Hey everyone!
Where to begin! I’ve been abroad in Vienna, Austria for the last couple of months and it’s been amazing! It really is a city where the past and the present live next to each other. There are buildings dating from hundreds of years back with beautiful architecture you just can’t see in America. There are 23 districts in Vienna, and I live in the 19th district. Each one’s got it’s own personality, and mine is supposedly the rich, posh district lol. I guess I got lucky. I live with five other girls, and we get along pretty well. Living with that many girls made me a little uneasy at first about how much space there was going to be, but our place is huge! A lot of the furniture looks like it’s been barely used, and my room is gorgeous. It’s got huge, square windows overlooking the other small flats next door, a wooden closet with several shelves, a couple other small drawers, a nice rug covering most of the floor and still PLENTY of space. I’m sure I’ll get a nice/decent apartment at Witt, but it may never be quite like this.
The only thing that sucks about living there is it’s far away from my school (I went through an international program called IES, or the International Education of Students). I miss the times at Witt when the farthest a class is is 15 minutes away. I’ve got to take a train, the u-bahn (subway), and the Strabenbahn (basically a trolley) which takes 30 minutes if I time it right. Right now, I’m taking 5 classes there: a public service internship, personality and psychopathology, cross-cultural psychology, German, and Music in Performance (basically studying classical music).
Because I don’t speak a lot of German, I’m taking classes at the Insitute here in English. People who can speak German can go to the University of Vienna, which is pretty cool because you can meet more Austrians. I’ve met some through a public service internship I’m doing for my sociology minor and hung out with them a few times. One of them is Sebastian, who works as a type of supervisor there. I’ve met some more people through him and he’s taken me to some parties at the University of Vienna that have been pretty sick.
Obviously, I can’t go into everything I’ve done over the last couple of months. I already feel like I’ve written a book (lol), but I’ll try to recap some things as I write different posts. Vienna is a huge classical music center, so I’ve been to the opera a couple of times. Last Thursday, I went to a standing opera. You can buy a ticket for 3 to 4 Euro (A Euro is $1.50), and you bring a scarf with you. When you get to your place, you have to tie on a railing around the area you’re standing and that marks your spot for the whole performance. It kind of sucks to have to stand the whole performance, but it’s cheap and the view was still pretty good.
The other thing that was pretty cool to see was an official soccer game. A bunch of people from IES and I went to a Rapid Wien (Vienna), soccer game. It’s a little shorter than an official soccer game, but it’s so intense! People were yelling and screaming at the top of their lungs, and I swear it looked like a couple of people were going to hop the wall and scream at the rep. The cheering section was AMAZING! These people were some of the biggest fans of the Viennese team, and they didn’t stop cheering for a second. Literally. I don’t know how they did it, but it would have been so awesome to have been in there.
I know this definitely doesn’t cover everything I’ve experienced in Vienna, but I’ll be sure to recap as much as I can throughout the rest of the semester.