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.

Chocolates in the Brussels airport

I got frisked going through customs in Belgium, as well as having to throw away the leftover pizza that I had lugged from New York (no foreign cheese allowed in the EU). Kim and I looked around (the airport was like a giant mall for perfume and chocolate) and slept on some terminal benches (less than comfortable) since we had an eight hour layover before departing for Vienna.

Once in Vienna, we stayed at the Hutteldorf Hostel, where I for some reason had offered to coordinate rooming for three other girls from IES. So we met our roommates, unpacked, showered, etc, since we were pretty gross after 24 hours of sleeping in airports and lugging our suitcases up a hill (which in my mind was really just a small mountain).

We eventually went out in search of food (note: carry-out in Austria, and I think other parts of Europe, is called "take-away") and... ate Chinese food (of course—or, for those of you who don't know, roughly 30% of my meals the last time I was in Europe were Chinese), though mostly because it was late and nothing else was open.

We didn't all sleep well (self included), but I managed to go jogging the next morning around the hostel (the first and last time for this trip, at this point). Then there was breakfast, a trip to the IES center to drop off a music student's french horn, sliding down some slides in the park...

Vienna is a beautiful city, and despite what I've heard or read, I don't find the people unfriendly. I haven't had a long conversation with any Austrians (except for some cab drivers, who weren't native Austrians, and the lady downstairs, but that, of course, was about the leak), but for the most part no one's been rude to me in a store, or stared grumpily at me on the subway, or shoved me out of the way on the Ubahn... any more than these things would happen in Cleveland. For the most part, people have been friendly and helpful, and can't tell that I'm American. Maybe that helps. :P Though they've always continued to be nice even once they know where I'm from. It seems to be clear that my German's not great, and that I'm a native English speaker, but not that I come from America. Who knows?