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.