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.