Pope in Vienna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mmmm Pope-bread!

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

Horay for the pope!