The One With Spontaneously Leaving The Country

Hallo!

Wow, what a day. So a couple of days ago, I found out that one of the girls on the trip needed to go to Bratislava in Slovakia to try to get a visa to stay longer than 90 days in Austria. (She was going to stay after the program). There was a few of us that decided to make a day trip out of it because Bratislava was only an hour away and a roundtrip ticket on the train was 16 Euros. So we met at the train station about 8:30am and headed out!

When we got there we realised that we hadn’t quite prepared for the cold, but tried to make the best out of the situation anyway. We took a bus into the old city. It was beautiful. It was so fun to walk down the streets that so many have walked down. There were tons of little shops and restaurants to explore. We spent quite a lot of time just looking around shops.



We then headed to lunch where I got “Crispy Trout with bacon and mushrooms.” I didn’t think anything of my order until the waiter put in it in front of me. I honestly had a really hard time looking at it even though I knew it was going to be delicious. The whole fish was on my plate, tail, scales, head, eyes, spine, everything. Brock saw that I was having a hard time with knowing where to start so he offered to cut the head off so I didn’t have to do it (gag). After all that nasty stuff was done, it ended up being so good! Plus they had gluten-free bread! Win!



After lunch we went to go explore the castle. We ended up just walking around the castle walls and through the courtyard because we found out there wasn’t much to see inside. It was a beautiful view though and a pretty castle.



We actually ended up running into some sister missionaries on our way down from the castle. We spoke to them for away. One of them was from Utah and the other was from Virginia. They gave us some recommendations on where to go and what to eat. It was fun to be able to see them!

We went into a few churches and then we went to the UFO tower. The UFO tower is a tower on a bridge in Bratislava. It literally looks like a UFO. There is an observation deck at the top and a restaurant (that is super expensive). The view from the top was beautiful. On one side was the old city which I considered to be a lot prettier than the other side which looked more modern and Russian. We stayed up there for about an hour which was really fun.



Something that was different was when we went to the restroom, the room that has the toilet had a window out to the city. Like… the entire wall was a window which was kind of odd and a little uncomfortable. Haha! And there was vinyl on the window that said “Enjoying The View?” which made it that much more uncomfortable/funny.



We ended up just wandering through the old city for awhile then headed back onto the train. It was a long day, but overall pretty successful. It was fun to be able to say that I’ve been to Slovakia, but I think I’ll stick to living in Vienna for now. ;)



Until next time!

The One With The Surprise

Well... it's been a minute.

Sorry about the lack of posts, life just passes you by without your permission. This may be a giant post, but I'm hoping to touch on some of the highlights that happened this last week.

In between homework, classes, and internship stuff, we're constantly exploring and trying to fill our time with mini adventures. One of the big adventures we had this week was on Wednesday. A bunch of us had bought tickets to the Circus. After seeing Madeline as a child, I was a little hesitant to go. For all of you that haven't seen Madeline, it's a girl that attends a circus in Europe and ends up getting kidnapped... yay for giving me things to fear!

But the circus was absolutely amazing! It was so much fun! All of the acts were extremely impressive, plus we got our tickets for a great price! Win win! But it definitely was worth going to, we all were so happy we went!



The next day, a group of my friends had been planning on surprising me with an outing. They told me to meet at the main U-bahn station at a certain time at night. All the instructions I got was to dress warm. I showed up to the stop a little early and started noticing that there were more people there then usually and they were being quite a bit louder then usual. But I didn't think too much of it.

Then all the boys showed up, Brock, Garen, and Brayden. Brock put an Austrian scarf around my neck and announced we were going to the Austria vs. Wales soccer game. It was such a fun surprise! The game was so fun! It was kind of odd to sit on the Austrian side of the stands when I was secretly cheering for Wales. But it was so fun to be in that atmosphere and be with friends!



The next day, we took a day trip to Melk, which is a little over an hour out of Vienna. We visited a Monastery there which was extremely pretty. Unfortunately pictures weren't allowed, but I think it had one of the prettiest churches I have ever seen in it. If you want to literally have your breath taken away, visit this church! It's incredible.



After that we all rented bikes and road from Melk to Kerms. ... That's about 22 miles. 22 MILES. It was incredibly pretty though. We rode through multiple little villages and vineyards which were incredible. I had gluten free cheesecake on the way, so I'm not mad. Haha! It was definitely a fun day!



Today is Sunday and I have never been more grateful to go to church. You really start to feel it when you're not able to take the sacrament for awhile. We went to the International ward which was in English and it was so good! It was so fun to meet people from literally all around the world. They even had a gluten-free tray for the sacrament bread! Tender mercy for sure!!



During our religion class today we had a speaker come and talk about his life. He's 91 years old and he's lived in Vienna all of his life. But he lived through WWII, he became a German Solider and everything. He spoke about his experience and the hardships he went through. He also spoke about how he joined the church and how he met his wife, which was fun. But hearing his story really put a new perspective on that war, I think we forget that some of the German soldiers rebelled and they didn't want to be part of Hitler's army. There were a lot of sacrifices made. It was so amazing to be able to hear his story and get a glimpse of what he went through.

I'll try to be better at uploading more often than just once a week, this week it just escaped me! Hope you are all doing well!

The One With Videos

So, ever since I started this blog I've wanted to share my videos that I take with you all. The hard thing is... I take so many little videos that it would've been annoying to click a 47 7-second videos. So I combined them into a few different movies.

I've only done the first and second week of the trip, the third week will be concluding soon so I hope I can get that organised and put together.

But in the mean time, here's the first two weeks of my trip - in video format this time. I hope this brings even more life to this blog and to my adventures. :)


Week one


Week two


Enjoy!

Love you all!

The One Where I Intern In A Crypt

Sorry it's been a few days!

The past few days have been absolutely insane! I've barely had time to breath. After we got back from the trip all over Austria, there was a group of seven of us that all had a mini internship working for an art curator.

The first morning we met at an old, small, unused apartment that we were going to transform into exhibit of sorts. There was a lot of cleaning involved, especially on the first day. It was interesting to see what goes behind exhibits and all the work that is put into it.



We were there for a few hours then were taken to a physiatric hospital (no, they weren't checking us in). There is a famous church there by the name of Kirche am Steinhof. It was designed specifically for the patients at that hospital. So unlike other churches built at that time, it was full of light colors, a lot of white, and at the time it was made, was built so that nobody could hurt themselves.

We met a man named David who was going to be opening an exhibit in the church. He gave us a tour around the exhibit which started in the crypt. The idea was that people would enter the exhibit through the crypt, it represented Madness. There were a lot of pieces of art that were different and required a lot of pondering to try to get the message out of it. David had decided not to put any text anywhere so that people would really have to think about the artwork.

David gave us a tour throughout the crypt explaining art pieces as we went, I wish I could've recorded it, because he did a beautiful job explaining it all to us. I think every single one of us was hanging onto every word he said, it was super interesting! After you go throughout the crypt, you go upstairs into the actual chapel which represented mysticism. That part of the exhibit hadn't been fully completed yet, but he gave us a brief overview of what it was going to be.

After that he had us help with getting ready for the opening night for the next day. We carried wine glasses and made sure everything was set up with the drinks. Then he wanted to complete an art piece containing 50 GIANT balloons that were suspended in the air by a book about diagnostics for the physiatric patients. We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how we were going to do it. But it ended up behind really cool!



The next day we went back to the crypt for the opening night. We were all a sort of security guard, just to make sure nobody did anything too crazy to the pieces and if anybody had questions we could answer them. (Let's take a minute and remember that Anna doesn't speak any German.) We were there from 6pm to 10pm, which was a little hard to be standing in a crypt for so long, but it ended up being pretty fun! A few people asked me questions in German, and I was able to pick up on enough words that I was able to answer their questions. So that was a confidence booster.



The night was really great,I ended up talking and getting to know some girls from my study abroad group a little better and it was a great experience to be able to work in a professional exhibit. Plus, David, the curator, is absolutely amazing. We all decided that we just wanted to be his best friend, because he's so fun to work with.

One example of this was when Becca and I were sitting at the table where people could come write their comments about the exhibit. Nobody had come all night. David came over and asked if anybody had written anything and we told him no. He then took a pen and said, "I know how to solve this." He then goes and writes, "HORRIBLE!" all along the top of the page. He told us that it would get people writing. Even though Becca and I had a good laugh of it, it actually worked! We had four to five people come write some of their comments (all of them were positive of course). He was great!

Random note: In between this time of internships, I had the opportunity to visit the central cemetery of Vienna. We went literally to see Beethoven's grave. We found it!




On the next day, (Saturday) a group of us wanted to ride bikes along the Danube River. We got there are about 10am, rented some bikes for a couple of hours and had a great time! It was so pretty! It was definitely a great way to start off a Saturday.



Other than that, I've just been attempting to catch up on homework, watching General Conference, and trying my best to get some sleep! I don't think next week will be as crazy, but I'm sure it'll hold it's own adventures that I'm not even expecting. :)

Cheers!