“Here in Austria we want to make sure you have a unique experience,” said Professor Asci. “That’s why you’re in class on Thanksgiving.” It is true, for the first time ever in my life and probably the last, I had class on Thanksgiving day. It really wasn’t too bad but it did contribute to the feeling that Thanksgiving was just another ordinary day. The evening festivities began with dinner in the Mensa (our cafeteria) which I must say made me miss home : ( Our Thanksgiving dinner was turkey, peas, and mashed potatoes, nothing too exciting. The [View Full Entry]

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It was our first free weekend to travel anywhere in Europe we wanted. So six of us girls packed our bags and headed off to Switzerland. It was perhaps the best first trip one could ever take because it taught us so many truths about backpacking through Europe. The most important being that the only thing you can really count on is things never going as planned. Gaming, Austria (where I live) is like no other place in the world. Basically, since the town is so small and there aren’t accessible means of public transportation, hitchhiking is an acceptable thing to [View Full Entry]

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Austria is a pretty crazy place that is all about protecting the environment. So knowing this it is no surprise that they have six different categories for their trash. There’s paper, plastic, metal, bio (all things that were at one time living…hair, bananas, orange peels and the like), restmüll (everything that doesn’t fit into another category) and problem trash (if after restmüll you still don’t know what to do with it…it’s a problem). Those are just the six main categories, if all else fails and we can’t figure out what pile to put our trash i [View Full Entry]

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Our pilgrimage to Poland ended with a trip to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Europe’s most famous shrine. The shrine gets its fame from the icon of the Black Madonna which has been the source of numerous miracles. The origin of the icon is unknown but one legend says that Saint Luke the Evangelist painted the portrait on a table made by Jesus himself. Saint Helena discovered the image while in Jerusalem searching for the Holy Cross and took it home to Constantinople where it would remain for the next five hundred years. In 803 the image was given [View Full Entry]

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I’ve read about it in books and watched it in movies but nothing can compare to the reality of being there. I don’t even know where to begin writing about the experience. The day I spent at Auschwitz is something that will take a lifetime to process. It put an entirely new dimension on something that I have heard about my entire life. When I walked out of the camp that day any doubt that something like that could have actually happened was removed from my mind. But it wasn’t so much like I ever doubted it, it was just that [View Full Entry]

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Day 2 in Poland began with a visit to John Paul II’s house in Wadowice, Poland. It was amazing to see the place where JPII spent the first eighteen years of his life, the years that laid the ground work for the person he would become. (There’s a thought, I walked around on the same ground as JPII did during the years of his formation). We also got to see the Basilica right next to his house where he was an altar server and I have to say it was one of my favorite churches because it was so cute. This [View Full Entry]

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After our visit to Krakow we headed to the Shrine of the Divine Mercy in Lagiewiniki, Poland. The Shrine of the Divine Mercy is where St. Faustina lived when she had several apparitions. I want to say she had somewhere around 72 apparitions, but I could be wrong on that one, it was a lot though. All of her apparitions are contained in her diary (The Diary of Saint Faustina). In one apparition Christ revealed to her the image of the Divine Mercy and taught her how to pray the Divine Mercy chaplet. The Divine Mercy chaplet is a devotion that [View Full Entry]

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Poland has never been a place I’ve really wanted to go to; in all honesty I’ve given it very little thought and had low expectations when I did actually go. I wasn’t surprised that when we arrived in Krakow it was foggy and dreary, but in spite of how it started Poland surprised me. I can’t say it was a really fun trip, it was more of several life changing experiences piled into one weekend. We were constantly in motion moving from Krakow to the Divine Mercy Shrine to Auschwitz and then to Czestochowa. We were so busy that if lunch [View Full Entry]

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Well I’m sure many of you are thinking that I’ve been slacking on journaling about my travels. But the real, honest truth is that things have been insanely busy on this side of the world. Not only do I find myself buried in school work but I’m also on sensory overload. There are so many new things and I’ve had so many cultural experiences, all of which have been fun and amazing, but at the same time they can be very draining because of the time it takes to process everything. But enough of that and on to the exciting stuff. [View Full Entry]

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Saturday we took a day trip to Vienna, which was a blast! The day began with mass at the “Minorite Church” which was modeled after St. Stephen’s Cathedral and is one of the oldest and most artistic churches in Vienna. Once again I was in awe of the magnificent artwork. They had a mosaic of The Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci made out of little tiles which was gorgeous! After mass we went to the Augustinerstr for lunch. They had amazing food and it was my first experience with venier sniztzel. We were really excited about it at first because [View Full Entry]

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