Reise Nach Passau, Fürstenzell und Prag

Last week was midterms week here.  I turned in one paper and had three other exams.  We soon discovered that midterms week here are sort of like finals week at home, in that no class is held during the week.  Fortunately I only had my exams toward the beginning of the week so I had the rest of the week free, which, I should say, somehow never happens to me at Puget Sound and I always stay for the whole finals week.  I should also explain, that this is not how the universities in Vienna work.  In fact at Universität Wien, they do not have midterms but only finals.  I don't take classes at Uni Wien, however, which is rather unfortunate.  Instead my classes are held at the IES center by my study abroad program.  This means all my classmates are American study abroad students.  Anyway, what I was going to say was, I had a few days off last week so I took advantage of the free time and traveled.

I took a train to Passau to visit a friend.  The weather was really wonderful during the week and we took lots of walks around the small city and her hometown, which is a small neighboring town named Fürstenzell.  I was really glad I got to take a break from the big city life and retrieve to a quieter place.  I think that is what I would like to do when I have more opportunities to travel later – I want to be able to visit smaller places.  After a beautiful train ride, I arrived at Passau Hauptbahnhof (train station) on Wednesday evening.  Julia picked me up and drove us to her home.  We drove through some country scenery and saw the gorgeous sunset.  It suddenly reminded me how long it has been since I have lived in a big city and missed the sunset.  For the next few days I was to see the same large red sun every evening.  Passau is a city only about 300 km from Vienna, about three hours drive.  It is on the Austrian-German boarder and a meeting point of three rivers, Donau, Inn, and Ilz, so you can imagine how beautiful it must be!  And then it was just really great to see Julia again after we parted last May.  I was really glad I got to spend some time with her. :)

I have decided that the theme of my travels last week must have been river cities!  Because I then went to Prague for the weekend with Suzanne and Kevin – okay, so I guess the theme was beautiful rivers and awesome people/friends/travel buddies, because they are some of my favorite people!  It is needless for me to say how important it is to have good company. :)  Prague was a marvelously beautiful city.  It lies by the river Vltava, or Moldau, the German name that I knew.  The walks along the river and across the bridges were absolutely beautiful.  Suzanne did a tour of a few major Central/West European cities with her family last summer, and Prague was the city that she wanted to visit again.  I have always wanted to visit too, as I am fascinated by all the East European cultures and post-communist arts, about which, I have to admit, I knew very little, and was even considering study abroad in Czech Republic at first!  What I didn't know was the city also contains a lot of medieval beauty, especially when you start going underground!  Suzanne loves the city; she would repeat that again and again just walking down the cobble stone streets.  I think it is the perfect representation my experience with the city.  I mean, it's just the atmosphere that is so attractive, and you don't need to see any particular thing, but just breath the air of the city is enough.  We just walked around a lot and tried to take in the city as much as we could.

I decided that everything in Prague was put together with good taste, it seemed.  Like restaurants.  Of course all these major cities would have plenty of descent, expensive restaurants all over.  But too often I just see ones that are purely fancy.  Just by looking through the windows of these restaurants in Prague, I was intrigued by the unique design and characters of each one of these places.  I loved the heavy wooden tables, or individual old-fashioned lamps and lounge sofas.  It's good taste. :)  And the streets are all dimly lit at night, together with the narrow stone-paved streets, they create a pleasant nostalgic feeling that I really enjoyed.

So... I have a bassoon lesson tomorrow, and another midterm exam.  Maybe I should study, or go to bed, but instead, I am going to quickly say what I did in the past couple days.  The weekend before last, I went to Belvedere Palace on Friday and Saturday.  Friday I went to the lower Belvedere and saw a special exhibition on Futurism and Cubism in Vienna, as well as a Schiele Portrait exhibit.  Because I purchased the ticket for a two-day visit to the entire Belvedere, I of course had to pay my visit to the upper Belvedere, which I did on Saturday.  I saw a lot of Klimt and some Fin de Slècle Vienna painting, which I really enjoyed.  I went a little late and did not have enough time to explore the entire museum.  I also usually take a long time to go through paintings at an exhibit, and I was taking notes and doing some sketches at the same time.  At any rate, it was already almost closing time when I finished the first floor, so I only had a chance to very quickly walk through the Baroque wing downstairs.  I did walk though the large garden though, and it was very pleasant.  And then I just walked home.  I was surprised how close Belvedere is to my apartment – I had known that it is in my district, but this is the first time I actually visited.  I will definitely want to go back, and I think my Austrian Art and Architecture class is going there at some point too.

Saturday morning I went to a solo concert at IES first.  This is an optional solo concert for the music workshop students.  I did not choose to play – psh, I only perform when I have to! – but my roommate Suzanne did (trumpet), so did some other talented music students.  We had a few violin solos, a double bass (I love Melissa and her double bass so much!), trumpet, euphonium, viola, some vocalists, and so forth.  Afterward we had some champagne at the post-concert reception, then a few of my roommates and I walked to the Naschmarkt from our apartment – it probably took us about forty minutes, I don' really know.  I have always loved Saturday markets, they are probably one of my favorite things in the world.  We had some falafels and hummus there (four pieces for 1 Euro!).  The weather was amazing.  Sunday Suzanne and I went to Augustinerkircher and attended a high mass with the renown full Augustiner orchestra and choir.  It was beautiful.  It was only my second mass in Vienna, and actually second mass ever, and they were both entirely in German, so I am still trying to get a grasp on the whole ceremony.  But I really liked the music and the atmosphere.  They played some later mass pieces by Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns, and so on, and I decided I really liked these sacred music by nineteenth-century composers.  That's another thing about starting from the modern art at Belvedere too, which I forgot to mention.  I felt like after seeing Futurist, Vienna Secession, and other twentieth century works, going down to the ground floor to Baroque just seems a little too restrained or contained... the earlier art does not seem as exciting to me anymore.  This is saying a lot because I am usually the one who loves early music, early art, Baroque, eighteenth-century art and music, and so on...

Tuesday I was stressed about the papers, music, and exams for midterm.  I had too much to do and I really did not know how to handle them.  So instead of picking one thing to begin work, I cooked crêpes and onion and spinach for lunch.  This idea was inspired by a restaurant we went to earlier.

Thursday my Austrian language buddy, Elisabeth, and I decided to go on a semi-long walk in the nineteenth district despite the rain.  It was a beautiful place, with lots of Heurigern, or traditional wine taverns, cute houses, and vineyards.

It was St. Patrick's Day on Thursday.  Many IES students went to some big party, but we prefer not to hang out with IES American study abroad students all the time.  So Suzanne and I went to a small Irish pub close to the Uni Wien campus.  It was very crowded, smoky, lots of green beer, and lots of fun.  I was hoping for maybe some good music, but didn't seem to have much luck.  About that, I am planning my trip to go to Ireland in April and I am very very looking forward to it, so I didn't mind not having enough Irish music that much, because I hope to experience lots of that in Ireland!  However, we did have some delightful conversations with the locals, mostly one Austrian person.  After talking to him that night, I learned a lot more about what a young, regular Viennese native think of Vienna, as well as many other issues.  It made me think a lot.  And I think I would like to frequent more of the little pubs like these for the different perspectives.
On Wednesday I am going to Passau!  I am super excited.  And I am going to Prague with Suzanne and Kevin for the weekend.  I just can't wait to be done with lesson and exam tomorrow!

To be honest, I rather wish we get to have home stays in Vienna.  That way, I get a chance to really experience the Austrian life style and know what time they have dinner, what sorts of food appear regularly on the dinner table, speak more German, and potentially form stronger bonds.  While host family was an option, I chose apartments because from what I understood, the relationships with host families here are more like that between landlords and tenants – the students are not just automatically regarded as part of the family and invited to participate in all the family activities.  As it turn out, my study abroad program has very limited number of host families this semester, and even students who expressed interest in living with host families didn’t necessarily get that assignment.  As for the small handful of people I know that are in home stays, they are often just one “landlord,” in a few cases, a person in his/her thirties or something.  To make up for this lack of Austrian host families, we have a system called Language Buddies.  My study abroad program can pair us up with an Austrian student, most likely between the age pf 17 and 27, and we can decide on our own how often we want to meet, what to do, and what language to speak.  Because this semester they have many extra language buddies, I got two!  I have met with both of them and both of them are really sweet girls.  Elisabeth is 25 years old, and is a second-year history major at Universität Wien; Verena is 22 and is working on a six-year education program to become an English and history teacher at Uni Wien (I like history too!).  I have yet to figure out a very good way to practice English and German at the same time.  Currently, my conversations with Elisabeth is always entirely in German, and we used English at my first meeting with Verena last week.  My favorite activity for these meetings is walking.  When it was cold, we walked around in city center,  down the narrow, quiet, old streets of Vienna; we walked by churches, coffeehouses, and we just talked.  When the weather was nice, we went to the garden of Schönbrunn palace, and we talked – it was fabulous.  When I can find a larger chunk of free time, Elisabeth is going to show be some trails in the 18th and 19th districts, and I am very looking forward to that.  One thing I found out was that both of my language buddies have done au pair for a year before college.  Elisabeth nannied for a family outside Paris and Verena was in Stockholm.  She loves Stockholm and highly recommended me visiting there, so now I really want to go to Scandinavia!  By the way, she did not know any Swedish before she went, and communicated with the family in English, but was able to pick it up in three months (granted that Swedish is also a Germanic language)!  I think it is exciting that au pair is a pretty common thing here, because I have always thought it is a fantastic idea to work in exchange for room and board in a foreign country – what a nice way to learn languages and cultures!

Oh, I am supposed to contribute a roasted vegetable salad to our dinner this evening… I have some garlic and rosemary.  So I must start making the food now.  My roommate’s chicken has already been in the oven for a while (I am not sure if I am going to try some or keep pretending to be a half-vegetarian tonight)!  Tschüs!

Museums and Friends

There are so many things that I could write about, so where should I start?  Well, I am naturally inclined to give some excuses for not writing in a long time... first of all, my computer hard drive crashed, fortunately it was mostly fixed after two weeks.  And then classes officially started, and all of a sudden I find myself spending a lot more time doing schoolwork (or mostly worrying about schoolwork), practicing, rehearsing, and so on.  Between school time I also managed to find time for other small weekend travels and trip planning.  Many students on the program have used regular two-day weekends traveling to nearby cities like Budapest, Prague, or Salzburg.  So far I haven't done any of such travel (honestly it's making me feel kind of lame), but this weekend I am going skiing in the Alps with the IES group.  My friend and I also picked out a few weekends, mostly in April, for traveling.  In addition to the cities I just mentioned, we really want to go to Graz.  But we decided it would be a better idea to go to some of these places and enjoy the beautiful scenery when the weather gets warmer.  I have also been busy working on my summer research grant application.  It is kind of hard for me to believe how much effort I have spent on summer internship and research applications.  In the past few days I have been thinking that none of these applications are looking optimal at all, what if all these effort and time just go wasted and I will still end up having nothing to do in the summer?  Then I really started thinking, how silly of me to try to apply for so many different things!  I was really quite disheartened by such thoughts!  My last excuse would be this: overall I was just not in a very good mood – I think I might be going through the phase when things start to get hard after the initial excitement passed – I was constantly having too much on my hands, sleep deprived, and I think I will blame that mostly on the research proposal.  That said, I did figure out how to utilize the Universität Wien library, including its online research database, so that was very gratifying.  When I cannot write merrily about travel and life stories, I feel that I should refrain from posting, because who wants to read about me being depressing, stressed, or angrily complaining about every little detail that does not suit me?  Anyway, enough of the excuses.

I decided to write about two things, one is my language buddy, and the other museum tours.

Elisabeth and I went to the garden at Schönbrunn.  Here on the hill one can see the palace and a view of the city.  Elisabeth took this picture for me.  I should have gotten a picture with her, but I didn't.

I am such a greedy person.  After meeting with my first language buddy, Elisabeth, when IES said that they found so so many Austrian language buddy volunteers, and that we could have two or three language buddies, I went ahead and got a second language buddy.  So far I have been in contact with both, but I have not met my second language buddy yet.  Elisabeth is great.  I was particularly happy after our first meeting.  That was before post-intensive break, a few hours before my laptop crashed, and before my trip to Paris.  First of all, I adore walking.  I feel like that is the best way to spend time with a good friend when one actually wants to have some conversations.  I am a slow walker, but I do not mind walking for hours.  Elisabeth is probably the same way.  The first afternoon we just walked around the city, instead of having lunch, or going to an exhibit (I love exhibits, but they are not places for conversations).  Another wonderful thing about my language buddy is that we converse entirely in German; I would only ask, in German, how to say certain things, and so forth.

This week I only had limited time during my day (I do not like having classes in the evening...), so we only took a walk in the Schönbrunn garden.  We planned to go to a trail in the city outskirt; we will have to do that when we have more time!

Naschmarkt produce

Gotta love the sweets.  Look who's wearing the hat I made this winter?

I am taking a class called Austrian Art and Architecture.  Almost every we go on a tour at one of the museums.  It is perhaps my favorite class.  Last week we went to Wien Musuem Karlsplatz – a history museum of Vienna; today we went to Kunsthistorisches Museum (and of course we will be going there a few more times!).

Stephansdom

Okay I was going to write about the museums tours, but my internet does not seem to be working so I will continue another time!