Woche Eins Part 2

Ok...after taking the wrong bus and exploring every part of Salzburg except where I wanted to go, I'm finally back in my dorm room and ready to do some serious blogging. I feel like blogging is such a nerdy thing, and not even nerdy in a good way like knowing the difference between a stormtrooper and an Imperial royal guard, but just dumb...let's call it a journal from now on. Ignore the website name.

By the way, if you're interested in seeing Salzburgian pictures, you should definitely go to the recent photos tagged of me on Facebook, because they're way better at showing you how awesome Austria is than I am. I'm the worst tourist ever, and therefore don't own a camera and basically live as a picture parasite...I let other people do the hard work of taking pictures and then pass them off as mine.

Here's a cool one though from over Salzburg (the other guy is named Seth, and I suppose you could say he is a pretty cool guy):

Hill top overlooking the city

Ok I believe I left off in the last post with arriving in Munich on Sunday, Sept 14. I amazed the customs people in the airport with my fluent German (I said "Hallo", "Ja", and "Danke"). Wait, no we made it to Salzburg in my last post. So my roommate and I get to the dorms we're going to be living in for the semester, and we find a cluster of brightly colored cubes awaiting us trying to pass themselves off as "modern" buildings. Not exactly the centuries-old, breath-takingly beautiful architecture I'd been waiting for, but I'll keep an open mind. The dorms are like a cross between a kindergarten and an insane asylum. Twelve of our group is living in the Internationales Kolleg dorms in all, half in the orange building (me) and half in the blue...war eagle. We basically just got settled in and then walked to the near by Rauschofer Brauhaus, where I got some excellent Weisswurstl (white sausage) and we listened to two Austrians sing Simon and Garfunkel (can't escape America).

The next day we started our orientation. AIFS's resident Austrian expert, Andreas, gave us an awesome walking tour of Salzburg. He is like the quintessential Austrian: very nice, animated, occasionally sings Edel Weiss (that's actually not very Austrian haha), wears a wide-brimmed Bavarian mountain hat. Salzburg is pretty neat because there are these "mountains", really like large hills with sheer cliff faces, spread throughout it, but around them it is just about completely flat. Andreas informed us that glaciers used to flow through the hills here so many thousand years ago, which basically carved the land out of the mountains which Salzburg now occupies. Definitely the most noticeable aspect of Salzburg is the Festung (fortress) Hohensalzburg, which was built in 1079 to guard the Salzach Valley (the river that flows through the middle of the city). It's pretty sweet to go to school every day and see a medieval castle glaring down at you from the hillside. You can see it right above Seth's head. It's usually pretty cloudy, but on a sunny day you can see the Alps too. It's probably like in the low 50s in that picture (and is right now, for that matter), which is probably incomprehensible to ye people of the South.

Today is the last day of St. Rupert's festival in Salzburg, which is a celebration of their patron saint (Austria is very Catholic...there's only one Protestant church in Salzburg). We were checking out the goods in the tents all along the river in this picture, and there were a bunch of rides, a beer tent, and wurst and pretzal stands all in the Altstadt (old town). Austrians and Germans basically use any excuse they can to have a party, complete with traditional dancers in lederhosen and dirndls and some good old-fashioned brass quartets.

At some point during the week we went to the Augustiners Brau, a pretty awesome beer hall founded by Austrian monks. Apparently fasting all the time got pretty difficult for them, so they found a loophole and decided to brew their own "liquid bread", also known as beer, to hold them over at St. Augustine's Church, right next door. The beer hall still serves that beer, which is a pretty cool tradition, and we had a pretty good time hanging out there, eating good schnitzel and pastries.

PROST!! (auf Englisch: Cheers!)

So German classes started last Tuesday, and meine Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut, so I'm in a perpetual state of confusion. I'm surrounded everywhere by stuff I don't understand, from my cell phone (which is all auf Deutsch), to the grocery store (reading the ingredients for dairy products just became a lot harder), to every person in the city besides us. How dare an entire country speak a language I can't? I guess when people of your language have invaded every country in Europe multiple times you get that right, so I suppose I understand.

Somehow I'm in Intermediate German I for the orientation, but next week when the real semester starts I'm going to strongly request to be in Beginning German II. The class is taught almost entirely in German, which means I am at somewhat of a severe disadvantage. I can't tell whether my teacher, Eva, detests me or likes me... she for some reason thinks that I am zoned out all of the time, so whenever I'm just a little behind the rest of the class in turning a page or something, she says "Schcottie....". She's a slavedriver. I think I only got that once today though, so there's improvement. I'm not used to a teacher demanding rapt attention from me for an entire two hours. I'm doing okay with written stuff though...Frau Witt-ler von Greenbrier must have helped me after all.

But I made it through the week and after class on Friday we hiked Monchsberg, which is the mountain right next to Altstadt that the fortress is on. Look, we even decided to pick it up:

We hung out and watched Top Secret that night...good ole 80s humor...and the next day we hiked Kapuzinerberg, which is on the opposite side of the river from Monchsberg, which is where the first picture of this post was taken. Seth and I had a delightfully manly time running through the woods, preferably off the trail and close to the cliff, with our shirts off and imaginary spears in our hands. There was an incredible view from up there...pictures just don't do anything here justice.

Five of us went to the Salzburg International Church on Sunday, which meets at the Lutheran church, and that was really interesting and cool. There was a strange mix of Americans, such as the pastor, Austrians, and Africans (the first black people I've seen in Austria haha). It was really refreshing to sing some hymns that I knew and take communion with this very diverse group...it felt like a very real picture of the body of Christ. We went back later that night for Tanzabend (dance evening), where two Scottish musicians sang some awesome Scottish folk songs and...Johnny Cash. Awesome. In between these two multicultural events, we wandered through Mirabell Gardens, which is very beautiful, but of course had the most fun in the strange Gnome Garden. Behold, my little friend:


That's all for now. Come back next time to hear about how I slayed a dragon at the Hohenwerfen fortress and proceeded to pillage and burn the beautiful Alpine countryside, retreating then to my base of operations, an ice cave.

And if you feel so inclined, I would love to be kept in your prayers, especially concerning several matters:

1) That I would really embrace my time here in this beautiful place that God has made (whether the Europeans acknowledge it or not), and not be mad about not having what I'm used to having as an American-i.e. the Office, Auburn football, speaking English, living relatively cheaply, and friendships with those back home.

2) That I would really make some good friends while I'm here, and not do what I tend to do sometimes and dwell on how amazing my friends are back home. I feel like I am prone to thinking that I have made all of the strong friendships I will ever have and therefore am stubborn about investing time in new people, even if those new people are great (which most everybody here is).

K Thanks Bye!