Grüss Gott von Wien!

Well I'm finally here. It has taken me about 6 weeks (6 awesome weeks I might add) but I am finally here in Österreich. I arrived at the airport on the 12th of February to an extremely warm welcome from my 'Buddy', Clara. (The University assigns each exchange student an Austrian student to help us find our feet when we first arrive) Clara had brought her Dad's car so I got chauffeur driven to my student accommodation. My room is on the 5th floor of a 17 storey building. It is all student accommodation so there are lots of cool facilities for everyone to use. Floors 5 to 8 are full of exchange students so there is always something interesting happening.

Anyway after I had unloaded all my baggage Clara took me to a hill that overlooks Vienna. There was a lot of snow around and it was awesome to walk through the vineyards there and see Vienna as night fell.

Over the next two weeks I had an introductory course to life in Vienna (OK Program). We did a few trips in and around Vienna and had a few lectures on topics like the Political System in Austria. I also signed up for a few trips that the Student Union organises for exchange students so in the next few months I will be going to Prague, Krakow and on a snowboarding trip to Zell Am See. In the afternoons I had a German Language Course for 2 and a half hours. After a short placement test I was put in the 3rd group, but this was a big mistake. The teacher didn't speak a word of english for the whole lesson and to make matters worse he chose me and a girl to have a conversation in front of the class... Those of you from Rossy know that 'Das ist mein Hamburger' is pretty much the extend of my German skills, so it was quite an embarrassing situation to say the least. Fortunately I was moved the next day to the second class where I understood about 40% of what was said, so a big improvement.

During the first week I went out to a few clubs with some other exchange students and had a really good time. In the first few days I was meeting about 10 new people every day so remembering names was quite hard. Especially when they are names like Stanimir, Pavla, Michaela, Sjoerd, Liekele, Nienke...

After the first week of the OK Program I went skiing with Clara and her friends. It was really nice of them to invite me, as they were all old school friends, and I had a great time hanging out with them. I had planned to only go for 4 days but I was having so much fun I stayed another day. Our days consisted of getting up around 9, having some breakfast and trying to make it to the slopes at about 11. Then we would ski until 4.30 with a short break for a coffee or hot chocolate. At nights we played cards and games like pictionary and charades until the early hours of the morning. I showed them 'Circle of Death' and they really enjoyed that, adding a few Austrian rules too.

One of Clara's friends is a ski instructor so she helped me on my first day of skiing and gave me lots of tips and suggestions. The first two days were quite frustrating as I kept falling over but the 3rd and 4th days were awesome. I could keep up with the others and go down most of the slopes. I tried a few jumps (only landing one) and tried out a speed slope. I got to 65km/hr but the hard part was stopping and they all had a great time laughing at my failed attempt. Overall I had a really awesome time and am now hoping to do as much skiing and snowboarding as I can while I'm here.

While I was away I missed out on a few trips and German lessons but I think that it was well worth it! I did manage to catch the last trip for the OK Program on the last Friday. We went to a small town called Melk about 1 hour north of Vienna. It is meant to be the oldest town in Austria. We had a guided tour around Stift Melk, a famous abbey, and then headed to a nearby winery to try some Austrian Wine. We tried about 5 white wines, 1 red and a special type of wine called Eiswein. When there is an early winter the grapes freeze before they can be harvested. Eiswein is made from these grapes and it is extremely sweet and quite expensive.

Well that was pretty much my first 2 weeks in Austria. I have had a great time so far and am really looking forward to the adventures I will have and the friendships I will make over the next year.

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