i woke up way too early (second night of shenanigans and 3-4 hours of sleep) and cleaned/packed up the rest of my stuff. that was painful. leah and emily crashed at my place in one of the vacated rooms and helped me get my stuff out.

after checking in at the hostel, we went over to the flohmarkt, which i enjoyed much more because it was not extremely hot and i also felt much more confident about talking to the vendors. i bought an awesome dress/long shirt thing for 6€ and leah bought a pashima. i was pretty proud of my german speaking with the vendors, especially with one lady who was describing a chinese coat emily was interested in. it was like all of the vocabulary we learned in that chapter in german 101 about clothing.

we had lunch at the naschmarkt, walked by the secession building and karlskirche, and ascended the mountain to krapfenwaldbad. the pool/grounds were almost completely empty, and by the end of our visit i think we were the only people there.

 

that is insane, because it's usually extremely crowded because people just hang out there all day, but it was really cold. we swam for about 5 minutes, which was probably too long. however, we had the amazing view of vienna all to ourselves, and i actually had my camera with me this time, so get jealous of this view:

on the way back, got off at spittelau to show them the hundertwasser factory:

we went back to the center and met justin before his train left at westbahnhof. instead of getting dinner, which would take a long time, we opted for a viennese dessert tour. emily and leah got sachertorte and apfelstrufel, and i got marillen knödel (apricot dumplings with whipped cream and strawberry sauce). i think mine won, it was so beautiful:

(jealous that he missed the dessert tour)

emily liebt sachertorte


on the way back to the hostel, we stopped by the haus des meers, an old WWII-era defense thingy that is now and aquarium/panorama view tower/rock climbing wall. there was a playground there as well.

then we headed back to the hostel and hung out for a little while. the fourth person in our room was there and we talked with her for a while - she is named flora, she lives in oxford and she is backpacking by herself for 6 weeks or so. we invited her out with us. first, we stopped at zanoni & zanoni, the really amazing ice cream/gelato place near my school. our plan was to go to a kareoke bar to hear german-speakers sing english songs really badly, but all the ones we heard were too good at english for it to be that amusing. i didn't enjoy the expensive/small/smoky/boring place we went, and then i took them to dickie mac's, mostly because i wanted to go to dickie mac's for the last time. we played a lot of 10 fingers, which was good bonding, especially with flora. i discovered that the pub's basement rooms were even larger than the first floor, which means that place is HUGE.

we left pretty late, like 3, and satisfied emily's craving for chinese fast food noodles at schwedenplatz, my favorite place for food. there are like two straight blocks of food stands that are great. i do not feel bad about eating the food stand food at all, especially when it's falafel or kebap, my two main european food groups. i am going to cry so hard when i want that in richmond and i can't get it.

schließlich

last day of classes! this was a mostly really frustrating day, unfortunately. we had to go to the police station to do important travel stuff. i was dumb and forgot my passport and had to go all the way back to the dorm and then back to stephansplatz again which took way too long. then i stressed out for a really long time about contacting emily and leah and did not enjoy our class party because of that, then i had to miss our last dinner to go get them from the 7. bezirk. that sucked.

then we met up with my class and went to the schönbrunn tiergarten (zoo) for our private evening tour. zoos are much cooler when they are completely empty! it's kind of weird that it's attacted to schönbrunn though.

hahahha nice try spencer.

i wish everyone didn't have to pack immediately after because i felt like we should have had a bigger bang for the end of this trip.

(almost everyone...)

later, a bunch of people accumulated in my apartment to get rid of their food and drink and made a huge and delicious mess. it would have been more fun if i didn't have to clean ALL OF THE DISHES afterwards, but i did get to keep a lot of stuff because i'm the only one not going on an airplane soon.

 

 i picked up emily and leah from westbahnhof in the evening. after getting them to their hostel, we went out to several places! the first was the final event of cultura wien, the heuriger party. the heuriger (a wine garden) was far north and we had to take the strassenbahn to get there. after some lost/confused in the rain times, we eventually arrived near the end of the event. while waiting for the strassenbahn outside of the u-bahn, i had the amusing experience of seeing almost everyone i know in another strassenbahn going the opposite direction at the stop. hehehe

we had a glass of wine each and i met some people from other classes that i had seen a lot but never talked to. one was ixchin (?), a guy from china who goes to school in france, and a guy from turkey whose name i never really got (he was rather drunk). the former talked about racism against asians in france (who knew?) and the latter talked about his long trip to NYC/ocean city/virginia beach.

then we met up with jessica, anne, and two düsseldorfers they met on the u-bahn at the prater to go ~dancing~. it was fun and very different in mostly good ways from clubs in the U.S.
#1 - no cover! interestingly, to pay for drinks they gave everyone a card to use at the bars. to get out, you had to pay your whole tab at the exit. i'd never seen that before, but i don't go to a lot of clubs/buy a lot of drinks anyway so maybe it's not that special.
#2 - more dancing space! i actually had room to move around and didn't feel like i would die if i slipped or anything. also when someone wants to dance, they don't just come over and grab your hips immediately.
#3 - more attractive people! although not by much.
i had an interesting experience with talking to some guy completely in german! absolutely no english was used in this conversation and i only had to ask him what he meant a few times. unfortunately he got a little creepy by the end, but he helped us get home on the night bus.

we got back around 4:30 AM. anne and i ate her delicious delicious magnum ice cream bars as the sun rose. that was a good night.

ein österreicher, part II

my second official interaction with an austrian stranger was unexpected, but did not go as badly as it could have. i think it was a good demonstration of how much better i've gotten.

i ordered my eurail ticket for next month a few days ago. because i did a stupid thing and waited too long to get this out of the way, i had to get it speed delivered before we leave the dorm, and i was very nervous that it would arrive too late and i would have had wasted $300! but yesterday, a note was left for me on our building. we figured it was from a package company and they couldn't get into the building for the mail. this morning, i called the number and spoke (auf Englisch) to the receptionist, and she said they would leave it outside the building if i wasn't outside to pick it up.

well, actually, some hours later around 11:30, i got a call from a strange austrian number. i answered, and deciphered that it was the package delivery. i asked, "sprechen Sie Englisch?" and he said no, to my surprise. that's never happened before. anyway, he kept talking and i ascertained that he was outside and he was asking me if i could also come down. i told him "ja, ich jetzt kommen" repeatedly but he kept talking and talking, and i eventually got through to him that "ich bin hier!" and "ich komme in zwei minuten". i got downstairs and greeted him and his package trolley. i forgot a little bit about what happened here, but successfully completed the package receiving ritual completely in german. so now i have my eurail ticket a few days early and a strange interaction with a strange person! 


i told a few people about this, and they agreed that having to talk on the phone to someone in a different language is really difficult. it is, because you don't get the body language -- none to see if the other person understands you, none to gesture to help communicate your meaning, etc. but i could actually understand him about as well as i could people i speak to in person. maybe it was because there were less distractions. also, this only furthered my belief that i usually only have to understand two or three words in a sentence to get the meaning, which is what i've been doing for the last week.

yesterday amber told me that my german has improved a lot from the beginning. hearing people like her and erik say this gives me a lot more confidence. as i've said before, it gives me some arbitrary checkpoint of progress to have other people observe and give me feedback. i'm thinking back to the first weeks, and yeah, i have gotten a lot better. in cultura wien, i can speak much more fluidly and speak in german to the professors about 95% of the time (unlike the other three people from our group, who are at about 50%. speaking of this, i'm so sick of them telling these stories to our classes, mostly if not entirely in english about things that are completely irrelevant to everyone else. if they were told in german, it wouldn't be so bad. however, i'm pretty sure that the austrian, german, romanian, polish, or italian people in our night class give no Scheiße about the homeless population in richmond. i feel like this is a very american thing to do. maybe i'm taking this way too seriously, but no, i do feel like it's pretty arrogant to go on and on about this type of thing, and again it would be a different story if they were talking in german. but since they weren't, it was like they thought talking about some small, relatively unknown city in america was the most important thing we could be doing.)

musing

right now i have no idea how many journal entries i have. i'm sitting with spencer and marielle in marielle's room and it's almost 2 AM. we just got our laundry. i am going to be More Thoughtful, partially because that's what's more important to remember in a while, and partially because spencer just read us some of his journal and i thought it was really good.

okay, here we go. they're writing down all of my silly quotes right now. waaaaaaaay back in richmond, in may or june or whatever, i remember looking around that classroom and wondering what would happen to all of us, and not really believing that in a short while we would all be stuck in close quarters together for a month in a foreign country. automatically bonded, like a family. i did not see any one person i was immediately drawn to as a potential Good Friend, or really anyone who i saw and thought looked particularly interesting.

in the beginning, i felt very surpressed by the personalities i was initially surrounded with. that is, jessica and anne, who are BFFs and have 'stronger' personalities than i do, and also justin and tony who kind of knew each other and anne from before. i felt like a weird parasite, especially being younger than all of them. i was glad to be included on that first night out on the 4th of july, but i was too quiet. i don't know why i get that way when i feel so comfortable around them now. it was only that first week i was so oppressed, before the melk/dürnstein trip. i think it was climbing up that mountain that broke down some barriers for me.

one of the most wonderful things about this trip has been how this random strand of people from my university (and a few others) is now definitively bonded. i would probably barely cross paths with any of them without this trip, and even if i did meet them somewhere we wouldn't become Friends under normal circumstances. Especially spencer and marielle, who go elsewhere, would carry their lives on completely independent of me and my life, not even slightly aware of my existence. then there's amber, whom i definitely would never would have met since she lives in germany. somehow it feels more amazing about the other americans, though, since it seems more magical that we all signed up, basically, to meet each other. the chances that, for example, me and spencer (who is from georgia) would ever meet under any circumstances are impossibly small! and yet, here we are, two meters away from each other in kandlgasse 30.

i'm glad i get to still hang out with most of them back in richmond. i want to, but i also know that these things sometimes don't happen. i know that i won't see a lot of them very often, no matter what our bond is here. i'm glad i got to meet them at all, and i hope that they take some part of me back too.

hundertwasser, noch einmal

Am Montag, wir haben Hundertwasser Haus und Kunst Haus Wien besucht. Ich habe da schon gesehen, aber, zum zweiten Mal war auch sehr gut.

Man kann in das Hundertwasserhaus wohnen! Das Gebäude ist auch einen Wald:

 

Dann haben wir zu Kunst Haus Wien gegangen. In das Museum, Fotos sind leider verboden. Aber, ich habe eine Zeichnung in mein Skizzenbuch gemacht. Es gibt viele Pflanze und Baumen auf jeden Stock. Die Garten ist auch draußend! Aber, sie ist innerhalb von die Gebäuern. Sehr schön, sehr grün:

Ich LIEBE Herr Hundertwasser. Ich liebe seine Ideologie und seine Bilder und seine Gebäude!!! Er ist meinen Held.

chaos in the end

falling behind again! i have to write about the salzburg/alps weekend and hundertwasser haus visit take two. they're going to be full of really pretty photos...eventually. i have EVEN LESS TIME than usual because of afternoon class/cramming all the stuff i want to do in the last four days/my friends from richmond are visiting me friday-sunday/i have to get this hamburg hostel stuff figured out, seriously.

but today...
i spoke with my friend erik over skype early this morning for two hours. we met in our german 101 class. it was about 9:00 AM here and 3:00 AM for him, but it was a good conversation. about 1/3 was in german! go us. i felt much more confident talking to him than to people here, and i think it's because i know when i say wrong things he probably wouldn't notice. it's good practice for both of us! i'm glad that i'll have at least some way to use german back in richmond if i don't get into 201. (it's so suspenseful!). unfortunately, i had planned on researching stuff for hamburg in this time, and that didn't happen.

then i went to Frau Lonnes's brunch at an italian restaurant. surprisingly few people showed up, considering it was a free brunch at a nice restaurant, and not even that early in the morning. i can't imagine why you wouldn't take advantage of FREE BRUNCH. Ich habe Grünsalat und Pasta mit Gemüse von dem Tagesmenü bestellt, und es war sehr lecker. Diese Monat, ich habe vor jetzt keine Brokkoli gegessen. anyway. Frau Lonnes's cousin aus Deutschland joined us, and I felt pretty proud/astonished that I could understand him. Understand meaning I could get enough words out of what he said to me to answer the question! So it was not lucid, but I could keep up! He asked me about why I'm going to Germany/what I'm doing there/why I'm going to Mainz, etc, and I told him (very basically, but he understood so alles gut, ja.

all of us were late for class. we are learning vocabulary about Weihnacht und Silvester and it makes me frustrated because I think it's a waste of time. The only new grammatical thing I learned in this entire class was the past perfect tense, and I'm pretty sure they covered a lot more than that in 102 (judging by what Erik has told me).

I went to the Haus der Musik after class and ran into Julia and Nick there, although we didn't stay together. It would have been a fun museum to go through with a friend...a different friend though. There was some fun stuff, but it was kind of a let down because a lot of the exhibits seemed really cool, but they didn't work. I actually really enjoyed the third floor, which was all about the famous composers. So many of them were born or worked in Wien, it's really amazing. So many famous people have walked through the city on the same paths that I do every day. Wien ist wunderbar.

wow

it's been a while. i've lost a few days but i want to remember what happened! i want to remember every day, or at least put my memories in this locker.

we got back a few hours ago from the great salzburg weekend trip. it was just as Interesting as i thought it would be, but in different ways for sure. this area is so beautiful sometimes i really seriously feel like crying. upon my return, i will be either disgusted with the U.S. (mostly virginian) landscape, or appreciate it in a whole new way. i feel like it's going to be the former, though. i think about the land we passed today on the train coming back compared to the land i pass on my way south on 1-95. we've just vomited up horrible buildings everywhere, everything is so over-pratically industrialized. concrete, grayness, dark green and gray plastic roofs, parking lots, pathetic trees planted out of guilt and not love, asphalt, cars, signs...ugh....

all of the land i saw today made me want to cry it was so beautiful. seriously. i didn't, but seeing the tops towering alps turn into clouds and disappear above that lake was so incredible. i want someone to drop envelopes filled with € into my bike basket as i bike across europe, drinking kaffee and eating semmel mit fleisch und knödel all the time, sleeping in a hammock over the donau in perfect weather. i don't want "Real Life" to happen to me ever. there's not enough time for that.

salzburg part III

okay, this post shouldn't be called salzburg anything because we weren't in salzburg at all, but it's consistent! here's where we went this weekend:

had breakfast courtesy of the Gastehof Hochsteinalm, then headed back down the mountain to be ferried back to the train. it was still really rainy and cold and sad. all day, the views would have been epic had it not been for all the clouds, but i can't complain too much about that because it was still beautiful, just in a less postcardy way.



we caught our next train to Bad Ischl, where we caught a bus (apparently the tracks were broken after this) to Hallstatt.



the views of the mountains were still amazing, but me and a few others got really nauseous in this long, twisty tunnel we went through.

in Hallstatt, we took a tram up a mountain to the salt mines. that was also really cold, especially because were were still very feuscht. i can't believe how long the mines have been in use!!!! this one is the oldest in the world, apparently. we don't have stuff like that in the U.S., at least nothing that the white people didn't mess up. nice going. our tour guide was an austrian stallion who had the capacity to go 40 km/h down the underground slides. he was quite the specimen. i thought too much about being INSIDE of a MOUNTAIN and became uncomfortable with my spacial placement. at the end, we took a little train out of the mountain which just kept going and going in this small tunnel at a slight decline, which was horrifyingly similar to a significant part in House of Leaves (an amazing and truly terrifying book). overall, the tour itself was actually not that great, for some reason, and i don't think i really learned anything about salt. the group was really big, which is not a great thing when you're walking around in a mine, and every time the guide switched to english all the german-speaking people immediately started talking to each other so it was hard to hear. the best part of this was the slides we had to go down to get to other levels of the maze. here's an underground lake, the only photo i took:




descending, still raining, towards food. i am using this word too much in this entry, but i was horrified at how many people are STILL ORDERING in ENGLISH. and not only ordering in english, but not even trying to use german phrases. seriously?? we get more practice ordering food than anything else! anyway, hallstatt is yet another quaint, small town that is also content to just be really scenic. it had these cool terraced houses looking over the lake:

 

(I just looked up Hallstatt on Wikipedia, and apparently some Chinese real-estate firm intends to build a complete replica of this town somewhere in China. that is...really weird.)

here's devio beating up florian for the last time. what a bully.

as our train pulled back into wien several hours later, i felt exhilarated to be coming back to a place i recognized, but also a little sad to realize that i don't feel entirely comfortable in the place i most consider 'home' right now. i was in a blindingly good mood though! the whole trip basically continued to polarize me towards and against certain people.

salzburg part II

this morning, we had a nice hostel breakfast. i became frustrated with people and left for the Festung Hohensalzburg on the hill alone (for some reason, almost always no one ends up following me on these things i want to do, and i definitely waited around for nothing). it was surprisingly easy to find. i was upset that there was no student discount, but the ticket covered all of the museums in the () plus at least one tour, so i guess it evened out. i really enjoyed looking at the old armor and weapons they had. i learned the word for armor: Rüstungstiele! i've been pretty into Rüstungstiele ever since i went to Köln, meaning i want to draw it all the time.



the watchtower was also a highlight, despite the rain. good views are always good views.







we got back to the hauptbahnhof, and a few trains later, we arrived at the small, silent, and beautiful town of Traunkirchen surrounded by the Alps and the Hallstätter See. so beautiful. the train ride itself was incredible, passing the lakes and clouds hovering over the mountains. wow.









(the others wanted to photograph me sitting here, aww)










two adult swans and their baby swan hung out with us for a little while, by which i mean they came uncomfortably close and hissed.




Frau Lonnes's friends met us at the lake and got us all up to the trail by car.



then we began the ascent up the mountain in the rain and the cold. it was definitely not the highlight of the trip, i'll say that much. at LAST we arrived at our home for the night, a large house/ranch thing in the middle of nowhere surrounded by llama and goat fields, and, strangely, two porcupines.




we immediately sat down to drink warm things and eat good food. i ate some venison + dumpling thing that was the best ever (but did not completely agree with my stomach, i discovered later) and PROBABLY one of the best cups of coffee i've ever had, and not just because ich war sehr kalt und feuscht.

it was here we became acquainted with florian, the 10 year old son of Frau Lonnes's friends. he spoke no english and we could barely understand him most of the time, but it wasn't really necessary because he behaved like every other hyper 10 year old i've ever met. he took pictures of us with his 3DS, which blew my mind. it was surreal coming across that technology for the first time in some obscure, desolate part of austria in the alps, surrounded by wooden furniture and walls. i wonder if florian will remember us.

we played some uno, some dice game, and then later a game of kings with a smaller faction of the VCU group. i thought it was fun and i learned a lot. i wish i could have learned the traditional austrian games, but i don't think my german would have been good enough to follow it. but who knows? i've surprised myself a lot with that. also, the guys were hilariously/excessively uncomfortable with their 4 bunk beds in a row arrangement, it was like two really really wide beds stacked on top of each other.

salzburg part I

(going to try to keep this short, but we'll see)
(....nope)

after class, we gathered at the train station to go to salzburg. some people hadn't packed at all for some reason, which i didn't really understand, but everyone made it on the train this time. yay!
we arrived in salzburg some hours later and followed frau lonnes around in our little flock onto a bus, onto an elevator, then hiking a bit to our mountaintop hostel. the view was great. this hostel experience was much…smaller than my first one in tulln. our 6 person room was just three bunk beds crammed as closely as they could be crammed. we didn't spend much time there though, and immediately headed down the many many stairs to the city. i left my camera, which was a good idea.



a big group of us walked around for a while looking for somewhere to eat. salzburg is not my favorite european city, but i didn't expect it to be. jessica and i stopped to stare at some really awesome prints and paintings in a gallery window. we realized that the door was actually open, so we went in and met the artist, peter gerl (???). i gave up speaking in german quickly for the sake of better communication. i told him  that his work, especially the figures and the architectural drawings reminded me of schiele's and we talked about his lines being great. he showed us his studio space (which was very, very clean) and asked me to draw in his sketchbook (i drew a building running with human legs) and we bought some postcards. he was a really nice guy, i wish we could have had more of a common language because i bet the conversation would have been more interesting. he encouraged me to email him, which i did but to no reply (yet!). that was a magical happening.

jessica and i caught up to the others in a typical austrian-food restaurant. i ordered some pasta with a salad because i was craving green things. the group split up a little here, and there was some silliness with certain people still not understanding tip ettiquite. we headed over to an irish pub and met an irish gentleman who promised to serenade us with his song "eggs" which is supposedly a hit single in ireland. however, anne, jessica, justin and i left to explore some more salzburger night life. we went to another irish pub, then a bar that falsely advertised kareoke. this was much louder and clubbier than the other places and we soon realized that it was mostly filled with 18 year olds. one of them approached us and really insisted on dancing with jessica and hung around for a while and ultimately ended up knocking his beer over onto me, breaking the glass, going away, then coming back and telling anne to buy him another beer because someone spilled his. apparently he also threw the broken glass parts into the wall for no reason. i didn't like him. his friend serenaded justin "country roads" in the bathroom, though. he was a mess.

we got a little lost on the way to our hostel. at one point we could see it wayyyy off in the distance on the mountain, which was hilarious and discouraging. luckily salzburg is not that big. when we finally got to the mountain stairs, we had to walk right next to a man sleeping in a cave adjacent to the stair path. he woke up when we walked by and started groaning stuff at us which made me almost poop myself. so scary.

not long after we finally got to the hostel, a rather upset spencer called me. everyone knows this story by now, but basically marielle had pre-birthday partied too much and was sick, and some austrian people insisted on calling an ambulace for her. luckily the paramedics just told her to go home, which they did, and everyone went to bed.

don

The highlight of this day was our adventure to see Sennentuntschi. This is a Swiss movie that Anne really wanted to see for some reason. I am well-acquainted to really bizarre horror movies thanks to my friends, so this one didn't phase me as much as I think it did to Anne, Jessica, Justin, and Jason, but there were some interesting parts, definitely.

The theater (one of the only two showing it in Vienna) was in Gasometer in Simmering, a place we only knew because of Frau Lonnes' stories about shenanigans in the old gas towers. I just looked this place up, and the region is based around the four HUGE former gas tanks that are now apartments. Eventually we figured out that the mall place that housed the theater also went under/was connected to the four towers. I looked up through a huge ceiling window and saw that we were under a ring of apartments! Here are some pictures I found on the internet:

two of the four gasometer buildings (picture from this guy's flickr page)

 

 At the bottom is one of the windows I looked up from.

Another inside-out building. Grass growing inside, which is still like an outside? Only in Wien.

These four buildings have their own community, which is closely tied to the mostly underground mall/Kino/restaurant area. It's like a hidden little city center. Above ground, Gasometer looked pretty dreary and industrial and desolated. We got lost for a little while, so I experienced some of this.

Anyway, I was apprehensive about paying to see a movie entirely in German (no subtitles!) because it seemed exhausting to either ask what was going on or try really hard to understand the people. I could actually follow the movie, though, and only had to ask a few questions about specific words. When we got out, I did learn that I missed or misunderstood some relatively important plot points, but I could follow the gist of it. The whole thing took place in the Alps (albeit the Schweizer Alps, aber, es ist mir egal) so it was pretty hilarious/terrifying to know we were to be going there the next day.

Trailer for Sennentuntschi:

mitt

Maneuvering through the lack of U6 line (so sad), I went to the Hundertwasser Haus and Kunst Haus Wien between morning and evening class. I was mad at myself for wasting away more time than I should have before getting there because the KHW is so amazing. I'm glad I'm going there AGAIN FOR "FREE" tomorrow because I didn't bring the camera.

Seeing the Hundertwasser Haus is completely different from seeing it online. I'll post more about Hundertwasser when I get images (!), but he is in my tier of Life Heroes, definitely. His artistic philosophy itself is inspiring. I can see myself in his paintings.

I had to leave earlier than I wanted to in order to get to class that evening. I became in a Bad Mood because of Disappointments and got home as soon as I could with the intention of painting for a while, but ended up talking to Karla and Greg on Skype for a while. Karla is in the Phillipines for most of the summer, but for some reason she was up at 4 AM her time/10 PM my time/5 PM Greg's time. We've been friends for 12 or something years and we live within 1-5 minute walking distance from each other (it's amazing). But now we are 4,440 miles (me to Greg) and 6,128 miles (me to Karla) apart. I can't comprehend that. The world is too small.

dididienstag

wow a free day! this hasn't happened for a while.

morgensklasse, we got our test back and i got a 1 (an A in österreich. they grade on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being SUPER and 5 being SCHLECT. in deutschland and a lot of other places, the scale is inverted.) and did ~the best in the class~. i'm a little surprised, since i know at least andrei knows his stuff and is probably also better at studying than me based on his personality. well, not going to complain. go me.
we looked up a lot of new words. it was exhilirating. i love how evita describes the word in deutsch because she doesn't know it in english and we figure it out. it's even more interesting when the deutschwort falls in between the english word and you have to kind of squint to get the meaning right.

jessica und ich sind mit u-bahn, strassenbahn, und bus nach krapfelwaldbad gefahren. i guess i would use "zu" instead of "nach", because techically we were just inside the city limits, but we got off the bus too late and had to walk down this awesomely twisty road to a waldweg (a great word i just made up). we asked a lady auf deutsch if this was the krapfenwaldbad, and she said yes and then started telling us in english how it is "the most beautiful............bath in the city". ("bad" = bath, but also pool. we thought it was amusing)

i'm sure the krapfen is the most beautiful bath in the city because it was pretty beautiful. there are at least three pools, but the best part is the sloping grassy hills to lounge on overlooking the entire city. as far as the eye can see, white buildings. and some churches. in america, this sort of place would be packed, noisy, full of trash, with huge groups and families everywhere. but here it was mostly young cute couples, small groups of friends, and old people just hanging out. jessica thinks it's because europeans don't have as many kids as americans.

i was looking for the bathroom at one point, and naturally headed towards a door labeled "DAMEN". i walked into a locker room, and saw a nice enclosed area with sunbathers lying around on flat benches. i thought it looked very pretty, and then i noticed that all of them were completely naked and understood why "kinder unter 15 Jahre [words i didn't understand] verboden" was posted outside the room. tee hee ehehe.

later this evening, we went out to the usual irish pub that i don't want to go to anymore for a variety of reasons. partially because the helles bier schmeckt mir nicht gut, but mostly because it's too far away to be worth it! we got to the u-bahnhof too late again, but this time handled it a lot better than the first week and hailed a cab. the good part was that marielle, spencer, and tony went to the bathroom at mcdonalds in stephansplatz, which costs €0,50 each. however, you can use the receipt to get €0,50 off whatever on the menu, so we combined forces and got a mcflurry. we got the mystery flavor ("mandel") which turned out to mean almond. so now i know the word for almond.

ein österreicher, part I

I forgot to write about this for the first journal check! On our first Friday (9. Juli) i decided to take my free time and go to café museum near operngasse, with the secondary intension of having my First Stranger Interraction. Café Museum is well-known for its famous regulars, for example, my boyfriend Egon Schiele.

(keinen Dächerzeichnung, aber, Ich zeichne immer Kaffee gern.)

this was the first time i went to a cafe or eating place alone. i was confused and tried to order at the counter inside, but of course the waiters come and take your order at the tables. i chose a table outside with a good view of some dächer and drew them for my independent study thing. eventually the waiter came around and took my order. i thought i said it okay in german (although i found out later i pronounced the coffee, the "franciskaner" like "francis kanner" and not "franCISkaner", sehr blöd), but the waiter would reply or ask another question in english. i feel very stubborn for sticking to my bad german when i could be more competent in english, especially when he obviously knew that i was better at it. there's a weird balance of being polite and being practical here. i don't want to subject people to awkward situations because of my shortcomings in this culture, but i also REALLY don't want to seem like it's their job to understand my language, since i'm a guest here.

i told this to an austrian boy named Philipp i met in the Irish pub around Schwedenplatz a few days later (unfortunately, i never found him on facebook, so there is another lost connection flapping in the breeze). I was talking to him (in English) about English and German and how I wish I could talk to him in German instead of forcing him to talk to me in English. I think the attitude of what I've seen here of the American tourists is pretty embarrassing. I really think when you go to a foreign country you should at least make an effort, like learning the really basic stuff like "excuse me" and "thank you", because I think just those key polite phrases aren't as polite if you say them in English. I had a friend who went to Spain for a week a few years ago and he didn't know ANY Spanish when he went. His companion was pretty much fluent, but he complained that it was really uncomfortable because there was no English anywhere. Well, no shit, the world shouldn't conform to what makes foreign tourists comfortable.

Of course, the waiters at Café Museum didn't seem upset that I was pretty incompetent at their language. I did try, and they could tell when I didn't understand something and spoke in English, and I didn't speak in English at all to them. I sat outside for a long time, drawing, and a man came up to me and asked (auf Deutsch) to take a picture of me. (i wonder what became of that??? hm) I could decipher that, because he kept gesturing with his camera and I understood a few words. I should have thought to ask "warum?" though.

Then I went over to Karlskirche, just because it was there, and lounged for a little while on the convenient lounging pillows they have out. It's kind of a bizarre building. I've never seen those spiraling columns anywhere before. It does seem very much like the extremely symmetrical, geometric buildings in Vienna, like the Secession building.

(photo from flickr)

catch-up

busy as usual. i will post more about DEUTSCH (for frau lonnes) soon.

montag:
woke up not-so-rested after the bike trip. we took a test. my potential friend from this class has not been here for almost an entire week. oh well.

i didn't know we had the stephansdom tour after this and regretted my choice in foot attire. i had already been in the cathedral, seeing as it's right next to the u-bahnhof we go through all the time...i was pretty tired, so i didn't understand a lot of what renate was saying about the cathedral. then that lovely surprise hike up a really narrow staircase in a tower! climbing any stairs after a long bike ride is the last form of exercise i want, but before we knew what was happening we were climbingclimbingclimbing... it was different from the church in Brugge, because there were open spaces to take breaks/breaths on the way up. in die turm, we were trapped! it was a nice view at the top though. i saw hundertwasser's apartment! so many interesting rooftops in wien. there is so much more green up on top than there is on the ground.

then it was pretty much time for abendsklasse. one of our group members was in some sort of a grump mood and acted immaturely and rude towards steffi, which just is not cool because steffi doesn't deserve that, especially because she puts up with us (mostly this person) so well. it's so embarrassing to be forced to be associated with that attitude, because it's really like the worst-case american attitude manifesting itself.

after class, my friend amber and i walked around in search of the johannisbeere ottakringer bier, which was a sad failure. but we got some gösser radlers which were good anyway. just after we bought them from some random wurst stand, amber ran into her biology teacher or something from her high school on the street! it was pretty crazy, especially since he is from seattle. if we hadn't turned onto that street (at random) and stopped to buy the radlers, that never would have happened. even more amazingly, this is the second time she's ran into a high school teacher in wien in the last month.

eventually we wandered back and she showed me her apartment in the 3. bezirk. my first austrian apartment! i love seeing apartments. i wish i could see every apartment in this city, but i probably won't. hers is really huge, and really cheap for a one-bedroom (at least by our standards). she has it under weird circumstances though, so i don't know how normal that is.

weekend trip part two

BIKE TRIP CON'T:
(51 miles on Satuday: Melk - Tulln
20 miles on Sunday: Tulln - Wien)

i LOVE overnight shelters with gratis frühstück! especially in germany/austria, because i love their breakfast sandwich things SO MUCH, they are so delicious. so we had some free breakfast, then laid around outside for half an hour before the ~egon schiele museum~ opened. i have probably read it a thousand times, but i didn't realize that where i was SLEEPING was the same town that egon schiele slept in. i wish i knew it earlier so i could get all hot and bothered by that for longer, but oh well. the museum was small and they didn't have a lot of his, in my opinion, really great work (it's all at the leopold!), but they had a lot of precious little baby pictures of him and his sisters. aww. also an awesome drawing of a train he made when he was nur 10 Jahre alt. wow! it breaks my heart he died when he was just 28.

although we were still very sore from the previous day's 50 miles, we headed down the path toward wien. this path was also kind of boring. just straight flatness, river on one side, trees on the other. not open enough for me i guess. we got back easier than i expected, and went for a european-style swim in the Donaukanal. which was awesome. we passed some really awesome graffiti (and i'm not a fan of the graffiti style, but i could appreciate the craft of these) and eventually got on the U-Bahn at Spittelau. That's pretty much the end of that trip. I took photos, but they are on film.

that night, we went to a big restaurant at the Prater because Anne can't stop talking about Schweinstelze. that was an intense "meat asteriod", which is what they tell me i called it, but really delicious. i don't think i'd order it ever if i was my choice alone, but i'm glad i tried it! ~experiences~

weekend trip part one

the bike trip actually happened! anne and i planned pretty much the whole thing friday afternoon. we rented bikes from ig fahrrad basically down the street, and anne with her good german was able to get the 'rads for us friday evening to sunday night with only paying for two days!

we got on our S-bahn from Westbahnhof with no problems and rode an hour and fifteen minutes out to Melk...again. it was weird to be back in those places we had been just a week ago. the beginning of this stay in vienna already feels like a million years ago! an actual MILLION. but okay. luckily i remembered to figure out where the Donauradweg actually is, besides on the Donau. we biked a kind of scary/hilly/trafficy road for 15 minutes to where the 'weg actually was. then we started our 70 miles back to wien.

the route was pretty populated with families, couples, and Serious Bikers. the trail is flat and really well marked, and for a long time there was a road between us and the river, unfortunately. but we went through a ton of tiny villages that took 4 minutes to get through. the air smelled faintly of apricots, due to all of the apricot orchards in that area (lots!). i didn't know that. the scenery was amazing. obviously exactly what we saw on the boat last week, but there's something about the experience of pedaling yourself through it that makes it more awesome. mountains on both sides, steps of vineyards, red shingled houses scattered everywhere. i dig austria.

we stopped a few times, including once for ice cream. have i mentioned how superior the average ice cream is here to america? it's like creamy delicious gelato, but cheaper and they give you more of it! the route changed after we reached Krems, going into a more foresty setting. the land was also much more boring. we started getting tired around where we stopped to swim on this really long, boring part of the trail, about 30 km from Tulln, our destination. it started to be extremely uncomfortable to sit down around here too, but we still had at least 15 miles to go! luckily the scenery changed again at the last 10 miles to Tulln. flat fields of grain, sunflowers, and green plant stuff, power lines, houses, all bordered by foothills at the horizon. it was like being in a big basin.

eventually we got to Tulln and decided it would be worth it to sleep in the hostel we looked at, specifically for the BED, instead of unter den sterne. another time. this was my first hostel stay! the first of many. it was nicer than i expected. we were given two beds in a six bed room, but we were the only ones that showed up so we got a big room with no stranger awkwardness. we were pretty hungry, but it hurt too much to bike around to find a place to eat faster. i could not sit down on that seat. many of Tulln's restaurants were closed around 8:00, but we eventually found a restaurant in the middle of a block with a big menu. i got a Puntigamer (which i randomly ordered and i liked it a lot) and spaghetti carbonara. not the most austrian dish, but it was perfect. i have no idea how i'm going to order food while Alone in Germany because i'm not going to have an Anne or a Frau Lonnes to tell me what all the words mean.

after dinner, we walked around Tulln and had some small adventures, mainly watching old people dance and party and hang out on a boat restaurant on the Donau. then we went back and i passed out so hard.

mittel tag

• instead of sleeping in, i went to the donauinsel with jessica, devio, and later ann joined us. i painted and worked on my doodle cup and had some bonding conversation (at least i thought) with devio. more people are accumulating onto this weekend donau bike trip and i really hope everyone ends up coming!!! it would be super fun.
• then we went to mittagsklasse. it is so uncomfortably hot in those rooms. i am definitely going to appreciate air-conditioning soooo much more when i go back to the states, even if we ridiculously overdo it a lot of the time (e.g. the computer lab in franklin terrace, what IS THAT). peter disappeared during the freizeit, natürlich, so much for New Friends i guess. oh well. we practiced more pronouns and direction giving/comprehension, something that i know will be very practical in austria and germany.
I'm getting worried (natürlich) about how slow this class is going. i'm by no means an expert in this material, but we haven't learned anything we didn't do in GRMN 101. everything is really good practice, but if i do somehow make it into a 201 class if i don't know the gramatical points i'm not going to do very well.
• i met my other New Friend Amber (aus meine Abendsklasse) in Schwedensplatz and she took me to the best falafel place (or so they say). it was actually really good, less bland than most falafel pita things i get! and very filling für nur €3,50. we sat by Ruprectskirche (the oldest church in vienna, but not a tourist attraction because it's so much plainer compared to the fantastic buildings, z.b. Stephansdom and Karlskirche etc.)
Amber is from seattle but goes to university near hamburg. i can tell she's an INTP (like me) or something close to that, and those people and i always become uncannily good friends. we're going to see harry potter tomorrow night!!!! before all y'all in america, what up. Amber and I seem to be on the same level in class, but i am sure she is better at interacting with people outside of school. she told me about the differences between Deutsch, Hochdeutsch, and Austrian, and how she and her friends sometimes cannot understand anything the Austrians say. Likewise, sometimes they get snarky about her speaking Hochdeutsch. I hope it will be easier in comparison to here when I go to Hamburg/Mainz, because I think Frau Rhode taught us everything in Hoch. Wishful thinking?

• abendsklasse. We reviewed how to tell time.
• nach - had planned on going to the opening of the international danze festival with jessica, but i really didn't feel like standing and waiting around in the U-Bahn ANY MORE TODAY, switching trains three times, so i got some food at an underground grocery store that actually gave me a plastic bag to carry my stuff in. zum beispiel, when the cashier asked me if i wanted one (i probably inadvertently paid some money for it), this is what it sounded like: "mumbldmlumoentasche?" i know what tasche is. i get a really uncomfortable feeling when paying for stuff like this sometimes. some way that the cashiers look/talk to me like They Know, even if i'm just saying small thinks like "bitte schön" or "danke" y'know. HOW DO THEY KNOW? they totally know.
• i just skyped with my parents and they said i look tired.

müde

the last two days have been hard. hard because the schedule has been so so packed -- i leave the dorm between 8 or 9 AM and get back around 9 PM at least. when we don't have class, we have mandatory activities. i like the activities, but i have had no time to Do My Own Thing at all this week.

tuesday:
• kunsthistoriches museum in the morning. there were some really amazing HUGE Reubens paintings. i enjoyed the dürer/kranach/holbein exhibit because i saw a good handful of paintings i had studied in my art history classes last year. that's really exciting for me!
• mittagsklasse. it's very hot and very boring this week. i talked to peter, a canadian!, who seems like an interesting guy. too bad he disappears all the time.
• wandered around, got some coffee!
• waltz demo. i (and everyone else) was really hot and tired and really wasn't in the mood for any physical contact, but it was actually pleasant. we were just taught the basic basic eins-zwei-drei step and we did that over and over with different people for a really long time. i wish we could have learned more things because we definitely had time for it. i REALLY WISH i could go to a waltz ball and dance with handsome cravat-wearing aristocratic men in powdered wigs and red coats and high socks. what is happening to me.
• went out immediately after waltzing mit freunde to the Usual Place around stephansplatz. the security dude made me feel bad about german because i didn't understand what he was asking (auf Deutsch, natürlich) and he seemed exasperated. then i went over to to to an imbiss by schwedenplatz satisfy my insane falafel craving of the day. this time, i only said a few words but the guy started talking to me in english! why :( *
my mood improved after a beer, hearty conversation with the vcu crew, and meeting a nice austrian boy named philipp.
it was a good evening! all that matters is how you feel when you go home, anyway.


* i feel like i haven't been using as much german as i should be this week. probably this is because i've been spending more time with people (The Americans) and i'm pretty exhausted and class is not as fun for me as it was previously. maybe i'm frustrated. maybe i'm being too hard on myself. i realized today on one of the several trains i ride every day, that this is like what jonathan acts like with drawing -- like if he/i is/am not being productive or practicing in every single moment then it's a wasted moment and we're falling behind. that is the heart of it. i do make an effort every single time i go out and have to talk to someone, but for some reason i feel like it's not enough. then how can it be enough?

schönbrunn, montag

Today we went to Schönbrunn. Schönbrunn is a Very Famous Palace/Summer Residence/Schloss that a lot of really famous Austrians hung out in, including Maria Theresa, Sissi, Franz Joseph, etc. Its name is an abbreviated version of the translation of "Beautiful fountain". The inside rooms were amazing, but fotografieren was VERBODEN, so no pics. All the complex inlaid wooden floors made me wish Leah was here to explain how the hell they did all that. The interior was quintessential Rococo, and although it's still too frilly for my tastes I could appreciate the style a lot more seeing it in person. It's dazzling. I also walked through the room where 6-year-old Mozart gave his first big deal performance (thought of June here, hi June).



The gardens are incredibly large. There were a lot of impressive/ruined fountain sculptures. I think I'll come back and explore some more, like in the maze and the big hill, because we were all too tired and hot to do a lot of walking here. By the time we got there, there still weren't too many tourists! Last year this place got about 2.5 million visitors. Sheiße.



We got lunch before class. Jessica & Justin got some Brote from a restaurant around Stephansplatz, which, at least where we were (Bieradies Pub or something), was a really long piece of bread with cheese and other stuff:



Everyone in our group was hilariously tired today because of all our activities yesterday, getting back late, and waking up early. It's all really great though. I love this.