Thanks for coming to my blog. I'm hoping to post here pretty regularly so I can keep everyone updated on how I am doing and what I am up to. Although, it's hard to promise anything because I haven't started classes or my internship yet so I'm not sure what my schedule will be like.
Well, I'm here! I'm in Vienna/Wien! Even though I've only been here for three days, I'm falling more in love with this city each day. The tall, old buildings are beautiful and the city is so clean! There is hardly ever any trash lying around and the gardens and parks are also kept very clean. It's absolutely beautiful.
The first day here is somewhat of a blur. Everyone had come in on a red-eye flight so had slept two hours or less that night. However that didn't extinguish anybody's enthusiasm. We stayed in the Hotel Baronesse (pictures below) the first night (probably so our host families didn't have to see us tired and grumpy). It was a really cute hotel, but the difference in culture and technology really hit us in the face when we first arrived. I shared my room with a girl named Lizzy, it took us about 4 hours of trying off and on to get the bathroom light on. It took me a good 60 seconds to figure out how to get the soap out of the soap dispenser, and we definitely spent a fair amount of time figuring out the outlets.
We ate at a Pizzeria that night as a group and I was able to have my first gluten free meal! Yay!
The next day we had time to pack up our things, eat breakfast, then meet outside the hotel for a tour. We had a walking tour by an Austrian that works at the institute (I'll be attending classes there next week). She introduced to us the main grocery stores, pharmacies, good restaurants and good places to shop. She ended up dropping up off for lunch at Naschmarkt which is basically a lot of street food restaurants put together within a city block. After looking around for a bit, a few of us decided that we'd rather something lighter, than Austrian meat. We found a really fun juicing place that put fresh fruits and veggies into a blender and it ended up being absolutely perfect!
We had a lot of orientation meetings after that I don't want to bore you with. But afterwords we got to meet our host mom, her name is Helga Braunsteiner. She is so awesome! She's probably in her late 60s, she originally is from German so she has a mix of a German and Austrian accent. She's LDS and she's a single mom of three kids who have all grown up who are in the USA now. She is so sweet. She loves to talk (she's currently talking to my roommate, Delanie, about King Richard Lionheart in Austria) and she's so incredibly kind. She welcomed us into our home and offered us everything that could possibly need. Delanie and I had dinner with her that night and called in for an early night.
Today (Friday) and tomorrow we get free time to look around Vienna. We decided today that we wanted to go to the Natural History Museum. We met up with some of the other girls from the program and went through the museum.
We spent about two hours in the museum that got some lunch at this Vegan/Gluten Free Cafe that ended up being better than all of us could imagine. I ended up getting up zucchini noodles with pesto, basil, and tomatoes. It was so good!
We had noticed that there was a holocaust museum right next door to the bakery so we decided to give it a try. We ended up going to two holocaust museums that day and did some grocery shopping afterwards. So overall it was a great day!
The language barrier has been hitting me in the face hard. I now realize what every foreigner that doesn't speak English feels like when they come to States. Whenever we have to talk to a cashier or someone at a restaurant, it's pretty difficult. Delanie knows more German than I do, so she does save me in a lot of situations. I titled this blog "English, Bitte?" because that's basically what I feel like all the time. Haha! We've had a funny situations because of the language barrier.
The second day we were here, Lizzy and I were at the Naschmarkt. One of the servers at a restaurant approached us trying to get us to eat at their restaurant. He did speak broken English, so Lizzy just said in English, "No thank you, we're looking for something fast." And for so reason, this guy thought that she said she needed the bathroom. So he shouted at a woman worker to come help us to the bathroom. We tried to explain to him that we didn't need the bathroom, but he kept saying "It's free, it's free. It's okay, it's free." while this woman was trying to usher us to the back of the restaurant. She ended up dropping something and she bent down to fix it, and I'll be honest... We just kinda left. We didn't know what to do. They insisted that we needed the bathroom. Ha! Maybe not the best way to handle the situation, but we panicked and we're learning. Haha!
The second story happened today while we were shopping at the end of the day. Delanie wanted a smaller bag that she currently had so we stopped by a small shot that had a lot of different bags. The owner came up to her and said something in German and Delian responded, "Was?" which translates to "What?" But the correct (and much politer) way to say it is "Wie so?" or "How so?" If you respond "Was?" to something it's pretty offending. This woman had a physical disgusted reaction and walked away. Instantly Delanie (realizing her mistake) tried to explain that she was just learning German and that she really meant to say "Wie so?" and the cashier WASN'T HAVING IT. She rolled her eyes at Delanie than just said the price of the bag and we left after Delanie paid. Delanie was so embarrassed afterwards, but it was a funny reminder for me to never get offended if a foreigner is trying to learn English because we are all trying the best that we can.
Well, that wraps it up for me today. I need to be heading to bed. Thank you all for all the support you have given me when it came to this trip. You're wonderful!
Auf Wiedersehen!
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