!

Egypt

2008-02-11T17:45:00.000-08:00

I have safely arrived in Africa! Its about 3 am and we are getting up early tomorrow to tour the great Pyramids in Giza. It is such a cool feeling to be here. Maybe its the massive amounts of smog, but there was definately a different feeling in the air I could sense the moment I got off the plane. We've been here for 2 hours and already we've been attacked by hotel peddlers, gotten stuck in the sketchiest elevator in existence, gotten locked in the hostel bathroom (during which an amusing conversation taken out of context about how to use the key to get out of the bathroom took place), and nearly died on the white knuckle race on the drive from the airport to our hostel.

It's been already an amazing introduction to this interesting country.

France in my Pants

2008-02-09T13:58:00.000-08:00

So I am a huge nerd and created this handy little map with my excellent skills in Microsoft Paint:

As you can see by the handy route key, after sadly saying goodbye to all of my friends in London (I miss them much already and they had better come visit me here at some point...), I took the Chunnel to meet Christian (from the IBK program too) in Paris. The whole chunnel experience was interesting but stressful since I almost missed the train due to a series of events including confused clerks at British Grocery stores and half of London's Underground Lines deciding not to work Monday morning. The whole process was like getting on an airplane, but in a train station, including seperate terminals and people checking tickets before you get on, I was overall disoriented by the whole process. The ride itself was quick and easy and I didnt realize we had even gone under the channel until I looked outside and everything was in French.

In Paris, I met Christian at our budget hotel in Montmartre, the old hangout of the Bohemians in the last turn of the century, known for the Moulin Rouge and sketch artists that will hunt you down and attack you with their rediculous requests to draw you:

"profile?"

"no"

"Portrait?"

"no, go away"

"Characature?"

"No. Please stop bothering me"

"Sketch?"

"Look! Someone else in desperate need of a rediculous Paris souvineer!"

After walking the 10 miles between every major landmark in the city: Notre Dame, Louvre, Arch de Triumph, we ended at the Eiffel Tower, to witness it's hourly ten minute "sparkle," a pretty spectacualr remnant of that giant Y2K thing everyone made a big deal about 8 years ago.

Christian and I decided that the McDonald's corporation deliberately funded these in order to subliminally encourage Parisians and tourists to frequent their locations at every hour since we both randomly had a craving for some McFastfood for the first time in a long time. Since we weren't in Rome, we didn't feel obligated to do as the Parisians did and succumbed to what in retrospect is one of the cheapest meals one could get in the city of lights. We then retreated back to the hotel to share a rediculously tiny "two person" bed.

The next morning, we conqured Versailles, as the French Revolutionists did 200 years ago and we got a fairly good impression of the wonderful Train-station-turned-art-museum, Orsay. In the evening we met up with my friend, Alicia, for dinner. She is an ND student I know from band who is studying for the year in Paris. She unfortunately had finals that week but she made it out to see us.

On Wednesday, we hit a lot including the correctly pronnounced ND cathedrial:

As well as the inside-out Pompidou modern art museum that I thought was an interesting break from all of the Madonnas I've seen in the past few months but I questioned the validity of all the work once I came across 3 blank canvasses. The thing next to it said was "an experiment in colors." The only experimentation the artist needed was to decide whether to use "snow white" or "cotton" paint color. We conquered Napolean's tomb which in my opinion was a little gawdy for the guy who used the Sphynx for target practice. Then Eiffel's Tower (up it this time), for a sunset view of the city, then finally off to the Louvre for their nighttime hours (open till 10 on wednesdays). It was really relaxing being there at night because since it was the end of the day, I didnt have that museum stress I always have that I need to be somewhere else, or at least outside where its warm and sunny. But we were exhausted from the long day and attempted to see most of the Louvre in 3 hours which resulted in "Louvre Sickness": the internal battle between body and mind, when one wants to run around and see as many masterpieces possible but has not the stamina to do so. It results in a semi-epileptic state as one sits on the increasinlgy comfy couches in the museum staring into nothingness.

At the end of the day, we had done so much I went a little "In-Seine"

I'm really sorry about that one...

Thursday, Christian and I split ways as he went north up to Bruges, and I started the land treck back home to Innsbruck. My goal for the evening was Strasbourg, a cute canal city on the French/German border. On the way I stopped in Nancy for a few hours for the sole reason that I heard they had a good Art Neuvo Museum there. The museum ended up being like 4 rooms in an old house full of cool looking furniture but it kind of wasn't worth the trouble and I was the only person in the museum and there was a highly unnecessary number of museum docents that would awkwarly stare at me the entire time. The redeeming quality of Nancy though was that there was a free zoo in the park with goats, rabbits, ducks, and, what? monkeys? Plus the place was overrun by a large number of peacocks that were no doubt scheming on taking over the world, starting with the rabbit/ginuea pig pen:

Strasbourg was a really cool town; half-timbered houses lining canals, with a skeletony gothic cathedral domineering the entire city. Its also a university town which gave it a refreshing lively feel. It was a great town to just wander around in; I rented a bike for half a day and enjoyed just riding around. Strasbourg was also interesting for me because it was the first time I had ever traveled alone. It was kind of daunting but at the same time allowed for more people to approach you and meet you. For example the random spanish lady I met in the cathedral who didnt speak a word of english or german and somehow managed to communicate with me. She apparently lived in the area and offered to buy me a cup of tea. A little skeptical, I accepted her request but it was strange since we really had limited means of communication. I think she thought I was married because of a ring on my hand. I also think she invited me to her house at one point, but I awkwarly told her I had to meet some friends soon or something. I wonder what wouldve happened if I had taken her up on her offer, she was nice but from her mismatched and dirty clothes she seemed a little strange to me.

On the way back to Innsbruck from Strasbourg, I had a layover in Stuttgart for a few hours. It was really a nice city in my opinion: perfect mix of old and new. There were some old classical buildings sprinkled among modern ones so that it didnt have the stuffy museumness of some older cities but it still had a little charm. Plus everyone was walking around and the city was abound with street performers, young kids, old couples, and lovers, all walking down the same main street.

Now I'm back in Innsbruck for a few days before heading off to Egypt on Monday.

A Banger in the Mouth

2008-02-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

I'm really sad to leave London tomorrow, its been amazing to catch up with everyone and just hang out like last year, but in one of the world's largest cities.

On Friday, after running into the wonderfully free National Gallery to visit a Caravaggio painting I did a report on in Art History this semester, K. Swiss and I wandered east to the Tower of London. We spent the rest of the day just kind of walking around markets and the river and parks, basically the free stuff. That evening four of us attempted to get the supposedly cheap student tickets sold an hour before performances for 'Billy Elliot, the Musical!' They weren't as cheap as we were expecting but it was worth it since it was such a fun show. Unfortunately it wasn't quite the show stopping, finger snapping, rockin' show I would expect to come from Sir Elton John (i.e. Aida & Lion King) since the story has its depressing aspects. Otherwise the music was good and the lead kid was an amazing dancer (as well as actor, singer, and person with the ability to speak in the difficult northern English accent). After going to the show, we all decided that after seeing what this kid could do, we have had nothing accomplished in our life.

The next morning, we ran off to Notting Hill to relive our favorite moments from the Hugh Grant movie as well as Bednobs and Broomsticks in Portebello Road. We were able to find the Travel Bookstore, and ran inside all excited until we were forced to leave after the woman at the desk realized we weren't actually going to buy anything. We unfortunately were not able to find the second half of a spell book I had used to start a home witching course amongst the antique gazelle magnifying glasses and "The Ladies Guide to Household Life." When we were tired of the crouds, I convinced Jillian to come with me to see if we could get cheap tickets to a matinee of "We Will Rock You," the Queen musical since I am a closet Queen fan. I will admit that I had a really good time, although the cultured side of me was looking at how idiotic the entire premise was. It was essentually a really good Queen coverband with excellent singers and good visuals all barely held together with strange dialouge that was mostly blatant British sexual innuendos. I didn't really realize how hilariously rediculous the story was until we tried explaining it to others after we got back. "Galileo Figero" is a rebel bohemian in a futuristic Orwellian society run by "The Killer Queen" and he must free the world with rock music by finding a guitar the band, Queen, had hid in a rock 300 years prior, all while having a budding relationship with his fellow bohemian girlfriend, "Saramouche." It was amusing just watching how they would try to force the songs onto us: Galileo complaining about how restricting the society is, then looking off into space as a key-note rings and he starts to belt "I want to break freee!" On a side note, "Lord of the Rings, the Musical!" is playing here, but unfortunately I heard it is both really expensive and really long and boring. That evening, we sat around and it strangely felt like I was back in Zahm as people were just wandering in and out of rooms, especially when a group of boys in the room next door came into the room because there was a small cooking fire in their flat and someone freaked out with the fire extinguisher until there was a rather pleasant layer of choking dust settled over everthing. The evening ended in a failed attempt to go to a pub with supposedly cheap drinks but there was a long line to get in and we weren't privy to waiting.

Today was really fun. We started at the east end where Jack the Ripper did his ripping. This is also were Brick Road is, the center of Hugonaut, Jewish, and Bangledeshian cultures, incuding a multitude of funky markets, the best I've seen in Europe so far. After a delicious lunch of curry in one of the famous indian restraunts there, we headed off to Kings Cross Station to visit probably the one real Harry Potter setting...okay, well the only HP setting that Muggles can actually visit. On the way, we obviously had to stop in the Angel Tube station since Laura informed us it was home to the world's longest escalator. It was quite impressive. Then on to platform 9 3/4. We had lots of fun running back and fourth between the barrier there with our carts, but it was kind of unexciting as the Hogwarts Express had left months ago. We ended the afternoon with a nice and free organ concert in Wesminster Abbey which also gave me a free view into the abbey itself. Tonight I think is going to be an early one as I have fairly early train train to catch through the Chunnel to Paris tomorrow morning.

Londoning

2008-02-01T03:11:00.000-08:00

Yay, I am in London! I ran to the airport, an hour or two after my last Theo final. During my really painless flight from the IBK airport to Gatwick (which cost less than the transportation from the airport to the city), I could barely contain myself, I was just so excited to see all my friends here.

When I arrived, it was like a mini reunion with all of my friends, some of which I hadn't seen since last June. After seeing everyone and getting settled in my old roommate's flat where I am staying, we went out to experience a little bit of British nightlife.

First we went to a small corner pub and had a couple of beers, catching up with a couple friends, then they took me to O'neil's irish pub which is supposedly THE place to go on Thursday nights. I was expecting a quaint little pub with some drink special that night. It was in fact a huge dance bar with a cover band. Apparently on Thursday nights, all 130 of the ND Londoners congrigate there and kind of take over the bar. I felt like I was in America, aside from the creepy old british men dance-attacking the girls from behind, to which they would run to me or some other ND guy and pretend to be their girlfriend. I think I had about 5 different girlfriends last night.

Being here is such a different mentality than Innsbruck. They seem to go out almost every night, they travel every spare weekend that they have, they need to walk two and a half miles to class one way, its really interesting to see how much of a different experience studying here would be.

I'm not really sure what I am going to do until I meet Christian in Paris on Monday. Hopefully a show or two, maybe visiting the Caravaggio painting I did a report on this semester in the National Gallery, a swing club. I honestly dont care what I do here, as long as I am just hanging out with everyone.

Old Ladies with Beer, oh and finals

2008-01-31T02:53:00.000-08:00

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!

Good day

2008-01-23T12:00:00.000-08:00

I woke up, it had snowed all night, and it was clear and sunny. I donned my ski pants and jacket and took my skis and boots with me to class. At half past noon, class ended, I grabbed a sandwhich and apple at Spar and jumped on the bus. In the hour, I was on the slopes. It was amazingly clear, still, and sunny with a fresh batch of snow. I was almost alone on the mountain. After two and a half hours of amazing skiing, I jumped back on the bus, got back to the dorm, took a shower, got dressed and met everyone for Gemeinsammenesessen (weekly dinner with the Gürtlers in the historic center of town). I've decided to not do any work the rest of the night and get to bed early. Tomorrow begins the studying for finals.

And just for fun, and because it's kind of appropriate, I thought I'd include the following. Listen for the noises he makes when he goes off the ski jump, its the Fasching noises from last night.

Fertility Slaps

2008-01-22T15:58:00.000-08:00

So after a long Monday night writing a long German paper for Poly Sci and a Theo paper fittingly about hell, I really wanted to get some sleep today. Tuesdays are my weekly dinner with my Gastfamilie so I was planning on having a quiet, short evening with them before heading back to Roessl, watching a movie and sleeping, little did I know that by the end of the night, I would have some fertility slapped in me.

I apologize for that last sentence, just read the rest of the post and it'll make more sense (hopefully).

Everything was going to plan, we had a nice meal of Kaesespatzle, a kind of Tirolean macoroni and cheese and we started watching a slalom ski race on TV. I kind of am obsessed with the sport now. I'm only mentioning this because we humorously discovered that there was some DJ playing songs when each racer went that correlated to their country of origin (sort of). I noticed this first with a Japanese skiier, they were playing "Kung Fu Fighting" when he went. Then we realized it wasn't a coincidence when ABBA started playing to the background of the Sweedish skier to go next. Then a crappy Italian pop song for the Suedtiroler skiier and so on. After discussing the political correctness of this DJ who had too much time on his hands, my Gastmutter randomly mentioned that she heard of a Faschings event going on in a small town 15 minutes away. We decided to check it out reguardless of my exhaustion, I can sleep when I'm older.

Fasching is the strange season that begins on November 11, (11-11) and extends until Lent. It is known as being the 'ball season' where various clubs and organizations throughout Austria host large black and white dances. I am going to the UniBall this Saturday, the largest University social event of the year. Another thing about Fasching is that there is a kind of traditional ceremony that the rural places still carry out. I am not really sure exactly what everything means but I think the general idea is to drive out winter and bring in the summer. You know, like any other pagan ritual. It involves men dressing in Lederhosen and elaborite masks, and what else, alcohol.

I had no idea what exactly we were going to, I'm not even sure my mother did, she just kind of read about it in the newspaper that morning. Well we arrive at this Gasthaus, a kind of traditional restraunt and apparently you needed tickets to get in and they were sold out, but they suggested we just stand at the doorway and look in the dining room as it all happens. So we each got a beer and waited for the festivites to begin. The room itself reminded me of a camp dining hall: a large wooden room with long tables, decorated very flamboyantly with colorful streamers and giant masks. Well, I guess we were standing in the kind of prep room before the 'performers' did their thing so a strange crowd of about 25 young men all arrived in strange costumes. They were wearing an assortment of clothing and the costumes included: disturbingly short lederhosen, colorful shag (think: gay chewbacca), suit with colorful pom poms glued all over, women's dresses, and a few suits with thousands of tiny pieces of wood hanging off that resemble those paint stirrers that hardware stores throw handfulls of at you whenever you approach the paint section. Right before they went on, they all put on these very interesting masks. Most were simply wooden carvings of a man's face with a kind of dirty porn star moustache with any assortment of decorations around it. These were both subtle and extreme. One had a 4 foot tall headdress kind of thing with mirrors, feathers, and sequins that he seemed to steal from an Elton John concert.

The festivities began when a masked man started playing an accordian and one by one each of the characters came out dancing and interacting with the crowd. First, these men dressed as hags went out and brushed people with their brooms. Then the men with the lederhosen ran out and started doing the traditional Tirolean dance called the Schuehplattler which is German for absolutely hilarious. It involves a lot of slapping, jumping, and high kicking to rhythms. If you ever stop laughing at them you would realize its a pretty complicated, rhythmic dance. Then the paint stirrer boys ran into the crowd with a twisting jerking dance that really made their outfits loud. Many of them were making the screaming noise that goofy would always make in cartoons when he would be falling or something, its really quite difficult to describe, a kind of high pitched "aaaaaaah hooo hoooie." But it wonder if Goofy was inspired from Tirolean Fasching ceremonies. This went on for some time and the men would go amongst the tables, reach into their costumes, pull out a flask, and offer some schnapps to the ladies. They would also give everyone a hefty slap which my gastmutter called a "Fruchtbarschlag" or a fertility slap. This went on for some time until the performers got tired, took of their masks and half their costumes, grabbed ein Bier and joined the party.

Apparently every town has their own traditions with the holiday, and every town has their own troupe of young men who do their own Faschings dance celebration. This night apparently 4 different towns were sending their dancers. I would have loved to stay and watch the next three towns' perfomances, but we didn't have anywhere to sit and I was already dog tired from the lack of sleep from the night before and the party went on till at least midnight so we decided to leave after this small but delicious taste of Tirolean tradition. When we went outside, it had started to snow for the first time since the new year. Looks like they need to work on their winter-driving out skills.

Austrian Sporting Events

2008-01-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Real short, I feel real good about February, I have finally finished purchasing all of my transportation connections.

I'll post later exactly where I am going to be and when.

Friday afternoon, Mariel tells me that there is an Innsbruck CouchSurfing meeting that we could go to. CouchSurfing is a social networking website that we just joined where you can connect with people in other cities and stay with them (i.e. surf their couch) for free. It sounds sketchy but they have pretty decent ways of checking up on people. I am planning on trying this out in Portugal so I thought it would be fun to check out this meeting. Well we arrive and apparenly it was an Innsbruck ExPat (Ex-Patriots) club group that some lady advertized on the CouchSurfing site. We didnt really quite read the invite right. It was not quite what I was expecting, but we were kind of socially obligated to stay and talk to some other fellow Americans/Italians/Irish/Australians. It was quite a unique group of people from folk songwriters to freelance band photographers and the whole time I kept asking myself how the heck I got myself into this crazy situation. They were unbelievably nice and they kept talking about meeting up in the future for parties and such but if I didn't have: 13 other native speakers from ND to be friends with, an obligation to leave the country in 5 months, a Gastfamilie, a decent grasp of the German Language, and a life, I may consider to spend more time with these people.

Today, Saturday, Mariel and I awoke before the sun to drag ourselves to the train station and go to Kitzbühel to see the world famous Hahnekamm Ski World Cup race. Kitzbühel is essentually where I was all of Christmas break and it was awesome to see this race on the mountain I had been skiing on just a month ago.

As a side note, on the way there, we had a layover in the small town of Woergl, and on a whim (and since I am terrified of the IBK train station ticket office and the beast that roams there) I decided to try to get another Interrail pass for my February travels. And I tried to keep my cool amongst my excitement when I was able to get it no problem.

Anyways, this event is probably Austria's biggest sporting event of the year. Austria really has nothing going for it with sports other than skiing. Their Fußball team is horrible and only reason why they are playing in the world championship this summer is because there will be a few games in Innsbruck. This event (the Saturday race) is the worlds longest and most difficult downhill ski run. There is a point where there is an 85% grade and even the snow grooming machines can't make it up so they call in the Austrian army early in the morning to march around and pack down the snow. In living here for the past 5 months, it seems that the Austrian army's most important jobs include cleaning up the Pope-trash in Vienna, parading in order to groom snow, and wearing red berets.

After sitting on an hour train ride packed with people and watching all the Austrians down beer and schnapps all before 10am, and making friends with an Australian snowboarder named Luke living/bartending in London for the year, we finally arrived and joined the mayhem. Austrians were running around everywhere, waving the flag, blowing airhorns, ect. I all thought that they had lipstick kiss marks on their faces but on closer look, it was just the red, white, red stripes of the Austrian flag painted on their cheeks. Mariel and I made our way up to the end of the run to stake out a spot for the race in two hours. As we slipped and slid in the snow our way to the stadium/holding area for people, the stumble drunk Austrians were easily passing us with their geneticly inherited Tirolean snow-legs. We found a good spot between the finish line and where the skiiers stop and celebrate about two hours before the race and made an Austrian friend who was telling us all about the sport and the racers (very helpful since mariel and I were fairly lost). The event itself was extremely similar to any other sporting event, including a pregame show with parachuters, hang gliders, cameramen amonst the crowd, and cheerleaders "the Alpine Angels," commercial breaks between races, and music to pump up the crowd (their 'Jock Jams' are a pleasant blend of polka and yodeling). The race was suprisingly exciting, we could watch the racers on a big screen then see them come around the corner at the top of the mountain and watch them finish the last fourth of the course as they raced against the best time. The only racer I knew was Bode Miller who the Austrians all love but the Americans all hate which which resulted in a confusing number of American flags in the crowd (carried by Austrian Bode supporters).

Unfortunately we witnessed a really bad fall. Scott McCartney, the first American skiier, and second of the day, wiped out really bad right at the end of the race resulting in them stopping the race for a half hour as they airlifted him out. It was really disturbing. As he was coming down, the announcer announced that it was his birthday today and before he finished, he got the entire crowd to start singing "Happy Birthday to you" as he came close. He got a little too much air from a ledge and lost control (it seemed as if he was distracted from the singing) and well you can see the rest here:

He stopped sliding right in front of where we were standing and the whole crowd went silent as he started convulsing with shock. I was almost sure he was dead or paralyzed but apparently it was just severe head trauma. He is doing alright now at the Innsbruck Clinic. Some birthday...

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/skiing/news/story?id=3204103

It was kind of a buzz-kill for the crowd but they livened up after they announced he was conscious, and the energy returned.

After the race, we decided we were exhausted after getting up so early and standing all day and decided to head back rather than wait for the fireworks display that evening. Before heading back to Innsbruck, Mariel and I walked around the city to check out the party of wasted Austrians dancing around and belting the words to "I'm Walking on Sunshine." And then we joined the crowd as we tried to set the Guinness record for how many drunk Austrians we could fit on the train in the short 50 min ride back to Innsbruck.

My host mom admits she is very spontaneous

2008-01-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately for me, she will often call me a half hour before doing something to see if I want to come along, such as hiking, movies, or skiing. Unfortunately whenever she calls, I am busy sleeping (usually the case) or in the middle of something else. Finally I asked her to kind of warn me of when she might be spontaneous in the future so that I could be prepared/awake. She had warned me last night that she would call me today at 11 am. At 10am, my cell phone vibrates off the table and crashes into a bunch of pieces. Putting my cell phone back together was truly a great way to start the morning. It ended up being my host mom telling me she was coming to pick me up in an hour to go skiing. Dead tired from our previous evening’s activities involving ping pong balls and disturbingly dirty plastic cups, I convince myself to go and hastily throw on my ski clothes: long underwear, ski pants, and jacket. She picks me up and we run out and go skiing which is basically 3 runs then 3 hours at an Alm or restraint lodge thing in the middle of the run with her friends.

After she invited me and the friends we met over to her house for coffee. I agreed to come even though I have a lot of stuff to do. A few hours later, after her friends leave, I look at my host mom to grab her keys and take me back. Instead, she grabs her Robbie Williams Concert DVD and pops it in and asks me to sit down. If you are unfamiliar, Robbie Williams is one of the most famous British pop stars out there now but no one in America has heard of him even though all of Europe, especially my host mom is obsessed. For the next two hours I sat through my host mom snapping her fingers and singing along to the music. He was a decent performer the music was catchy but it got a little ridiculous. When the concert ended, she started preparing dinner, I guess I’m staying over for dinner now. I wasn’t complaining, I didn’t really have anything to eat back at the dorm anyways. After dinner then I guess it was time to watch Der Bourne Identität which they had never seen before. Mind you, unprepared for this 12 hour day with my family, all I am wearing this whole time is my loud swishy ski pants and my awkwardly tight fitting long underwear top. By the time it was 9:30 I felt like it was late enough for me to leave and I suggested I could take the bus but they insisted to take me. By the time I got back to the room I was so tired, I crashed and got no work done.

Little did I know that “picking you up for skiing” was hostfamilyish for “kidnapping you for 12 hours” I suppose all kidnappers rely on spontaneity.

Florence et al.

2008-01-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

Kevin and I got up early the next morning and our hostess was nice enough to cook us an "american" egg and bacon breakfast. They were way too nice.

Then we hit up Pisa which doesn't really have much going for it other than the Field of Miracles where the Cathedral, Baptistry, and world famous falling over bell tower all sit. Most images of Pisa just include the tower but I think the whole field is really beautiful. After laughing at all of the silly Japanese tourists attempting to prevent the Tower from falling over we got the urge and took some cheezy pictures when no one was looking. For the sake of alliteration, I even coughed up 1.50 euro to photodocument me feasting on a piece of Pisa pizza in front of the leaning tower. If the internet was a little better I would be able to upload it.

After Pisa, we planned to go to Volterra, a small hill town that has an interesting Etruscan history to it. In order to get there we took a train to Pontederra and then a bus to Volterra. The train/bus schedules didn't quite match up and so we had to wait in Pontederra for about an hour and a half. After being there for 5 minutes, I decided that God likely used this city as inspiration for purgatory. Optimistic we walked around looking for an old part of the city, a church perhaps or something but no. There is nothing but random shops that seemed to sell decorations in your house that were left over from the 1980s, the world's most boring river/canal/resivoir thing, and some wierd colorful paper maché art randomly stuck in the middle of a traffic circle. NEVER go to Pontederra, your brain will eat itself in boredom. Trust me, I've never had a more mind-numbing hour in my life.

The drive to Volterra alone was worth the trip, we drove through small Tuscan villages, by large villas, and there were always hills in the distance topped with tiny towns and skylined with bell towers. The city itself was also really quaint, it reminded me of an Italian, less touristy Rothenberg. We walked around for a few hours and explored the tiny city with stunning views of the surrounding countryside. Other than that, there is really not much in Volterra. It was cute but small and a little unexciting but I'm glad we went nonethelss.

We got back to Florence that evening and met up with the other group at our hostel, an old convent. It was one of my more memorable hostelling experiences since we were in a 22 person dorm room. During the night I would have my own private concert of a symphony including sounds from around the world.

The next day we decided to stay in Florence. This included waiting in line for 2 hours at the Uffizi Museum because Betsy refused to pay the 3 euro reservation fee, walking around the city, having a religious experience at the Accedemia when looking at Michelangelo's the David, and making friends with the gelato man after purchasing our 3rd gelato at the same locale, "Grom" within a timespan of 2 hours. We took the fact that it was all organic to mean it was actually healthy for you. Then I wanted to take a picture in front of the fake David in front of the Ufizzi because I feel I resemble him, kind of. This was a mistake on my part because it opened a can of worms of everyone else trying to imitate every statue in Florence (there is a lot). Posing as Muses, Hermes, and famous Florentines is all fun but I felt it got a little out of control when they started reenacting a statue of a centuar (Betsy as the horse-ass) and especially the statue of the rape of the Sabine women. Apparently the Italian police felt the same way.

After another moving evening concert, this time including a commentary in Portugese, we moved to our new lodgings (it was way cheaper to stay in two places in Florence...claims Betsy) to a room for just the 6 of us more in the heart of the city. We then all parted ways and Anthony went to Rome in an attempt to see the entire city in a few hours where we think he contracted ebola or something (explained later), Betsy, Julie, and Monika went to Pisa, and Kevin and I went to Lucca. We really enjoyed Lucca a lot, the nice weather that day also really helped; it was sunny for most of the afternoon. Lucca is nestled in a valley and has this neat rennaissance town wall that is now a raised bike path/park around the old part of the city. It also has some neat buildings such as a unique circle of structure that is just houses built into an old Roman amphitheater and an old mechant family's tower with a garden on top including large oak trees. It was also in Lucca that we came across Henry, the pidgeon who almost was, or who was then wasn't or maybe the most pathetic thing I have seen in my life. Here is his story: After visiting the cathedral, we heard a small squeaking sound and discovered a juvinle pidgeon freaking out around the door. We started to try to feed it bread because we had some and it stupidly ran away from. But other pidgeons came flying in and eating the bread, and then Henry would see them eating then try to take the bread from their mouths. The whole thing was hilariously pathetic. We kept throwing bread at Henry and he would run away until the othe pigeons ate it. I think he figured it out after a while. We taught Henry how to eat bread. We had a bond. Well we turn away, satisfied about helping a poor dirty pigeon learn to live in such a cold, dark, hurtful world. Two minutes later a car drove by and we hear a squash sound and some people gasping. There, was Henry squished into the pavement. He had a wing half-raised as if a waving goodbye to us. We then felt like it was then probably a good time to leave Lucca.

The next day, we made it to Siena, which was probably my favorite city of the trip, even though we had the worst weather. In this city there are 17 different neighborhoods and each has its own mascot as well as colors and a coat of arms. The mascots are fairly normal such as eagle, panther, dragon ect. But they also have some strange ones such as snail, shell, goose, and she-wolf. My favorite was catepillar. Every neighborhood also has its own fountain or well as well as a church. There is competition between the neighborhoods since every summer there is a horse race in the center of town where each neighborhood submitts a rider and horse and the winner gets bragging rights for the next year. Well we spent most of the day walking around the city and looking at the signs on the buildings to figure out what neighborhood we were in and trying to find their fountain. Conversations usually went like "Ooooh look! We're now in giraffe!" And then we would discuss how giraffe could totally beat forest by eating all the leaves but forest has a rhino on the crest which could totally beat out any giraffe. It escilated and got a little rediculous when we were in unicorn and we found what we believed was a unicorn grotto which then resulted in some people having a unicorn fight. I guess this is what we do... Many college students go to Europe to get sloshed, we go to have unicorn fights in Siena.

The next day we had to head back to Innsbruck but before, we had a very long night ahead of us. We had an early train the next morning and we had a late night to bed, mostly because of an improptu shadow show before we went to bed, dont ask. At about 2 am, I wake up to Anthony cursing and trying to leave the room to use the rest room. When he came back, he was just lying in bed making noises which he later called "dramatic breathing." After about an hour of this and me being unable to sleep I turn over, annoyed, and ask him if anything was wrong. He kind of mindlessly mumbles nonsense but I figured he had a bad case of food poisoning. Not knowing what to do, I just put the trash can near his bed for him to boot in and try to sleep. Well with the dramatic breathing all night and the hasty trips to the bathroom sleep didnt happen. The alarm rings and I realize we have to somehow get Anthony to the train station in this state. He was still making trips to the bathroom enjoying his last few meals in reverse. With an hour before our train left, we packed up all of his stuff, and wait for a lull in the action. It didnt come until about 30 minutes before the train left. We grab him, throw clothes on him and drag him on the 15 minute walk through Florence to the train station in pouring rain. Somehow we made it minutes before the train left, and we throw him in his reserved compartment full of Italians who have no idea how much fun their ride with Anthony will be for the next seven hours, luckily I was not among them. Since he is still alive, we figure he didn't have ebola.

Monika and I decided to stop in Verona for a few hours on our way back to Innsbruck. I'm glad I went, it was a very beautiful city but I was exhausted and kind of wanted to get back to IBK. Monika loved the city, she also had a little more energy since she slept through the exciting events of the night before. It was a little exciting when we almost missed our train coming back to Innsbruck.

We finally got back to Innsbruck and everyone who had gone home to America was already back and we spent the rest of the evening catching up and it was good to see everyone again.

This week

2008-01-12T05:37:00.001-08:00

I am going to try to blog more often now until I have finished what I have left out in the past couple of months. I have decided to start at the present and work my way backwards so if you dont check the blog for a week or two itll all be in chronological order. This is more for me and I apologize if you are overwhelmed.

This week was fairly uneventful. We had classes resume and it seems like this month is going to be a lot of work before we have finals in the last week of January. Amongst studying for finals, I have a couple of large papers to write in German as well as planning for all of the travel we'll be doing after finals. We were looking at our calendars, and with the semester break and the spring break we have around easter, we only have 4 days of class in the months of February and March. Places I am hopefully going to travel to are: London, Paris, Egypt, Spain, Morocco, Holland, Belgum, Croatia, Slovenia.

One quasi-eventful occurence that happened is that for the second time this year, der Föhn came at the end of this week. It is an extremely dry wind that comes from the south and blows through the Inn valley for a couple of days. If you live in Southern California or are familiar with the movie "The Holiday" it is very similar to the Santa Anna winds. The Austrians all claim that it makes everyone go crazy and Professor Giacomuzzi told me that you'll know that der Fön is here or coming when you see people stumbling down the street in a daze. I was joking about it with my Gastfamilie one time and my Gastmutter gave me a stern look and told me it is not a laughing matter. I beg to differ.

Made it to Tuscany

2008-01-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

After taking 10 hours or roundabout trains, Kevin and I finally made it here to Florence. We were planning on spending the night in a small hill town of Volterra, about two hours outside of the city, but unlike the Austrians, nobody actually works on holidays so that means no transportation to get there. Serously, how are these two countries neighbors?

On the way we did pick up a small Interrail pass (take that devil woman) in Verona. We did have problems like in Austria where one guy told us we had to be Italian to get it. But we tried again with the guy next door and even though this guy was yelling around the office about how to get us this pass, making the other guy well aware it was our second try, in true Italian form he could care less.

I had called some family friends who live in Florence for their help in figuring out whether we could make it to Volterra. They were the ones who informed us that we would be unable to make it there and they invited us to come to their house once we arrived in Florence. Expecting them to help us find a room in a hostel or something, we arrived, and they had already made us two beds for us to stay for the night. They were unbelievably nice and told us we were joining them for dinner. They helped us figure out our travel plans and then we had a home cooked feast, finished by a long due pumkin pie. The fact that there is no canned pumpkin, condensed milk, or pie tins in Europe made this treat a huge treat for us especially since it was the only thing missing from my Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.

Well so much for spending the night in the train station.

Silvester: The Aftermath

2007-12-31T18:16:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-31T13:05:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-21T15:31:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-16T05:29:00.000-08:00

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:

2007-11-18T10:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-17T15:00:00.001-07:00

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!

2007-10-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-09-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

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!

Life in Heftie

2007-09-20T13:17:00.001-07:00

So as I said before, it has mostly rained so we’ve come to explore pretty much everything that is the Hefterhof hotel. So our morning begins with us being unable to get up from our extremely comfortable beds. Feather pillows and knit sheets. It’s amazing. After the morning ritual shower fight me and my roommate have (about who gets to shower second and get 20 minutes of extra sleep) we get ready and groggily stumble to the Frühstucksraum (breakfast room). On the way, I usually inadvertently walk through some important Austrian meeting or business deal going on because this hotel is more of a mini conference center with a few rooms. As you walk through the cloud of cigarette smoke, all the Austrians look up and have this indifferent but kind of confused look on their faces. It wouldn’t be bad if they didn’t stop talking and all stare at you when you pass. After you survive the trial of 100 Austrian death stares, you finally get to the Frühstrucksraum and there with a big grin is Prof Gürtler who greets us with an overwhelming “Guten Morgen!” as he finishes off his 3rd or 4th cup of coffee (if you ask, he claims he has 8-10 cups a day then will laugh hysterically, this man is a god). Then, before you, you have a feast buffet. Every bread imaginable, cheeses, cold cuts, eggs, cereal, I love European breakfasts. As you feast (if you’re in the vicinity of Gürtler) you’re required to speak German but if you sit strategically away you can whisper in English. After breakfast, full of food, you waddle off to class and try not to fall asleep in a food coma for the next three hours. Then it’s time for lunch. Lunch is a full 3 course meal, with 3 different entrée options, and none have ever been the same since we’ve been here. From Gnocchi to Goulash, we’ve been fed just about every rich meal you can imagine. Just when you think that the hotel is fattening you up for their wurst, you feed off the fat you’ve accumulated during the first two meals for dinner because we’re on our own for dinner. All we have is an archaic microwave that nobody really understands how to use.

Hayley is quite frustrated with the Microwave

No words or keypad, just a knob and really misleading pictures that don’t seem to have anything to do with microwaving
and we have a minifridge. Even though we get a 6 euro stipend a day, we’re all trying to save for travel and most just eat a frozen pizza or 2 euro worth of fruit or nothing at all. Evenings are an interesting mix of frantically trying to go outside (if its not raining) and doing homework. We all live at the end of a hallway, in 6 rooms and you can imagine that it’s really easy to focus with everyone around all the time. Another interesting aspect about the Heftie is the rather haphazard room cleaning that goes on. Fresh towels and sheets are given at irregular intervals, and the blanket fold/pillow combination is different every day. Our favorite is when they chop our pillow. Essentually stand the pillow on its side and karate chop it down so its nice and pointy, kind of like a napkin folded into a swan at a nice restraint but with a pillow and a lot less complicated. Also the nice cleaning lady always stops us in the hallway to speak to us when we walk by and we never have any idea what she is trying to communicate to us. We usually walk away extremely confused and trying to get her creepy smile out of our heads. Otherwise, this place is heaven and it will be missed greatly when we leave next week.

Usually just chillaxin is what happens when in the Heftie, however things do get exciting when there are bugs to be extracted. The walls also have holes in them that makes you feel like you're room is a hardware store.

Classes

2007-09-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

Okay so I apologize for the long delay in posting. We're already more than halfway through our classes here in Salzburg and I've been extremely busy. We just got back from Budapest and Vienna and I've written a lot about our amazing adventures, so expect a lot posted real soon (or as soon as I type it up).

So let me tell you about these wonderful intensive German classes we've been having. After a placement test two weeks ago, I was placed into the lower level of the two classes offered here. I guess I am satisfied with my placement because it sounds like the upper class would be too much over my head. However it seems we are using the same German textbooks we used in my German 201 class I took two semesters ago which kind of makes me feel like I'm taking remedial German, but I'm okay with that (really, I need it...) Also all of the students in the upper course are in their 6th, 7th, or 20th year of exposure to the language.

I was extremely nervous about the upcoming class since: (a) I hadn't really practiced my German all summer (insert lame excuse here); and (b) prior students had told us that our teacher, Frau Offenberger, is a really tough German who takes no crap and has a legendary 'stare of death.' Well we walk into class on the first day (we have it from 9:00am - 3:30pm with 1-3hrs of homework daily) and there, sitting at the desk is not the German she-devil I was expecting but a woman who looked akin to as if Mrs. Claus had taken a liking to wearing cravats under her shirt and strangely fitting knitted sweaters. As we entered the room, she smiled at us and welcomed us to the course and did the teachery things teachers awkwardly do in the first few minutes of any course. Her demeanor can only have been described as grandmotherly, there was no stare of death but always a kind smile, and at several points in the day I wouldn't have been surprised if she pulled open her bag and served us all chocolate chip cookies, or a German equivalent. Little did we know that this was merely a front that was presented that first day to cover something no one could have prepared us for. I have now gotten used to her teaching style now but that first week was extremely difficult. So here's a typical five minutes in our class:

Frau Offenberger asks us to give a sentence or asks us a question in German, usually an excersize in whatever grammar we're currently reviewing
You answer, to the best of your ability
Frau Offenberger stares at you blankly for at least 10 seconds. This is no ordinary, "Is that 55 year old German man really wearing blindingly yellow florescent capris?" kind of stare but a stare that goes directly into your soul and makes you question your very morals and all you know or all you think you know until you have nearly forgotten your name in a whirlwind of pronoun declensions and verb conjugations.
Whether your answer was correct or not, you then frantically mumble something new, trying to crash through the awkward silence and trying to correct whatever you got wrong, usually sabotaging your answer even more
Frau Ovvenberger's stare changes dramatically with merely the twitch of an eyebrow to a stare that begs a question akin to "how was that actually a legitimate attempt to communicate with someone/"
You then hang your head low in shame as she corrects you and your classmates mourn for their fallen comrade

In the last week. most of us have found ways not to be fooled by her deadly enchanting stare. I have discovered that a confident blank stare back can easily lessen the awkwardness of the silence. However sometimes a concerned "Ist das logisch?" needs to be fired in extreme situations.

Otherwise class has been chugging along and I cant believe we are halfway through. Every day we pretty much cover the same amount of material we would have covered in a week of German at ND. This puts the intense into Intensive Language Course. My 20 minute attention span is also being tried every day as we go for more than 1.5 hours without taking a break.

Coming up next: Life in the Heftie and the Pope-trip. yeah. Get excited.

The Sound of Rain

2007-09-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

I imagined studying in Salzburg to be fun and exciting where we would be working intensly on our German during the day and then go in the city in the afternoons and evenings to practice or frolic around the city like the Von Trapp children. However it has definitely nothing but rained since we got here which is quite unfortunate. This means that we are essentially stuck in the Heftie, unless we get the nerve to run a quarter mile through the European icy coldness to Spar to get some food for dinner. It's usually a strange assortment of cheap yogurtey and lunch meaty things we’re not sure what they are but have generic quasi-american names that don’t sound very appealing like “Choco-Drink” and “Sauer Milk” but they all taste amazing. However, this country has given us the strange but everpresent urge to run into eachothers’ rooms at night in long nightgowns all afraid that somehow result in us gleefully singing about our favorite things. Hopefully this will end with the rain. One other problem we’ve been having recently is that a couple of us have considered making our own Lederhosen play clothes from the colorful curtains in our room and we’re afraid that this may have a dire impact on the hotel bill for Notre Dame.

The only somewhat nice day we’ve had was fortunately the day Güetler took us into the city to give us his tour on Sunday. The first place we went to was the Mirabell Garten which is this really pretty garden in the Neustadt (note that the Neustadt is about twice the age of America). This is perhaps the most recognizable place in Salzburg for most Americans as the second half of the “Do a deer” song was filmed in various places throughout. I immediately recognized it (having just watched the Sound of Music a week ago in preparation for my stay in Salzburg) and while Prof. Gürtler was trying to explain to us the historical significance of whatever he was saying in German, I kept getting distracted and was trying to recreate my favorite moments from the movie. Unfortunately nobody really realized what I was doing until after we left and I got a lot of “oh THAT’S what you were doing, why didn’t you tell me?” Somehow I’ve reached a status where anything that would seem strange for someone other than the cast of Godspell to do in public would not warrant a second glance from anyone in this group. For example: hopping up and down stairs in a Salzburger baroque park while humming to myself. I finally convinced a couple of people to join me in running/skipping down a stretch of arbors in the park which resulted in, arguably the best picture in existence. After we got back I showed everyone the scene from the movie, and THEN they got all excited about the park and wanted to go back.

Sooo a needle pulling thread!

Faaaaa a long long way to run!

After the park we went to the Mönkberg one of the two hills in the midst of the city that had some great panoramic views of the city. We finally ended in the Altstadt where we had a couple of hours free in the city to roam. After getting bored with the Getreidegasse, a neat lane with all these cool iron signs advertising the shops (long are the days of cobblers, blacksmiths, and bakers unfortunately it’s now a collection of American and Scandinavian fast food restaurants along with super trendy, expensive, randomly specific European clothing shops that exclusively sell things like a combination of cuff-links and sashes) we all decided to go to a neat Biergarten I had heard about, Der Augustiner Bräustübl-Mülln. Its essentially a cloister where the Monks brew beer and it is perhaps one of my favorite places in the city. So there is a giant shelf of white clay beer mugs in two sizes, liter or half liter. You take your mug, wash it out in a special washing station, pay your ticket and give it to a monk who heartily fills up your mug from a wooden barrel to the brim as if it were water (take that, Guiness!), topped off with a friendly foam. You then have a mideval food court of sorts where you can pick up classic Salzburger dishes: warm apple strudels and schnitzel with noodles along with cheeses and meats. They have these awesome beer-halls you can sit in that look suspiciously like South Dining Hall at ND except they’re a tad bit smaller, everyone is smoking and drinking, and there are amusing phrases written on the walls. Our favorite was: (A good drink makes the old young). It was sunny so we sat outside under old trees and a wonderful atmosphere. The beer there is amazing, it’s the locals’ favorite. It’s unfiltered and hearty and one liter will fill you up like a 5 course meal. Das schmecht mir gut!

We had to leave as we had to be back to the Heftie early because we had our classes beginning the next day. Rather than take the bus, we decided to walk, which may have not been the best idea after walking around the city all day. It ended up taking about 45 minutes from the Augustiner and we were very tired and blisterey by the time we got back. We also had a tough time getting there because nobody had really given us any directions as to get back which can always be fun in a massive European city.

So this was all on Sunday and I’ll try to fill you in on the rest of the week before we leave for Vienna on Sunday. More to come, soon hopefully!

Tschuss!

Shopping Cart Guy

2007-09-02T03:06:00.000-07:00

So yesterday was our first real day in the city.

We started the day with an absolutely wonderful Austrian breakfast, I love the food here. Then we had a meeting about pretty much the entire year. I'm sure there was a lot of important stuff in it but because the whole thing was in German, most of it went over my head. Nevertheless, I'm absolutely sure that my language skills have improved over the past two days. I'm still hindered because I'm not at the stage where I recieve immediate understanding, I have to translate things to English in my head still which kind of makes me a step behind. This also gets frustrating because people will ask me things in German and I'll hesitate, but I understand, then they ask me in English and I get all frustrated because I couldve done it in German. Then I realize its probably all for the best since I would have responded in an overly enthusiastic but incomprehensible guttaral mumble that probably wouldve offended any Icelandic people in the area because I had just unknowingly insulted their parikeet.

In the afternoon, we were taken via bus to the Salzburg train station and kind of got the lay of the land of the city for the future.

Okay I dont know why I wrote about that last bit, it wasnt anything too exciting. Oh, actually on the bus back I did accidentally call our program director by the German form of "mrs" and I dont know if he actually heard me but it was really awkward. I was like "Frau Guert...." then there was an awkward pause and he didnt make any form of recognition so I hoped he hadnt heard. However laughing about the incident later, the girl sitting next to me, Madeline definately heard me and said it was pretty obvious. I feel like that's the third or fourth time I've called a German professor by the opposite gender.

When we got back, we all made a really nice spaghetti dinner. We had gone shopping earlier and Professor Guertler had asked me for my advice on a type of wine during the excursion like I had some expert knowledge. I dont know why he came to this conclusion but I think it was the fact that I'm from california and some of the other students here think I have an expert knowledge of alcohol because I hosted a 'party' last year for all the pre-Innsbruckees in which everyone's favorite bev, Keystone Lite, was served. I only drink the classiest drinks as you can tell. Anyways I immediately saw a type of wine I recognized, Santa Christina, and it was fairly cheap so I told him to get that one (he didnt seem to have any kind of wine knowledge whatsoever). I know its a special wine to my mom and I hoped that it wasnt only because her name is also Christina. Dinner was really fun and good but it seemed that a lot of the students in the group either don't like red wine or they just dont drink so about halfway through the dinner there was still a lot of wine left. I ended up drinking about 5-6 glasses because Guertler kept coming around and refilling the glasses and I was one of the few at the table who needed refilling. Obviously by the end of dinner, I had gotten a fairly decent buzz and I'm sure my face was beet red. The nice thing about it though is that my German had improved tenfold (or at least seemed to me), but it wasnt just my speaking but also my comprehension. I got really confident and then was one of the people most joining in the conversation. Because I was speaking so much, I also was making more mistakes than everybody else as well and Guertler made a jocular comment that people should stop serving me wine. So the combination of that incident, my 'expert' opinion of wine, and the fact that during dinner I asked about a Biergarten in town(essentually an establishment that exclusivel serves beer) I think he has me pinned as the alkie of the group.

Dinner: note my beet-red face and goblet full of cheer

It was game day so we wanted to go to town to see if we could find a place that had sattelite and was willing to play the GA Tech ND game for us, it started at 9:30 our time. We took the bus to town and wandered around looking for a sport bar or irish pub. We hadn't seen the downtown area yet so we ran around playing with the interesting sculptures and such...

We finally found an Irish pub that the Guert had warned us about (very expensive) but they had advertisments about international sporting events so we went in to try to see if they would play the game. Inside the place was hopping, and it was in this really neat basement crypt. We immediately saw an assortment of Irish-american memorbelia including Boston Red Sox and the Celtics banners among which was a "fighting irish" lisence plate so it seemed we had found the proper place. I asked the bar-tender if they had Sattelite (enthusiastic 'ja!') and if they had NBC (another 'ja!') and then I asked if he would put on the game. Immediately his face went to some desprate look and he mumbled some excuse in german about there being patrons wanting to watch the game that was already on TV. I looked up and it was some frighteningly manly Romanian women playing pairs tennis, not exactly the prime irish pub sport... None of the patrons couldve cared less what was on the TV. There were also other TVs that were turned off so I asked if we could turn it on another TV and he said something about his manager and college sports and I pieced together they had some lame rule against playing these sports on TV. Ah well. We ended up sitting in the back of the pub and we ordered our first (and really expensive) drinks in Europe. I couldnt resist so I splurged on a Strongbow cider, they had it on tap. We were there for a couple hours and it was quite an experience. The other Austrians in the room with us would suddenly break up into some hearty drinking song every 15 minutes or so and we were getting a kick out of trying to comprehend what they were saying. After a couple beers we were soon singing our own songs, trying to cheer on the Irish from across the Atlantic. It was a really fun atmosphere.

By the time we figured it was halftime, we decided to take the bus back to the hotel and listen to the rest of the game online. We had fun taking pictures waiting for the bus and on the bus itself, like Hayley here leaning against the random ironing board shaped leaning pad on the bus...

Coming back to the hotel, we discovered that we were losing 27 to 3 and we got really depressed. Nobody else wanted to listen but I listened to the rest of the game. It was not fun. My favorite part was when we fumbled the ball 18 yards from our endzone. We all decided we picked an excellent year to miss Irish football.

My evening culminated when we were in one of the girls' rooms and Madeline told me a rather humorous story about her and her friends having a nickname for me before we had officially met. Apparently there was an instance towards the end of the year last year when she and her friends went to Target. She claimed that they never go and that when they do, they stock up a whole bunch. Well apparently I was there and they walked their cart past me and it was half-full and I looked at the cart full of Target amazingness, but she claims that I gave a disgusted look at the cart and at her like I was judging her for buying so much. Later in their shopping they walked by again with the cart 3/4 full and I apparently did it a second time, and then she claims I gave the strange look at them a third time when their cart was full. I feel like I'm not one to judge people on the fullness of their Target shopping carts if anything I would be happy at the many joys they were about to purchase but she swears it was me. I do recall going to Target some time last year but I think the main purpose for the trip was to purchase some underwear for the summer, so if anything I think it wouldve been more embaressing for me. So a couple days later we had our first Innsbruck meeting and after when she got back to her room, her roommates were like "so do you know anybody going?" and she replied "You wont believe this, but shopping cart guy!" and apparently they all freaked out all screamy and giggly like all girls do. I really have to laugh at this story because I think there have been many times where similar insances have happened to me and my roomates and friends in which the end reaction was always the screaming giggling one.

Time to get ready to go into the city! Classes start tomorrow and I we'll be a lot more busy so I dont think I'll be able to post as often. Until next time.

First night in Österreich

2007-08-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

I am currently sitting now in the dark, I’ve been in Austria now for about 12 hours. As I was watching the Princess Diaries in German on local TV, the other students abroad with me haven’t figured out the whole adapter/converter issue yet and between the 14 of us, we’ve probably blown about 3-5 fuses in just the past half hour.

Visiting ND was really fun. I had a great time going around campus and goofing off with people. Even though I’m still extremely bitter about missing the Georgia Tech game, it wasn’t as hard to leave. By the time classes started I just got kind of bored and after doing all of the facebook stalking I could, I was ready to blow that pop stand. Bryce (who generously let me crash at his place) threatened to put on Rudy my last night on campus, and it’s a good thing he didn’t because I would probably be on campus still.
After enduring the world’s longest bus ride to O’Hare in Chicago, I met up with the rest of the group and prepared to board our Austrian Air flight to Vienna. After getting through security and walking 5 miles down to our gate, we all agreed that our stomachs were going to start digesting themselves so we began to look for a place to satiate our hunger. We then discovered we were trapped in the world’s most poorly planned terminal. Not only did we have to walk 5 miles back to the security gate searching for food, with the only edible substances being duty-free sees’ candies and liquor, but they have food court right outside the security gate with windows that border the terminal! It’s just sitting there, taunting you. It finally got to us so we walked the 10 miles to go back and get our boarding passes so we could go out and eat and come back in.

The flight was uneventful except for the fact that I got no sleep because the stupid solitare game on the airplane kept cheating and I wasted 5 hours of good sleep time trying to beat the stupid thing.

Once in Wien (Vienna for all you English speakers), we ran to get a connecting flight to Innsbruck. It was here that we decided we really enjoyed the Austrian Air stewardesses.

Once in Innsbruck we had the pleasure of meeting our program director, Professor Gürtler who speaks nothing to us but German, they weren’t kidding about the full immersion. Its okay except when he’s telling you important information like where to meet him or how not to destroy the electrical system of the hotel you’re staying in. His wife is funny because she talks twice as fast and giggles a lot and most of us just put on our best acting skills to look like you’re really interested, which gets especially hard when you start swaying and lose your balance because you haven’t slept in 30 hours. I usually know the subject they’re talking about but have not idea why they’re talking about it. Here’s the dialogue in my head:

“Okay he’s talking about chickens… what do they have to do with the crusades? Ooooh, chuckle, I think he made a joke, all the better German speakers are laughing. Crap, did that last comment warrant a response from me?

From Innsbruck, we drove east again to Salzburg where I am currently staying. It’s a really nice four star hotel outside downtown and we’ll be here for the next four weeks. Since we got here, we've been doing orientation stuff and we're all super jet-lagged so its been really interesting. I seriously dont remember some of the day, like I remember sitting on my bed, and the next thing I know, I'm in the shower, 30 minutes later. I should seriously get some sleep... Oh and my address is:

Charlie Vogelheim
CO Hefterhof Hotel
Maria-Cebotari-Straße 1-7
A-5020 Salzburg
Austria

So the beds are starting to look pretty inviting now.

Half a Month

2007-08-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

So I finally jumped on the blogging bandwagon, look at me all getting hip with the 21st century... As many others have done before me the point of this blog is to keep any and all who are interested in my life updated as I will be living in another country for about 9 months. I hope this doesn't get too boring for anyone and if it does please let me know. I hope to update this at least once a week but who knows if I'll be able to make this a habit.

Please give me feedback, like if I'm being too boring, havent posted in a while, or am using this as an excuse to not physically talk to anyone anymore, that would be really sad.

So I don't have anything exciting to say, other than the fact that I will be leaving in about two weeks and I am very excited and nervous. I wasn't too thrilled about going earlier this summer since everyone around me at UNDERC was talking about their excitment for the upcoming school year at ND. This was one of my biggest hurdles in signing up for the program and it was depressing me that I won't be on campus for my junior year. The band somehow still thinks that I am marching this year and sent me the music for the first game which also just about killed me since it was all my favorite music. But the more I think about going and now that I'm actually packing and getting things together, I'm starting to get pretty thrilled to start the semester. I honestly think its affecting my health.

I'm also very nervous about the whole German thing too. Even though I'm reading Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Azkaban and watching just about every German film I can get my hands on, this will not help me much with the speaking aspect. Rumor has it the first language professor is a tough Austrian who takes no crap. A big difference from Frau Weber who I had the last two semesters who was pretty much our grandma. I guess only time will tell.