March 16-18, 2007 - My buddy assigned to me by the school here in Wiener Neustadt, Matthias, is the best buddy that anyone could possibly ask for. This weekend, he invited a few of us (the other Adam from Drake and two canadian girls, Monica and Jacqueline) to go to his father's cabin in Corinthia in the Austrian Alps. After a 3 1/2 hour drive from Wiener Neustadt we arrived at the cabin and quickly went to sleep. We woke up Friday morning at 8am and drove an hour to the Nassfeld ski resort. We were doubting how much snow there [View Full Entry]

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Sunday March 4, 2007 - After a very sombering experience at Mauthausen, I decided it would be good to do something more upbeat and fun. On the train ride home from Mauthausen Tyler and I decided we would find a train to Bratislava that night. I knew absolutely nothing about Bratislava so I first had to ask him what country it was in. Of course it is the capitol of Slovokia. So after we got off the trian from Mauthausen, we came back to the dorms and grabbed some stuff to take for the night. We made our trian and were [View Full Entry]

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Saturday March 3, 2007 - On Saturday a few of us decided to go and visit a concentration camp in Austria. It is located in Mauthausen, Austria and was the largest camp within Austria. Getting to the camp was a bit of a struggle though. We woke up Saturday morning to catch the 7:30 bus to the Wiener Neustadt train station, then took a train to Vienna, then in Vienna took the subway to another train, where we finally got on a train headed towards Salzburg. We had to switch trains one more time before we finally arrived in the town [View Full Entry]

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Friday February 24, 2007 - Our German teacher, Herr Sulzgruber, thought it would be good to take our class on a tour of Wiener Neustadt. He is an officer in the Austrian army and has also written several books on Wiener Neustadt and its past. We started our tour at the Reckturm. It means Rack Tower in engish. It was built used as storage of torture equipment in the beginning of the 13th century. It is the nothwest corner of the original city limits and next to it are some of the old remaining walls of that limit. Today the Reckturm [View Full Entry]

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On Friday night, almost all of the international students from the school boarded a bus headed for Venice. We left at midnight and arrived in Venice shortly after 8am. The trip was planned by the International office here at the school to let us experience the Carnival of Venice. The Carnival in Venice is said to have originated from a victory of the "Serenissima Repubblica" (that is Venice: in those times it was a powerful state), in the war against Ulrico, Patriarch of Aquileia, in the year 1162. To celebrate this victory, dances started to take place every year in St. [View Full Entry]

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Our flight was scheduled to leave O'hare at 2:33pm on the 6th but because of snow, (and some stupidity on United's part) we did not take off untill after 7:30pm. Because we took off over 5 hours late, we missed our connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany. It was a little bit of a worry but it worked out well and we got on another small plane to Vienna less than an hour later. Once we arrived in Vienna, we were greeted by our "Buddies" who are a couple of local guys assigned to help us transition us to life in Austria. [View Full Entry]

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