win et frommage canard et creme brulee

What is this language? I'm in Paris, and completely confused by French. It is incomprehensible to me, and less people here are willing to speak English. I'm sorry that I speak no French, all I have managed is "merci". It's a little bit uncomfortable...one man actually said, in English, "I know English, but I will not speak it to you." Thank you, sir. That and the metro is difficult because tickets never work and signs are vague. It was a stressful day.

BUT other than weird people, Paris is beautiful. I went to the big cemetery, hunted down Oscar Wilde amongst other admirable people, and looked into very old sepulchres that are basically frozen in time. The cremation part was interesting but also really freaked me out, because you could see the big smoke towers where they do it in a church. Then we went to the Pompidou, one of the coolest looking museums I have ever seen. It was built partially inside out, so all the elevators, escalators, and stairs are on the outside. And modern art is usually entertaining. I actually liked a lot of it though.

Then we went to a crazy fondue restaurant in Monmartre, which is all about loud drunk people and tiny spaces. It was amazing. They bring you wine in baby bottles, refill it for free all night, and keep giving you tons and tons of fondue for a reasonable fixed price. Then you can get pushed around by the old French man who owns the place because there's no room and he's not in the best mood since everyone is yelling and jumping on the tables.

Today we got up late and went to Chantilly, a day trip from Paris with a beautiful chateau, gardens, and a horse show. I illegally petted the horses because I loved them. Tomorrow is hopefully Notre Dame, the Louvre when it's free for students, and the Eiffle Tower at night. We'll see.

I also just did Stockholm for 5 days and loved it. Cold, but beautiful. I didn't really know anything about Sweden but now I want to go even further north, and perhaps stay in the ice hotel. The best part was the boat tour of the inner archipelago, the islands between Sweden and Finland. We only got to go a little ways out, because you need a longer trip where you would stay overnight to see the outer ones. But snow-covered islands covered with pine trees and nice Scandinavian houses, and ocassionally palaces were incredibly beautiful.

I'm running out of time!

Struenseegade?

Hello briefly from Copenhagen, Denmark.  This Danish keyboard is a little hard to figure out and also doesn't work very well, so quickly...I was just in Amsterdam for three days, and spent one full day here, and am leaving in 40 minutes for Stockholm.  The night train to Amsterdam was fun, I got my own tiny hotel room basically and spoke quick German to the nice Deutsche Bahn people.  It is very strange to wake up in another country, with an announcer speaking a language you've not really heard before.  But Dutch is very close to German, and I think I could learn it easily.  I actually had one or two people say things to me in Dutch that I understood well enough to give answers (in German) to.  After some chaos in the Amsterdam train station, I met up with Rachel and we headed to our hostel, Shelter Jordan.

I think Amsterdam could also be named Don't Get Hit by a Bike.  There are apparently more bikes than people there.  But it's beautiful and doesn't look like any other city I've seen.  Everything is on canals, and somehow it manages to be cleaner and nicer looking than Venice, I think.  We went on the free tour again, which gave us quick history and sights for three hours, starring tour guide Basilio.  The brief dip into the Red Light District was interesting, but of course you have to do it.  We also went to the Van Gogh museum, which is actually more like Some Van Gogh Plus All These Other People That Lived Around the Same Time.  We also spent a long time exploring parks, finding strange birds, going to a wax museum, getting hailed on, and sitting in bars with Dutch men singing American blues quite well.  

Night train to Copenhagen wasn't quite as great because I was in a tiny room with five other people, but they were all very nice.  Including myself there were two Americans, two Danes, and two Germans.  Again, spoke to the German girls quickly and was happy.  The venture into the part of the train that was separating and going to Moscow was just upsetting though, and reinforced my recent aversion to going to Russia.  Everything was ugly and scary looking, painted vomit color teal under horrible lighting.  We also kept getting trapped in the weird Russian doors.  At least Deutsche Bahn makes their trains look nice.  The parts going to Poland and the Czech Republic weren't doing much better, either.  Ahhhh eastern Europe.

We arrived in Copenhagen to find that our hostel, Sleep in Heaven, was kind of far from the city center, but we didn't mind walking.  We spent the day walking all over Copenhagen, which is gorgeous and I want to go back to so much.  There were swans everywhere.  Hans Christian Andersen is also everywhere.  We went in the cheesy little exhibit for him, and I remembered just how depressing all of his stories are.  I guess I forgot about how The Little Match Girl actually ends.  We also went in a Danish castle, which I loved because it didn't look like any other castle and was also not overwhelmingly spectacular.  The crown jewels were inside it.  We then managed to find a harbor out to the ocean, before becoming unbelievably cold and eating a nice Italian meal in the confusing Danish currency.  We will also have to figure out Swedish Krona soon.  Weird.

Okay, almost time to go get on the Danish train system.

I am not doing anything tonight.  Rachel and I tried to go see a play, Alice im Wunderland, but there were no more tickets left, and neither of us really had the energy left to actually do anything.  So I've been relaxing in my room for awhile, passively listening to my roommate and her friends speak some German, every once in awhile concentrating on it enough to understand something.

I have been to all of my possible classes by now.  This weekend was the Musik Seminar, ending with a Konzert on Monday evening.  It is taught by a man who looks somewhat like I imagine any number of the famous old Viennese composers to have looked when they were young and alive.  Yesterday we did Arnold Schönberg, and went to the Arnold Schönberg museum, which has lots of old musical manuscripts of his and some of his artwork.  Today was Beethoven, Motzart, Haydn, and Debussy.  We listened to some of their string quartets.  The professor handed out music and we followed along, while I realized how much I´ve missed being musically involved somehow.  One of my program directors mentioned she found a place I could take voice lessons, I will have to remind her.  On Monday we are going to see a concert, and then there will be no more of Herr Crazyhair for me.

At the Uni, I went to two different classes, and already know which one I will be keeping.  Epische Lieder (Epic Songs) was by far easier for me to follow than Liebe, Ehe, und Ehebruch in mittelaltlischer Literatur - that professor spoke incredibly fast, and there were also hundreds of people in the classroom, making it extremely difficult to concentrate.  I was able to understand about half of what the Epische Lieder Professorin said, and I think the more times I go the easier it will become.  We looked at a section of Beowulf, which I luckily remember well.  However, a translation of Old English into Modern German was one of the more confusing things I have ever read.

The way classes work here is interesting.  They are in gigantic lecture halls, people can come and go when they please, and no one is really expected to be quiet or pay attention the entire time.  This is difficult for me, because if I don´t pay complete attention then I will get completely lost and not understand anything.  I am also finding some cultural differences a little strange - such as the fact that here it is acceptable to blow one´s nose loudly in public, or when giving a lecture, zum Beispiel.  But the personal space thing is weirder for me.  It is smaller here.  I guess I didn´t really notice in Schwäbisch Hall because there were not enough people for it to matter, but here people will get really close to you.

The Central classes are all fine.  I think I´m dropping the Theatre one, because I will just have way too much to do otherwise.  I still have Deutsche Grammatik und Stylistik (necessary for me to somehow keep learning grammar, I still don´t understand passive or subjunctive at all), the required Austria in Context class, and German Literature from Realism to the end of the 20th Century, taught by Austrian Alan Alda.  

I also saw both No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood recently.  No Country had German subtitles, and I enjoyed finally being able to pick out how subtitles differ from what people are actually saying.  Anyway, No Country was clearly better, in my opinion.  There Will Be Blood was a little too much on the crazy for me, and I´m glad all the Austrians in the theatre were also laughing nervously at inappropriate times.  Call it, friendo.

Schönbrunn palace was one of the prettier places I have ever seen.  We ventured there a few days ago, and didn´t actually go in the palace.  Wondering the grounds took long enough, and we can always go back...we do have four months.  It, and several other places in Vienna, do not actually look real.  Vienna might just be a fake place, out of someone´s bizarre dream where all the buildings look absolutely unbelievable.  Schönbrunn had an old gate of some sort, where we sat and looked out on all of Vienna for awhile, as seen in the photo.  

I also had an adventure to Zentralfriedhof by myself.  One of the first things I wanted to see in Wien was the graves of musicians, so I took some U-Bahn for awhile followed by some Strassenbahn for awhile (but hey, I understand the public transportation system a lot better now) and ended up at the giant graveyard.  I wandered around for awhile, found the circle of Austrian presidents, and various other extravagant graves, before locating the Musiker.  All the oldest and most famous ones are buried in a circle together, where I just stood and got weirdly emotional for awhile.  People had put flowers all over their graves, and unfortunately the best I could manage was picking up a flower off the ground where it blew away and putting it back on Strauss´s grave.  Somewhat pathetic, I wish I´d had my own.  I then spent awhile trying to find the old Jewish section, but the cemetery is approximately one billion kilometers in every direction, so I never made it.  Besides that, it was very cold.  But I love graveyards, for some strange reason.  I don´t get scared in them, just calm.

We set sail on the Dawn of Dreams, through the Hallways of Hope and Happiness, to the Valley of Victory and Virtue.

One day I will write the cheesiest, most alliterative short story ever.

On Thursday evening, the Central Abroad group arrived here in Wien.  It was quite a chaotic day, as expected.  Perhaps the most difficult part for me was dragging my 33 kilo suitcase across Schwaebisch Hall to the ZOB bus station.  Luckily most of it was downhill so I kind of just let it go, and if there were stairs I employed the help of our friendly Bulgarian and Saudi-Arabian men.  Miraculously, I didn't have to pay anything extra for being way over weight limit on the flight.  Marie finagled the good people at German Wings into measuring us as a whole group, and since some people were somehow under weight limit, I was fine.  We took a short flight out of Stuttgart which involved a lot of me being disturbed by the amount of turbulence, and arrived in Vienna in the late afternoon.  We were then all put in cabs, and without much information, taken to our seperate dorms.

Rachel, Jonathan, and I arrived at our dorm (Boltzmanngasse) to find it dark and locked, with no one in sight.  We stood on the street with all of our luggage for a few minutes just looking sad, until we were able to sneak in behind someone else.  We then spent the next few minutes in the lobby looking even sadder as it was dark and no one was there.  Finally Rachel just opened a door behind the desk, and the Heimleiter emerged - an awkward, short Austrian man named Karl, apparently ganz langsam and ineffectual according to my roommate.  But he gave us our keys and sent us off to our rooms, without much information about the dorm.  His office hours next week are very short and all during times that I have classes, but I need him to sign a paper so I can register with the city.  Central already told us to lie about what day we arrived, I will just have to lie more, since I can't get it in until later because of this.

I met my roommate pretty soon after arrival, and she is very nice.  She speaks German and English very well and seems to just respond in whatever language I start off speaking to her in, so we have a little weird mix going on right now.  Our room is nice and big, even though the bathroom light doesn't work and my bed light doesn't work.  The bathroom light is really the only big problem - showering in the dark last night was not the most fun.  I'm still on a quest to find a desk lamp that can double as a bed lamp when I need it to.

Friday was Central College's insane whirlwind of activity day.  Orientation in the morning was essentially filled with throwing a bunch of mostly-confusing forms at us, saying YOU MUST FILL THESE OUT AND TAKE THEM TO VARIOUS PLACES IN THE CITY NEXT WEEK, a nice, comfortable little talk about not breaking any more doors and essentially not being like the frat boy half of our program in Schwaebisch Hall, and a few things about academics.  They then took us to a few of the Universität buildings, most of which are within a 10 to 15 minute walk from my dorm, which is nice.  

We had a bit of a break during which many of us went on a frantic trip for bed sheets, which we found and which are very comfortable.  Then we had a tour of the city, which I kind of just wish they had saved till Saturday since by that point we were all very tired, wanted to buy things we needed, and it was still raining.  But, we did see lots of palaces and Hapsburgs houses...always a bonus.  Then dinner with the professors all paid for by Central...soup and goulasch and beer and chocolate cake for me.

Today was shopping day, and I found everything I needed but the desk lamp, the quest for which will continue on Monday.  Also did not find an open Apotheke, but tbc on Monday as well.  Three friends and I had a very nice dinner at a good Asian restaurant, followed by some quality time walking around to look at the Rathaus and Volksoper and to sit on the giant statue in front of the Hapsburgs´ palace.  

Anyway, I am convinced that perhaps by the end of this week I will understand the U-Bahn and street car maps a little better, but I have not actually gotten lost yet!  I have, in fact, led people home with the handy gigantic map of the city.  

On Monday I´ll have my first class, which is Central´s theatre class.  I think I am actually taking all of Central´s classes, plus one at the Uni.  I am also being interviewed by Greenpeace on Wednesday...AHHHH.

Also.  Auf wiedersehen bis das Wetter shöner ist.

(goodbye until the wetter is better and I have seen more of Vienna).