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Published: November 21st 2005
i got back in from vienna last night. on the whole, it was a very good trip.
the train ride to austria was kind of rough. i requested a sleeper car on the way there, which is awkward, but i really wanted to sleep on the 14 hour ride over night. i guess the guy at termini misunderstood me, though, b/c i most certainly did not get a sleeper car. instead, i was in some little boxed in area with five other people. there was hardly any legroom at all, it was cold, and all around miserable. somehow i managed to get a few hours sleep, thankfully, but i was very happy to get off that train in vienna the next day.
when i got to vienna i was a little nervous, to say the least, b/c this was my first time travelling alone, i was in a brand new country, and i can't speak a lick of german. fortunately, a few of the kids in the program here went to vienna awhile ago, and gave me some tips, and my hostel gave really good directions on how to find it. so i took a tram in what i
samantha, in her wedding dress
i cooked dinner one night, and laura and keri surprised me by dressing up all fancy like. samantha then felt inspired to upstage them by putting on her wedding dress.thought was the direction of my hostel, but i quickly realized that it was going AWAY from it instead. i was all nervous and a bit scared, so i decided to just sit on the tram for the rest of the line and to keep riding it until it turned around and went in the right direction. thus, the tram ride took awhile. and then while trying to walk from the tram stop to the hostel i went in the wrong direction for a while again. finally i got to my hostel and put my crap down in the luggage room. i couldn't get into my room until two, and mary woulnd't be in town till three, so i just wakled up and down a really big, busy street for several hours.
i looked into united colors, my favorite european store, and ate at mcdonald's b/c 1) i didn't know what any of the german/austrian food was on the menus of other restaurants and 2) it was really cold outside and i figured if i got lunch at mcdonald's, i'd be able to take refuge within its warm walls for awhile. mcdonald's turned out to be a pretty nice
a very large kit kat bar
i was really impressed by this thing's magnitude. choice. this was the nicest mcdonald's i have ever seen in my entire life. there were cute, trendy pieces of artwork on the wall, the tables and chairs were pretty sleek and modern, the lighting was very mellow and pleasant, and they even had a really fancy barns and noble style cafe area that served nice coffee and deserts like tiramisu. i was super impressed. AND, it was about a euro cheaper than italian mcdonalds. after this i did some more walking around until i could go to the hostel.
mary didn't in till four, so i sat around and read till then. i guess i should explain who mary is. mary is a girl from the u of a who is doing study abroad in graz, austria, right now. i met her one time last spring, and well.... we were both quite drunk at some party at the time. i don't know how we started talking, but we did, and we ended up sitting in a very narrow, crowded hallway for quite awhile babbling away merrily. we takled about how we were both going to be studying abroad in the fall and that we should meet up in
mary at starbucks
she got points with me for wearing that cool, stripey sweater. actually, i bought a new sweater b/c i was embarassed that every picture on put on here is of me wearing that pink sweater, but now its so cold i have to wear a coat and you can't see my new sweater anyway. drats! europe. somehow, this actually happened, and it all worked out really really well. when she came into the hostel, i was a little apprehensive b/c we had only seen each other that one time, when we were not quite ourselves, and this all could have gone very ill indeed. but it didn't! mary was really cool, laid back, and friendly, and we had enough in common to talk about that i didn't really clam up at all, as some of you know i am prone to do when i first meet people. also, i think it was good for me to go do something without laura and keri. dont' get me wrong, they're the best travelling buds imaginable, but we're about to be together CONSTANTLY for about 4 days, and this is the first time i've gone more than a few hours without seeing them in over a month, so this distance was nice in that way too. change of scenery, so to speak.
by the time mary came in and had arranged all her stuff it was practically dark outside (in austria its completely dark by 5), so we didn't do anything too grand on friday night. we
street performers
they were playing that pretty song from the debeers commercials. you know, "diamonds are forever." went and looked at st. stephen's cathedral (which i didn't take any pictures of b/c it was too dark). this was a nice change from all the basilicas and other italian edifices i am so overly accustomed to visiting. it was very elaborate, with lots of super intricate sculpture/structure stuff. yeah im still pretty inarticulate when it comes to architecture. cest la vie. we also saw a starbucks, which completely made my day! i go to starbucks at least once a week in fayetteville, and i've been without it since i was in the chicago airport. and while there is coffee in italy, its all pretty much either espresso or cappucino. those things are good, but they are not as good as mochas and frappacinos. so we hung out in starbucks for awhile, drinking delicious, sugary american coffee and getting to know each other. in a way, being practically strangers made it easier for us to talk, i think, since there was so much uncharted territory to explore, so to speak. then we had dinner at some random restaurant we saw on the street. i told mary to introduce me to austrian cusine, and woo, did she ever do a
good job. this first night i had wiener schnitzel, the national dish of austria, with salad. wiener schnitzel is pork that has been pounded, covered in breadcrumbs/batter, and then fried. it was pretty dang good. usually i don't like a lot of pork, but that is pretty much all that's eaten in austria, and i've had sooooo little meat this semester that i jump on every possible opportunity to consume something that was once a living, breathing animal. ahhh, the sweet flavor of animal flesh. anyway, this delicous meal was followed by desert at some cafe place. i had apple strudel, which austria is famous for, and i can see why, and mary had some unknown desert that looked kind of like a candy version of biscuits and gravy. as you might be figuring out right now, a great portion of this weekend was devoted to eating. seriously, i ate soooo much, and it was sooooo good.
back at our hostel, we met our two roommates. one was a girl from korea who was all freaked out b/c her credit card was stolen that day. i feel bad for that girl, but she DEFINITELY could have prevented this horrible
a funny poster.
these were up all over vienna. occurence. apparently some random guy wakled up to her and said "i'm with the police, you need to show me your passport and credit card." so she did and he ran off with her credit card. baaaaaad idea. you should never ever ever show your important stuff to anyone on the street. that's just asking for trouble. the other girl was from texas, and she turned out to have some sort of connection to mary's brother. it was odd. she was pretty cool, though. she's working as an opair (sp? you know, a fancy nanny) in the czech republic. the family she works for is super rich, as in they own CASTLE, and they gave her a range rover to drive. this is all besides the point, but i just thought i'd share what a freakin' sweet job she has. the hostel was nice. we had a bathroom attatched to our dorm room, the shower had lots of hot warm and great water pressure, the beds were pretty nice, and the rooms were toasty warm. it was quite a bit more comfortable than my apartment, actually.
saturday was quite a bit more active than friday. we were out and
about at around 10. we walked through a street market, bought some stuff there and drank some gluwine (sp?--its hot wine with spices in it, good for cold weather. there were lots and lots of stands around selling it. i guess it is appropriate to drink at 10 in the morning in austria). these booths sold pretty much the same thing--mittens/gloves, hand made jackets and coats, jewelry, honey products, and little cakes. i got some of the cakes, one for myself and one to bring back for laura and keri, and some air freshner wooden ball thingies. thats a bad description, main point is that they smell really nice. it started to snow while we were in the street market, and not just a little bit. it was hardcore snow. it was realy pretty and fun for awhile, but eventually we took refuge inside the leopald, an impressionism museum. i saw a klimt, a degas, a cezanne, a van gogh, and soem other nice stuff. then we walked through the christkindle markt (christmas market). lots of cute christmas stuff. we got a big backed potato with ham and some relaly excellent white sauce on it, and some sausage with melted
cheese in it. extremely unhealthy and equally scrumptious. went to the freud museum--it wasn't that great. it was in his former apartment and one of the rooms was fixed up exactly like he had it back in the day. the rest of it was just a couple of rooms with pictures and papers he had written. pretty slow paced. we didn't stay long. we met kaye, the opair, at one of the famous viennese coffee houses. i had melange, an austrian coffee speciality, and cheese struedel. the melange tasted just like coffee with lots of milk, i approved. it was really crowded in this place, and we had to share a table with a lady from new zeland who was locked out of her apartment for awhile. she had a bull terrier. i petted it. that was fun.
that evening the three of us went to some place that was suppose to brew its own beer and wine. that was an interesting experience. we were the only people under 45 in the place. all the waitresses wore long, traditional austrian dresses. there was some old lady speaking german with a lisp behind us, which made mary laugh uncontrollably, and
me and a really loud christmas tree
this is the super expensive coat i bought awhlie back, if you remember me talking about that. there was some other old lady directly in my line of vision who had dolled herself up and was thus quite grotesque. i think she either had bad denture or missing teeth. but anyway, so we tried to order this austrian drink called strum, which according to mary is fruity and delicious. that was out of season, so we ordered most (i think), something that mary knew was somehow like strum. turns out most is strum before there's an alcohol in it, so essentially we just sat around drinking apple juice. it was good apple juice, though. there was a cat here. i petted it, too.
next up was more food!!! i got chili con carne and an order of fries at some cheap pub style restaurant. i ended up with a huuuge plate full of super meaty chili and a great big mountain of fries. i felt bad b/c i could barely put a dent into all this, but im just not use to portions being that large. or meaty...yumm.... however, mary realized at this restaurant that she could not find her wallet. she had accidentally left it at the old-people-apple-juice place. we eventually got this all straightened
out, but it took awhlie to do so and i ended up not going to bed until 1:30 or later. this wouldn't have been such a big deal, but i had to wake up at 4:50 in order to catch my train back to rome. so i took a nap and headed to sudbanhof to catch my train.
train ride was uneventful for the most part, but extremely long. the best part of it was right after i got out of vienna. all the area around vienna was under a few inches of fresh snow, and i got to see the sun rising over the alps, fur trees with their branches bowing under the weight of snow, smoke happily rising from chimneys of cute yellow houses, you know, cute stuff like that. then i fell asleep.
so my weekend was great. calamity set in as soon as i got back to rome, though. i stopped at the study center first and my roommates told me that the water in our apartment had been turned off b/c the apartment below us was flooding due to problems with our bathroom. that annoyed me, b/c i really really needed to take
a shower and thats just all around inconvenient, but i was like, okay, whatev. but then somehow one of my roommates got the idea that we HAD to leave our apartment that night, as opposed to the next day when there would be a new apartment waiting for us. and she also told us that we were suppose to move as much of our stuff out as possible and go sleep in a monastery down the street. i learned all this at around 9 at night. i had only slept 3 hours the night before, i was dirty, and hungry, and i was suppose to back all my stuff up and sleep in a monastery. by this point i was pretty angry. i found out today that we could have slept in our apartment, and we didn't need to move our stuff (which is fortunate b/c i didn't move anything, although i did go stay with laura and keri). i've probably just confused you all a lot. anyway, last night really sucked, but now we have a new apartment to stay in for at least a week, its really nice so hopefully that will make up for how inconvenient all
this is.
my roommate samantha is getting married this week. tonight is her "bachelorette party." which means we're all going out to eat at the hardrock cafe. woo woo!
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Devon
non-member comment
aww
sarah LaBauve you are a good, good kid. I bet they were 2 guys