Wir sind Wien!

Today was great. The weather warmed up, the sun shone, I wandered around the inner city eating chocolate... at any rate, there was a group of people in front of the Stephansdom (St. Steven's Cathedral) holding these signs, with a photographer with a tripod in front of them, and when he asked them to jump... I snapped this photo!

I'm guessing it's for the tourism board, or some business, or... I actually have no idea. But "Wir sind Wien" means "We are Vienna", so... it's clearly something close to home. :) It made me smile.

First Week

Oh my god, where do I even start. 

This banana approves of Liechtensteinstrasse.

The view over Wien

See! I'm actually there! Not lying!

IES organized a bus tour for us on Saturday that took us around the city and up into the mountains to look out over Vienna. It was cold, but beautiful. The city is large, but completely surrounded by forest. Very strange. No suburban sprawl.

 But it was so cold! Not bringing a coat was a mistake. I need to buy one soon. It feels like it's going to start snowing tomorrow (though it's actually only around 60 F; me thinking that it feels like freezing is probably still due to being adapted to living in a stuffy 100 F apartment all summer).

The front of the pilgrimage basilica in Mariazell

das ist alles

Mariazell (orientation)

zip line = am besten

For orientation we went to Mariazell, a pilgrimage town in Styria (which is an Austrian state—Vienna, itself, is actually also a state of Austria [also known as ein Bundesland]). We had to meet at the Bahnhof Hütteldorf (Hütteldorf underground station) between noon and 2 PM on Thursday, August 19. I didn't want to be stressed out about arriving in that short of a time frame, which is why I decided to arrive on the 18th.

Arriving in Vienna

The sky over Cleveland! Auf Wiedersehen!

... took quite a while. I flew first into JFK, where I met my flight buddy, Kim (we had coordinated flights through the IES Vienna group on Facebook). We had dinner (which the waitress insisted I take with me), and boarded Jet Airways (an Indian airline, destined for Chennai after its stop in Brussles).

It was a nice airline. The stewards gave us cold towels to wash with before the plane took off (novel for me), and the in-flight entertainment was pick-your-own games and movies. I ended up watching (what I'm guessing was) a highly bowdlerized version of The Full Monty as well as playing a few hours worth of Tetris. :)

I had Palak Paneer for dinner, and it wasn't bad! :P No food sickness.

Water leak

I have a lot of fun stuff to update about, but just so that no one doubts that real life actually happens in other countries, I thought I'd let you know that our apartment is leaking water into the one below us, that my backpack split apart yesterday when both of the zippers broke, and that I've been lost several times and had to take a cab back to our apartment. Fantastic! I've also been shuffled through three different German classes so that none of my homework counts towards the class that I'm in, and we had a test today (Grades, what?!)...

But then we got to go to the Palmenhaus Cafe, which is a beautiful atrium cafe right next to the butterfly garden downtown. Pictures soon (and an explanation of orientation, I swear)...

Update: I just went and gave the lady downstairs our landlady's phone number, and the leak is like... a water stain. Not even the size of my palm. Of course I was thinking water gushing everywhere, or at least a puddle, or something, but it wasn't even dripping. Just a very small stain. Not nearly as bad as I thought!