Fanging the March an and arrival in Ljubljana

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.