November (so far)

After that Oktober quickie, I'm almost up to date! Let's see what's been happening...

November 1 is All Saint's Day. Since Austria is largely, largely Catholic, the holiday is seriously celebrated here, and banks and schools are closed. Citizens go to the graves of loved ones and do yearly care-taking and decorating. (Halloween, by contrast, isn't widely celebrated, though it's catching on among the younger generations. Even trick-or-treating. Free candy?! Internationally appealing!)

Wall of the Zentralfriedhof

For this reason, then, a friend and I went to the Zentralfriedhof (the central cemetery) to celebrate (is that the appropriate word here?) with the Viennese. The Zentralfriedhof is HUGE. I've heard that the Viennese like to say that it's half the size of Geneva but twice as lively. :)

The end of Oktober

I've been disturbingly bad at updating my blog (much, much worse than I thought I would be. I'm guessing it's the fault of lack of habit), but here are some highlights from the end of Oktober (in pictures): 

walking the Wienerwald (Vienna forest) while the leaves are changing

Last weekend

I love Vienna and I'm very happy that I decided to study here

This weekend I had guests (I'd say just like the second weekend, but I realize now that the post about my second week is still sitting as a draft in my blog entry list): a friend from high school who is studying in Valencia for the semester and his roommate from their study abroad program!

Delicious caprese. 

It was AWESOME, for two main reasons: they made me break out of my routine and act like a tourist for a little while (which means fun excursions and cool pictures), and because it was one of my roommate's birthdays! Hurray! They helped us celebrate and even cooked dinner one night as a thank you for letting them stay in our apartment.

Oktoberfest!

Me plus Germans Dana and Daniel, and persons "Tad" from IES

I'm alive, etc

Florence and Barcelona were amazing (Milan less so, but still good), classes have started, classes are amazing... I'm cooking my roommates yellow curry tonight... and tomorrow we're going to MQ Vienna Fashion Week (Thai designers! Yes, I themed the meal).

I haven't done any homework yet... but I promise I'll get to that tonight. There's a cafe nearby that plays nothing but bad American music from the 70s and 80s and has terrible upholstery on the booth covers. I think I'm in love with it. So hopefully I'll go there tonight and get some work done.

View from the top of the Duomo in Florence, Italy!

Um...

I haven't posted about my second or third weeks yet and it's already time for our nine-day break... What happened?!

At any rate, I'm going tonight on an overnight train to Florence, where we'll spend a few days (I'm traveling with my flight buddy, Kim), then to Milan for a day and a flight to Barcelona, where we'll meet up with some other IES students for the last four days! And hopefully go to the BEACH.

Update: I'm not taking any computers on the trip with me... but I'll try to be in touch here and there if possible.

Just a quick update...

Kim (my flight buddy) and I went wandering through the inner city with some other IES students a few days ago, and, being the ones with cameras, we were a little bit slow and distracted and ended up wandering off and getting lost. We found a place called (get this) "The Choco Bar", however, that had a special: prosecco with lemon gelato and a champagne truffle.

We split it. 

I love Vienna.

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!

Liechtensteinstraße

I've just moved in to my apartment. I have lots of pictures to upload and stories to tell, but my roommates and I have to get up and register ourselves as legal Viennese residents at the local registration office before our first German class tomorrow, so... I'll just leave you with this (from the place where we had our orientation):

Tada

I made it!

We have an orientation retreat for the next few days, so... there will probably be no news until Sunday or Monday.

The Cleveland airport has free WiFi!

Hi all!

I'm at the Cleveland airport, and my computer is misbehaving, so this will be a much shorter introduction than I planned:

I'm currently on my way to Vienna, hopefully for many adventures and a nice semester abroad. I hope to keep you all updated via the Internet, since it's cheaper than calling and can efficiently reach a bunch of people at once!

I set up this blog a while ago. Pilot data is data you collect before you run your experiment, to make sure your head was put on properly when you formulated your hypothesis—"Was I even vaguely going in the right direction? Does the equipment work?"—before you spend all of your money on something broken. I was going to use it as a place to air my speculations (so a better name really would have been "Anecdotal Evidence" or... "Flights of Fancy"), but it's been sitting around doing nothing.

I think it will work well as a travel blog, as "Pilot Data" conjures up images of pilots in lab coats, or something.

Thanks for reading! If you want to send or receive hard mail while I'm gone, email me at rochelle.hudson@gmail.com and we can exchange addresses.

Auf Wiedersehen!

I really only want to upload a photo

This is a view along the Florida A1A (looking north) from my spring break trip to Ft Lauderdale.

I had a great time with a great traveling companion; would go again. :)

Trying to study in Vienna: Part XV

My study abroad application and transcript finally went in to IES. Now all they need is my review form from the study abroad office. Then they can accept me!

Ich bin jetzt unerträglich und spreche nur auf schlechtes Deutsch. ;)

Best I Ever Had

Happy St. Patrick's Day. The rest of you are out. I (hopefully) am reading the On the Origin of Species! Which I apparently stuffed with local movie schedules after the Cleveland Contemporary Youth Orchestra concert.