(no subject)
Well, here I am in Vienna since Sunday. I guess I owe y'all a little bit of a description of what's going on right about now, so I'll do my best, and to keep it relatively short since there's a whole bunch of people waiting.
My flights went really well. The one from Detroit to Amsterdam left and arrived early, but the one to Vienna was delayed, so I was overall about an hour later than expected, but still in plenty of time to find the Westbahnhof (West train station) where everyone was meeting up. I was even lucky because as we I was boarding the plane from Amsterdam to Vienna, the guy behind me saw the tag on my backpack and said, "Excuse me, are you from IES? And that's how I met Adam, which was really nice because then I felt less nervous about trying to find where I needed to go. Even less nervous when, at the bus stop, we picked up Alex, B.A. and Dale. This was a very good thing.
Anyhow, once at the Westbahnhof we stood there for two and a half hours while waiting for most everyone to show up. From there it was onto buses to Murau, which is about three and a half hours away in the mountains. We stayed at this really nice youth hostel there and had a great time. It was a really pretty city, too. Unfortunately I left my camera with my other bags at the Westbahnhof accidentally, so I didn't get any pictures. I wouldn't mind going back though, because it was such a pretty place indeed. The Mur River is absolutely gorgeous and perfectly clear, so pure that if you felt like it, you could drink straight from it. In fact, they just pipe it into the houses without any sort of purification, I do believe.
Anyways, enough about water. Orientation was fun, but we were too big a group for the hostel and so it was a lot of standing in line to hurry up and wait and so the weekend ended up feeling just a bit too long. Highlights, though: Friday night was a "typical Austrian evening," which turned out to be a male dancing troupe complete with lederhosen, accordion, and rather flat clarinet. Jess, who's another flutist I've made acquaintance with, and I cringed every time he took the clarinet out because we knew we were in for a, well, interesting sound. Other highlight: I learned the waltz! Goodness only knows if I'll remember it, but perhaps with the right partner I might... :)
On Sunday we got back to Vienna and moved into our housing. I chose Haus Salzburg, which is a dorm in the sixth district (more on the layout of the city some other time, I'm thinking) close to the Naschmarkt, which is this big open air market for pretty much everything. I picked the place because it has everything - an easy, 15-20 minute commute to class with the subway (I could walk, yes, but I long ago became addicted to the Viennese subway system on previous trips), proximity to the Naschmarkt, a phone in my room that I can always call out from (you'd be surprised -they're not always available over here), kitchen, television rooms, washer and dryer, and... drumroll please... internet!! :D Granted, it's not working yet. Konni (the equivalent of an RD for the place, really) sent a resident down to me who studies computers and he worked on my laptop for an hour last night to try and get it to work, but it even confused him! So he's going to talk to people that might know Windows 98 SE better than I do and see about getting an answer. If any of you know about configuring a VPN to access the internet, let me know. He got it to access the internal server but nothing else. So I could look at the Haus Salzburg page to my heart's content, but even that would get boring, I'm thinking.
I'll also be living with an Austrian student! Her name is Klaudia Lang, but she doesn't get here 'til next week, so I've got the room to myself right now. That's kinda nice actually, because I got to unpack my stuff at my own pace and take phone calls whenever I felt like it without worrying about disturbing her. I am looking forward to meeting her, though. It'll be a good time to practice my German, to be certain. Right now it's been a lot of English because most people here don't speak conversational-level German and the only guy I know in my dorm, Rafael, is Polish and he speaks German but he thinks better in English. So I've really only used the language in class (more about that some other day as well) and to buy stuff. Although I have bought a lot of stuff so far in terms of groceries, LAN cards, notebooks, etc. And at the post office. And I speak only German with the Haus Salzburg staff even if I don't speak it with Rafael. So it hasn't been too terribly bad.
For the first few days here I've been rather homesick. I hit a pretty good rock bottom yesterday morning, so much that I seriously considered either getting on a plane back home and finding a way to get myself into classes at Hope or moving to the Freiburg program where there's a lot of Hope people, but sometime yesterday afternoon, I started to feel kind of curious about the place and the people. Not enough to do much exploring yet, but instead of sitting around and lamenting my non-functioning internet or the fact that I really don't know people in my dorm yet and I miss everyone sooo much, I went out grocery shopping. As dumb as that might sound, I felt better. Even willing to explore the place. And less like I absolutely have to catch the next plane home or I'm going to die. And today I've had the "I want to leave" thoughts, but they always pass. I guess I just expected too much, to be honest. I've only been gone a week. Takes longer than that to make friends, get settled, and all that good stuff. So I'll just keep plugging away and it'll get good soon. I'm already making some plans to go out shopping or exploring or whatever with B.A. and Beth (the two girls I almost roomed with if there had been any three person apartments with internet, which there weren't) and Jess, so that's going a lot better. Thanks for prayers and everything; they are really helping me. God is so very good! :)
By the way, I absolutely love email and snail mail, so if anyone's ever in the mood to send a letter, here's my address. Shameless plug, I know, but oh well.
Kathy Ewing
c/o IES
Palais Corbelli (yeah, I go to school in a real palace, how cool is that?)
Johannesgasse 7
A-1010 Vienna
Austria, Europe
Apparently it's a good idea to specify the whole Europe thing because the mail service sometimes confuses Austria with Australia and that's no good.
Alright, I'll try and provide you guys with more descriptions and stuff in the next few days, but for now I ought to be off. Tschüß!
My flights went really well. The one from Detroit to Amsterdam left and arrived early, but the one to Vienna was delayed, so I was overall about an hour later than expected, but still in plenty of time to find the Westbahnhof (West train station) where everyone was meeting up. I was even lucky because as we I was boarding the plane from Amsterdam to Vienna, the guy behind me saw the tag on my backpack and said, "Excuse me, are you from IES? And that's how I met Adam, which was really nice because then I felt less nervous about trying to find where I needed to go. Even less nervous when, at the bus stop, we picked up Alex, B.A. and Dale. This was a very good thing.
Anyhow, once at the Westbahnhof we stood there for two and a half hours while waiting for most everyone to show up. From there it was onto buses to Murau, which is about three and a half hours away in the mountains. We stayed at this really nice youth hostel there and had a great time. It was a really pretty city, too. Unfortunately I left my camera with my other bags at the Westbahnhof accidentally, so I didn't get any pictures. I wouldn't mind going back though, because it was such a pretty place indeed. The Mur River is absolutely gorgeous and perfectly clear, so pure that if you felt like it, you could drink straight from it. In fact, they just pipe it into the houses without any sort of purification, I do believe.
Anyways, enough about water. Orientation was fun, but we were too big a group for the hostel and so it was a lot of standing in line to hurry up and wait and so the weekend ended up feeling just a bit too long. Highlights, though: Friday night was a "typical Austrian evening," which turned out to be a male dancing troupe complete with lederhosen, accordion, and rather flat clarinet. Jess, who's another flutist I've made acquaintance with, and I cringed every time he took the clarinet out because we knew we were in for a, well, interesting sound. Other highlight: I learned the waltz! Goodness only knows if I'll remember it, but perhaps with the right partner I might... :)
On Sunday we got back to Vienna and moved into our housing. I chose Haus Salzburg, which is a dorm in the sixth district (more on the layout of the city some other time, I'm thinking) close to the Naschmarkt, which is this big open air market for pretty much everything. I picked the place because it has everything - an easy, 15-20 minute commute to class with the subway (I could walk, yes, but I long ago became addicted to the Viennese subway system on previous trips), proximity to the Naschmarkt, a phone in my room that I can always call out from (you'd be surprised -they're not always available over here), kitchen, television rooms, washer and dryer, and... drumroll please... internet!! :D Granted, it's not working yet. Konni (the equivalent of an RD for the place, really) sent a resident down to me who studies computers and he worked on my laptop for an hour last night to try and get it to work, but it even confused him! So he's going to talk to people that might know Windows 98 SE better than I do and see about getting an answer. If any of you know about configuring a VPN to access the internet, let me know. He got it to access the internal server but nothing else. So I could look at the Haus Salzburg page to my heart's content, but even that would get boring, I'm thinking.
I'll also be living with an Austrian student! Her name is Klaudia Lang, but she doesn't get here 'til next week, so I've got the room to myself right now. That's kinda nice actually, because I got to unpack my stuff at my own pace and take phone calls whenever I felt like it without worrying about disturbing her. I am looking forward to meeting her, though. It'll be a good time to practice my German, to be certain. Right now it's been a lot of English because most people here don't speak conversational-level German and the only guy I know in my dorm, Rafael, is Polish and he speaks German but he thinks better in English. So I've really only used the language in class (more about that some other day as well) and to buy stuff. Although I have bought a lot of stuff so far in terms of groceries, LAN cards, notebooks, etc. And at the post office. And I speak only German with the Haus Salzburg staff even if I don't speak it with Rafael. So it hasn't been too terribly bad.
For the first few days here I've been rather homesick. I hit a pretty good rock bottom yesterday morning, so much that I seriously considered either getting on a plane back home and finding a way to get myself into classes at Hope or moving to the Freiburg program where there's a lot of Hope people, but sometime yesterday afternoon, I started to feel kind of curious about the place and the people. Not enough to do much exploring yet, but instead of sitting around and lamenting my non-functioning internet or the fact that I really don't know people in my dorm yet and I miss everyone sooo much, I went out grocery shopping. As dumb as that might sound, I felt better. Even willing to explore the place. And less like I absolutely have to catch the next plane home or I'm going to die. And today I've had the "I want to leave" thoughts, but they always pass. I guess I just expected too much, to be honest. I've only been gone a week. Takes longer than that to make friends, get settled, and all that good stuff. So I'll just keep plugging away and it'll get good soon. I'm already making some plans to go out shopping or exploring or whatever with B.A. and Beth (the two girls I almost roomed with if there had been any three person apartments with internet, which there weren't) and Jess, so that's going a lot better. Thanks for prayers and everything; they are really helping me. God is so very good! :)
By the way, I absolutely love email and snail mail, so if anyone's ever in the mood to send a letter, here's my address. Shameless plug, I know, but oh well.
Kathy Ewing
c/o IES
Palais Corbelli (yeah, I go to school in a real palace, how cool is that?)
Johannesgasse 7
A-1010 Vienna
Austria, Europe
Apparently it's a good idea to specify the whole Europe thing because the mail service sometimes confuses Austria with Australia and that's no good.
Alright, I'll try and provide you guys with more descriptions and stuff in the next few days, but for now I ought to be off. Tschüß!