Well, I need to continue to tell the tales about the first days of the adventure!!
Ok, so Paris…thankfully I met another IES student, Ellison, while I was in the airport and thank goodness for that because the Paris airport was super confusing!!! I only know how to say hello, thank you, and do you speak English in French…apparently this was enough for the airport workers to believe that I was actually French! After just saying hello…which I don’t really think people were doing in the airport…(culture shock #1: not in the south anymore!) the worker talked back to me in French and when my eyes got wide and I froze, we performed some hand signals and broken English and Frenglish peppered with Spanish speaking. Walking through the airport, the signs were not consistent and nothing really made sense! Finally we found our plane and boarded!
After a surprisingly bumpy road and some more Frenglish, we landed in VIENNA!!!!!! Again, I was cracking up laughing…to myself may I add, and smiling constantly! I did not know what to do, nor could I believe that I was in Vienna!! It was the strangest feeling that was not dream like, nor reality…a weird medium place. We got off the plane and found baggage claim…somehow! Culture shock #1 started to sink in…the fact that I was not longer in a place where smiling at each other frequently happened. I felt helpless because I did not know how to say anything in German. We found baggage claim and thankfully, right when we were about to file the missing luggage claim our bags came out on the tram! We met some more IES students in the baggage claim area and a couple more joined us! We ended up making a big pod of baggage and students! All of us were eager and excited!
After waiting in the airport for more people to arrive, we left on a bus to our orientation in Deutschlandsberg, Austria! Deutschlandsberg is in southern Austria and it is BEE-U-TIFUL!!!! It is a smedium town with its own Vineyards and rolling hills! We stayed in a hostel and we met our roommates, mine are Grace and Courtney! We were thrown into the mix of meetings and power points when we got there after a traditional Austrian dinner of schnitzel!
Orientation was filled with a lot of fun activities! I went to a CASTLE! Yes, I am aware that they are everywhere in Europe (we passed at least three going back to Vienna today) but it was still awesome and it was my first one! The castle was filled with artifacts from the Celts and Romans, and some modernish glassware from the 19th century! I learned that I never want to live in a castle because they are super duper cold! It was freezing! The castle even had a torture chamber! It was really crazy! The view from the top was absolutely wonderful! I could not use enough capital letters or exclamation points to get that point across! Austria’s small towns are in clusters, each with a main church and a main street and houses! The houses are a mix or modern and traditional. They are so colorful! It is like a dream town for me, since I am such a colorful person!
Other fun activities during orientation included: walking through the town and taking pictures, going into a beautiful church with gold motifs everywhere! (I am not used to Catholic churches, let alone churches with such incredible detail and extravagance), learning how to waltz (Why would I need to know this? Oh, it’s ball season in Vienna, yes ball season!!! The first one that we are going to is in a palace, in Vienna…WHAT?!?!! Yes, how sick is that? Super amazing! So now I am prepared for this cultural tradition!), eating more local Austrian food (I am a fairly picky eater, parents be proud of what I am eating right now!), learned some German and tried it out in public (which was pretty embarrassing, but hey, you have to try it out to learn, right?), watching a European sport sweeping in popularity called Radball!! (OK, THIS is the WEIRDEST thing that I have EVER seen!! EVER!! So you are in teams of two, and you are playing soccer…while riding a bicycle! Oh yes, a bicycle!! It is polo…FOR BIKES!! The sport it NUTS! I talked to some local Austrian kids and learned some phrases! I also tried riding the bike, which is super difficult because the seat is in the back and they do not sit down, so the bike has a weird balance that is very different from a normal bike! People were falling, hitting each other, popping wheelies, it was crazy! And super intense!!), and generally being in a honeymoon phase of culture shock! The phase that IES calls us being obsessed with everything around us! But that’s ok with me because orientation was absolutely heavenly!!
Today we got to VIENNA!!!!!!!!!! We left our dear hostel and drove to Vienna! Driving in was crazy! I really did not know what to expect! Vienna is not exactly like I pictured it, it is much more urban, which I knew it would be because it is a big city of over 1 million people! The buildings have beautiful architecture and I cannot wait to start exploring the city tomorrow!!! Tomorrow I begin to learn German!! I’m so excited to learn German!!! Yea!!
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