Easter Vacation

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April 2nd 2009

Published: April 2nd 2009

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MooseIsLoose

Rettenbachklamm

Little bit of nature in the heart of the city.

Greetings all,

Since I haven't written on here in a while, I'm certain my avid readers are chomping at the bit. Anyways, tonight is the night that begins my Easter vacation and adventures. The last few weeks since Rachel left have been insanely busy, as I have so much work to do this semester, what with having many more classes than last semester. I have classes in 3 languages outside of German, which is also a challenge, and then the last week was spent doing at least 6 hours of research a day about the Russification of Finland in the 1800s and then Finland's freedom from Russia in 1917, culminating with a 45 minute presentation, in German no less, on Tuesday for a group of 20 Austrians. Needless to say, Monday night was a sleepless night. Since then, I've been winding down, getting things in order since I am about to embark on a 3-week trip!

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm saying Auf Wiedersehen to Graz until the 20th. Libor, Jana , Ivan , and I are driving up to Vienna tomorrow with our friend Jevgenij [born in Ukraine to Russian parents and now lives in the Czech Republic,

Austrian Nature

Looks different, huh?

if you follow that]. Jevgenij has his car here and is driving back to the Republic, so he's giving us a lift. The four of us will be spending the afternoon and evening in Vienna, before meeting several others at the train station for the 10:30pm to...Berlin!

There's a deal going on right now with the Austrian trains that to select European cities a ticket costs only 19Euro. Thus, about 8 of us are spending a few days in Berlin, experiencing the "German motherland"...though of course we're all still loyal to Austria. Anyways, I can't really say too much on that now, since I don't know what's going to happen. What I do know is that Saturday morning we should arrive in Berlin at around 8 or 9 , and then we'll be staying there until Tuesday.

Libor and I then had to get a little crafty. We looked with Czech trains and German trains for the cheapest way to Prague, but it was going to be at least 40Euro with either. Thus, being thrifty, we bought tickets back to Vienna with said Austrian deal, and, after confirming that the train'll

Rettenbachklamm

You can see the stairs we had to go along in this picture. Those things were death.

make a stop, will just jump off in Prague. Libor's cousin lives in Prague, she's very cool and speaks fluent German, I met her while I was there during the Christmas break. She's going to meet us at about 2am , and then we're going to stay at her place for 3 days, until the 10th. She's then going to drive us to Linhartice , where we'll be until the following Saturday, the 18th. While there, we're also planning on visiting a good friend of ours from Graz, who only lives about an hour away from Libor. He hasn't been to her city in a long time, and I've never been there obviously, so she really wants to show us around, which should be great. On Saturday, the 18th, we're going to go watch Libor's soccer team , and then head down to Brno in the evening, where we'll stay with his grandfather, meet up with his friends again, etc. On Monday the 20th, we're going to board the bus and head on back to Rakousko ["Austria" in Czech...coolest

A Buck!

We saw a buck! He had antlers and everything! I'd never seen that before so was pretty excited.

word ever]. Needless to say, I'm very excited!

Anyways, that's about all I can say for the time being. For now, I need to go and pack, so I shall talk to you all after I return!

By the way, the pictures on here are from a cool place Libor and I found in Graz. It was a gorgeous day two weeks ago, so we decided to go for a little hike. We ended up going back there the next day, too, to enjoy the weather and do some homework outside. Enjoy.

Additional photos below

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