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.