Saturday, 8/30 On my last whole day in Vienna, I slept in, despite not having a particularly late night. My mission for the day was to pack, work on my blogs, and get some last minute souvineers. Kelsey and I hung out in our apartment for awhile, both of us putting our stuff into our bags (of which I definitely had more!) and trying to polish off the rest of our food. Kelsey needed to iron her shorts, and I finally found a use for my travel iron. We decided to go to Cafe Central, a cafe in Vienna famous for [View Full Entry]

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Friday, 8/29 We had the day off from class today, and it was one of our classmate's birthday. We decided to sleep in and go to breakfast once everyone was ready. This type of planning should have been my red flag that it was going to be a long morning. Kelsey had gotten a recommendation from a friend about visiting Grinzing, a winery neighborhood in the north of Vienna. Combined with that tip and the Lonely Planet walking tour through the various winery neighborhoods, Kelsey and I were determined to spend our Friday checking out Vienna's wine gardens. With this plan [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, 8/27 The German word of the day is: Fußball (soccer). We were scheduled to take a tour of the UN headquarters today, and speak with a representative of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). My preparation questions are attached below! We had been instructed to bring our passports, so I put mine in my bag the night before. As I was getting dressed, I decided to try and dress a little bit on the nicer side, seeing as the last time our class visited the ambassador, only one of us dressed up at all. I had a business-casual top, and [View Full Entry]

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Tuesday, 8/26 We began the day with a class wrap-up of Mauthausen. It's a rather contentious issue even amongst my own class, so we ended up spending the entire class period discussing concentration camps and the Holocaust. We talked about the surrounding city, and the idea of what they did and didn't know during the war. My professor discussed life in a totalitarian state (like the Nazi regime) and how, historically, they are important to avoid because they're incredibly difficult to come out of. I'm supposed to discuss why and how the Holocaust happened, and who the perpetrators are. H [View Full Entry]

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Saturday, 8/23 I woke up early to pack for Prague. We saw that a train was leaving at 10am, so we decided to meet at 9:15 to make it to the station to buy our tickets. We hopped on the train, finding a cabin that was only occupied by one person so far. The lady in the cabin was from Australia, specifically from the southern island of Tasmania. She was a single mother who needed a break from her life and managed to get grandma to babysit her kids for two months as she frolicked around Europe. It didn't take long [View Full Entry]

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Friday, 8/22 We woke up early on Friday morning to meet the bus at 8am. I planned on sleeping the entire bus ride (2.5 hours) to the concentration camp, so I brought my neck pillow and earplugs. We jumped on the bus and I promptly curled into a little ball and fell asleep. I woke up right as we arrived at the camp. Everyone was a lot quieter than normal as we walked to the visitor center. Some of us wandered over to the cafe to grab some food before our tour- scheduled for noon. Mauthausen was the main concentration camp [View Full Entry]

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Thursday, 8/21 In class we discussed the fall of the Habsburgs. WWI was the end of the Austrian Monarchy, and the later leaders of Austria were of various Socialist affiliations. We discussed the reparations placed on Austria, and I can't seem to wrap my mind around the rationality behind doing that. Maybe I don't understand our current war with Iraq, but it does not appear to me that when the war concludes we are planning on demanding that Iraq compensate us for the pain they have caused our nation. It seems to me like people will be happy enough to just [View Full Entry]

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First and foremost, I need to whine a bit about this blog site that I am using. It has a faulty saving mechanism, and if you ever see my blogs end abruptly (like there is no period at the end of the sentence) than you can assume that something got cut off. So far it only seems like it cuts of a few sentences, so you're probably not missing out on much. Tuesday, 8/19 We headed to class a little bit early this morning. When we arrived at the institute, there were a ton of other students there. Apparently other programs [View Full Entry]

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Monday, 8/18 Melissa and I woke up early Monday morning, stuffed our faces at the breakfast buffet, and went to go find the rest of our group at the hostel. It was Shayna's birthday, so I poked into a few shops trying to find a birthday card and a small gift. I thought it was really important to make her feel recognized on her birthday. When we finally got the group together, I made everyone say, out loud, what they wanted to accomplish out of the day. Since my group was so big, there were a lot of conflicting agendas. I [View Full Entry]

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Friday, 8/15 After going out Thursday night, I came home and tried to sleep for the last portion of the night that I had left. For some reason, I was too anxious to sleep and felt like I was awake the whole night. I woke up early to make sure everything was packed for my trip. We had to meet at the Belvedere for another Dr. O tour at 10am. We took the streetcar over to the museum, and got our tickets and headed into the first exhibit. The first room we spent some time in was a display of a [View Full Entry]

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