Cafés, Catacombs, and Countryside - The Parents Come to Visit (14/4-18/4)

Not having seen my family in two and a half months (yet another Year Abroad record), I was naturally happy to see them when they arrived in Vienna in mid-April. Perhaps I would have been happier had I not had to walk to their hotel in the pouring rain to meet them, but I was happy nonetheless. And with the help of Charlotte's welcome schnapps I was happier still.

The next day was my day off so I took my family on a not quite whistle-stop tour of Vienna, starting with the Spanish Riding School. The last time that I was there the horses weren't, so it felt slightly more authentic to see them doing their morning exercises, although it did mean subjecting myself to a lot of Strauss. As it turns out, living in two of the cultural capitals of the world has failed to turn me into a classical music aficionado, and each waltz just sounded like all the other waltzes that had gone before. Is it shameful to admit that the highlight for my brother and I was giggling at the boy with the shovel who collected the horse manure?

After the Spanish Riding School, and a tour of the catacombs below the Stephansdom (used to store the hearts of the Kaisers in copper jars as well as the neatly-stacked bones of many, many commoners), we went somewhere a little more suited to our emotional maturity level - the Prater! We saw the whole of Vienna from the top of the Riesenrad (a huge and slightly ancient and creaky ferris wheel), and then Andrew and I risked our lives on Austrian rollercoasters which gave us sideways whiplash (yes, such a thing does exist)!

The next day I had to work, but the day after we went on a spontaneous trip to Dürnstein. Dürnstein is a little town on the Danube, which was once the home of Richard the Lionheart (if by home you read place where he was held hostage), so we hiked up to the castle. It was a ruin, and health and safety rules were non-existent so we got to clamber all over it before getting lunch and catching the train back to Vienna. That was the last bit of sightseeing that I did with the family, as I spent Sunday drinking wine in the Heuriger/all the alcohol in my flat with Christina and Milan, who was visiting from Prague. And the next day I flew home for a week of food, friends, and even more family time.

Schönbrunn, Steiermark, and the Sound of Music - Staying in Vienna (4/4/11-13/4/11)

Seeing as most of my posts seem to be about the time which I spent outside of Vienna, I thought I'd write about some of the things which I did within the city itself.

Of course, there was the teaching, also known as the reason I was there in the first place. With the Royal Wedding drawing ever closer, it became the main topic of conversation in many of my classes. I then caught upon a foolproof time-filler - making the students plan their own wedding. This kept classes amused for entire lessons, and also provided some very interesting vocabulary requests, from 'chocolate fountain' to 'wasted life'. In return for these thoroughly English lessons, they taught me a little about Austrian culture, specifically things which you aren't meant to do in Austria. One of these is making the Hitler salute, another is drawing the swastika, and the teacher demonstrated this by making the salute and drawing a swastika on the board. Now why were we discussing this again?

My students also proved to be talented actors, and one day I had the pleasure of having students ask for me in the staffroom (most of the teachers hate it because it means extra work, but it just made me feel important). They were in Klasse 4 (about the equivalent of Year 9) and they wanted my help in rehearsing a play which they'd written themselves. My first job was to check the script. Expecting a few lines of dialogue of the kind that I'd have been able to produce in German at their age, I was shocked when they handed me a hefty notebook: they'd rewritten and modernised Twelfth Night!

In the same week, I went to see some of the older students from the English Drama Club performing Blythe Spirit. This was an opportunity to show off my school to Hannah, who had agreed to come too, and also to show her that the trams were not as confusing as she thought (the tram network in Vienna is rather extensive and not particularly well documented). Unfortunately, the trams let me down, as the number 58 (which I took to work every morning without the slightest hint of a problem) decided that today it wanted to be a number 52, necessitating a long walk, a metro ride, and a change onto a tram which wasn't having an identity crisis. Luckily the English Drama Club didn't let me down like the trams, and gave an excellent performance, leaving us amazed as always at the quality of English.

At the weekend we let our hair down after all that terribly hard work by visiting Schönbrunn Zoo like the children we are, then walking to the Rathaus (which was slightly further than Christina had predicted) to go to the Steiermark Festival. Steiermark (or Styria) is a Land in the south of Austria, and its festival was about as stereotypically Austrian  as it is possible to be. People were drinking beer, wearing Lederhosen, eating sausages, and listening to an oompah band. Christina's boyfriend, who had been brought along to see everything that is wonderful about Austria, went to the toilet and emerged in hysterics. "There was a man in there," he explained, "playing two trumpets! At the same time! In the men's toilets!"

As if we hadn't had enough Austrian stereotypes, that night Hannah and I decided to watch the Sound of Music. With beer. And singing. The next morning my flatmate was positively gleeful as she poured us coffee, rightly assuming that we needed it. Oh the shame...

Lakes, Lift-Shares, and Last Minute Plans - Yet Another Weekend Away (3/4/11)

In an attempt to spend three weekends in a row out of the country, Christina and I started planning a trip to Munich for the weekend after Prague. For this trip we decided not to go with any traditional methods of transport, and instead opted for Mitfahrgelegenheit, a German lift-sharing website on which people making long distance journeys can advertise free spaces in their cars. So on Friday afternoon at 5pm we were waiting in a car park, prepared to drive all the way to Munich with a man who we'd never met before in our lives (in order to stay with another total stranger once we arrived - God bless CouchSurfing).

An hour later, and after a very embarrassing misunderstanding with a man who was definitely not our lift-share, we were still waiting. Apparently this was one risk too many, and we were not to be going to Munich this weekend. Unfazed (or perhaps not entirely unfazed, but re-christening our failed lift-share 'Mitfahrgelegenheit Wanker' helped), we set about making new plans for the weekend. And, like all the best plans, it started with gin.

It also started with CouchSurfing, a CouchSurfing games night to be precise. Latvian Guy (he has another name, Pyotr, but Christina named him Latvian Guy in our first week here, and so Latvian Guy he will forever be) had invited us to the event a long time ago, and he didn't seem to mind us RSVPing at the last minute, so we went. We played games, we drank gin, we spoke several different languages, we made friends, we shared our gin with our new friends (whether or not they wanted to share it is another matter entirely). All in all it was a good evening, the highlight of which was Christina giving the last of the gin to Latvian Guy as a parting gift (again, how welcome this gift was is a matter of debate).

The next day, in the midst of a delightful gin hangover which made us feel slightly like we were floating, we went shopping. I decided to blow a good portion of my recently received paycheck on a new coat - apparently coat-buying has become a Year Abroad tradition for me - and some sunglasses which I broke three days later, and then we decided to go at sit on the Danube Island and watch the sunset. Imagine our delight when we later discovered that one of Christina's work colleagues had been robbed at knife point there only a few weeks before.

To end our weekend, and to enjoy the incredibly hot weather, we went on a day trip to the Neusiedler See. And a very pleasant day trip it was too, aside from the fact that the train station was actually a good couple of miles from the lake itself. And getting there involved walking along a very long road in the very hot sun. Still, the lake was delightful (if very cold), and we had a lovely afternoon lazing in the sun, spotting nudists, and eating ice-cream. So a lovely weekend, no thanks to Mitfahgelegenheit Wanker!

Pronunciation, Puppets and Peppermint Liqueur - A Weekend in Prague (25-27 March)

Our second attempt to go to Prague for the weekend was almost another non-starter, as we arrived at the Prater metro station to find no bus in sight. Luckily we were just too early (incredible though it may seem) and a few minutes and some seat-shuffling later we were safely on the bus. While Hannah and I had managed to switch seats so that we were together (and to show his gratitude for being able to sit with his wife, the man who I'd switched with took it upon himself to tell me about the Napoleonic battlefield we were driving through), Christina made friends with the man sitting behind, a Czech man who taught her about the Czech tradition of eating carp for Christmas dinner and in return refused to be taught the correct way to say the word 'cathedral'. The resulting sound of "ca-theeee-dral" "cat-tay-dral" kept Hannah and I amused for the best part of ten minutes, for the rest of the four hour journey we entertained ourselves with Beatles music and beer, giving ourselves sufficient Dutch courage to meet our first ever CouchSurfing host.

Apparently our luck was still in, because Milan was not only not a rapist/murderer/general crazy person, but he also took us all over Prague, gave up his huge bedroom to us while he slept on the sofa, kept us constantly supplied with bread, cheese, coffee and cherry tomatoes, and let us watch videos from his impressive collection at the expense of any of us getting a good night's sleep. All in all, the recipe for a good CouchSurfing experience!

On the Saturday we did a whistle-stop tour of the sights of Prague, but as usual we didn't exactly focus on mainstream sights. Although we saw everything the guidebook wanted us to see: the castle, Charles Bridge, Wenceslas Square, and the Old and New Towns, the highlights were, as in Budapest, the slightly wacky things which we sought out. The top three are listed below:

Rozhledna
This was Hannah's choice from the guidebook, mostly because "it looks like the Eiffel Tower". And it did indeed look like the Eiffel Tower, albeit being smaller and slightly more shabby-looking (being built on a hill, it didn't need to be anywhere near as high as the Eiffel Tower itself). Climbing the steps to the top felt a little like a death-defying experience, although not nearly as death-defying as getting back down the hill. Milan (trying to disprove his earlier reputation as a non-crazy person) decided that paths were for wusses and led us down the hillside instead, although he did offer assistance and there was a park on the way down, so I can't fault his shortcut too much!

John Lennon Wall

My choice also came from the guidebook, but it was obscure enough that the guidebook wasn't exactly sure where it was. But once again our luck held, and with minimal amounts of getting lost we managed to find the wall, which is painted with hundreds of tributes to the dead musician, and put our own mark on it. They may not have been quite as impressive as the giant painting of the Yellow Submarine, but it was the best us non-creative types could come up with!

Absintherie

Another thing that we couldn't leave Prague without trying was the absinthe - unlike the cheap imitation in the Undie, this stuff was 70% alcohol and came with a risk of actual blindness (disclaimer - risks possibly exaggerated and/or falsified). It also had an incredibly bitter aftertaste that ensured we would hesitate before drininkg it again, a disappointment that was worse than the potential(ly fake) blindness.

Other wacky highlights included the creepy puppet shop which Milan dragged us into halfway up Castle Hill (I'm amazed I'm not still having nightmares about Charlie Chaplin, I swear the puppet's eyes followed me around the room!), the Kafka Café in which we drank Kafka coffee (ingredients: coffee, peppermint liqueur, whipped cream, and not the slightest hint of a cliché), and the crazy steam punk bar which we unfortunately couldn't afford drinks in, but which was awesome all the same. Although we left Prague too exhausted to even concentrate on Music and Lyrics (and that film does not require many brain cells to concentrate on it), we took that as one more sign of a successful weekend!

New Blog

For anyone who's interested, I've set up a new blog, From Julie With Mixed Feelings. I'll still be writing about my travels here, at least until I've completed the updates on my Year Abroad, but more general stuff like film and book reviews and angst about my ongoing failure to break into the world of journalism/overexcited rambling if I manage to get any kind of work experience will be posted over there. You know you want to click it....

Currency, Culture, and a Crazily Early Morning - A Day Trip to Budapest (19/3/11)

In the middle of March (which, terrifyingly, is now over three months ago) Christina, Hannah, and I decided that we wanted to take a trip to Prague. Unfortunately (and as you can probably tell if you've actually read the title of this blog post) we didn't actually make it there, at least not on the weekend we were intending to go. Apparently buses tend to be fully booked when you try to buy your tickets the day before you want to travel, who'd of thought it? Luckily, we had a Plan B - or rather, Hannah is very good at crisis-Googling. Approximately three hours after we had been turned away from the bus station (and I had very nearly had a breakdown because my laptop had crashed that morning and it was all just too much to take) we were booking tickets to Budapest, because Hungarian buses are apparently never fully booked.

The downside of our Plan B was that the bus we had booked left at 7AM. This meant a wake-up call at a time that shouldn't even be allowed to exist in the morning (except perhaps if you have yet to have gone to bed - but then I never knew how to go to bed at normal times), made slightly more bearable by free fizzy water, wafers and Mr. Bean.

Impressed by the funny money.

By the time we arrived in Budapest, our eyes were on the verge of having to be propped open by matchsticks and only one thing could get us enthused for a long day of sightseeing - funny money! Luckily, Hungarian money was funny enough to keep us alive until we could buy some energy drink. Reaching the Old Town (which is the Buda half of the city, the Pest half is more modern) involved a ride on a metro train that bore more resemblance to a cattle wagon than any metro train I've ever seen before, and also a moment of utter stupidity on our parts. As we stood on the bank of the river looking for a) the centre of the Old Town and b) somewhere to buy energy drink, we almost managed to miss the Parliament building. To put this in perspective for people who have never been to Budapest, this is the Parliament building:

How can you miss this?

It is, as you can see, rather big, rather impressive, and rather unmissable, or so you'd think. Possibly sightseeing on three hours sleep isn't such a good idea. 

Luckily, a can of Red Bull later we were in full sightseeing mode. With the help of two of the most bored-looking information centre staff members in existence (who we then managed to annoy by leaving the door to the centre open, you'd have thought they'd have been pleased to have something to do) we managed to see all of the main sights in Buda, the highlight being the Fisherman's Bastion where Hannah, during a mammoth photo shoot, mused "Maybe I just look better horizontal." We also, thanks to my expert researching, visited a slightly unconventional sight. It was the statue of Andras Hadik (who is no doubt very famous and important to the Hungarians but if you want to know why I'm afraid you'll have to Google him because I have absolutely no idea) astride his horse, and we (or possibly just I, but I had the guidebook and the return tickets so where I went the others had to follow) were particularly interested in seeking him out because we'd heard that students rubbed a certain part of the horse's anatomy in order to get good degree results. Undeterred by the fact that the statue turned out to be on top of a rather large plinth, we set about ensuring our Firsts.

Eyes definitely not on the prize.

Having embarrassed ourselves sufficiently with our climbing of ancient monuments, we set off in search of our next destination, Margaret Island. We mainly wanted to see it because the guidebook informed us that it was neither Buda nor Pest (and as it used to be the home of the Turkish pashas' "women of ill-repute", we were sure to feel at home there), but in the end it turned out to be another highlight of our day. The reason is simple, this:

To me, to you.

The man hiring them out advertised them as bikes, we thought they looked more like Chuckle brothers mobiles, but whatever they were they were brilliant fun to drive. I let the others take care of the pedalling, while I took on the oh-so-taxing role of steering and braking, which was admittedly not as easy as it sounds. In our hour of hiring the 'bike' we saw everything the island had to offer: a water tower, some ruins, a zoo containing birds and ponies, and this graffiti:

It seems you can never escape Austria (pun possibly intended).

If you can't read it, it says "Natascha Kampusch", who is of course one of Austria's "cellar children" (yes, more than one child has been locked in a cellar in Austria, in fact it's become a bit of a national joke, although obviously most people in Austria are wonderfully hospitable and are not at all planning to lock you in your cellar when they invite you round for dinner...). 

After a delicious lunch in which only Hannah bothered to try the national fare (Christina and I had learnt our lesson in Slovenia), we set off to see what Pest had to offer. As it turned out, not as much as Buda, and the main things we saw that afternoon were rain, Hare Krishnas, and Andrassy utca, Budapest's answer to the Champs Elysées (just as long but not quite as beautiful).However, the Hare Krishnas gave us free chocolate and the beer we bought in the bus station with our leftover funny money made the bus journey back a lot better than the outward journey - or maybe it was just that the tiredness had made us delusional by that point!

Dirndls, Drinking and (un-)Domestic Bliss - Pancake Day and Other Stories (6/3/11-13/3/11)

A brief break from travelling followed, as I began to settle in Vienna. This settling was aided by meeting tandem partners, discovering (and laughing at) some Austrian traditions, and, not to forget our roots, celebrating a British one.

To be fair, the "British" tradition was Pancake Day, which is actually celebrated across Europe, but it was still something familiar, and yet nothing like any other Pancake Day that I've ever experienced. I celebrated it last year in my student house, but the difference then was that my housemates actually knew how to cook. In contrast, this year I was the only one out of the three of us who knew how to make pancakes, and that was only thanks to a frantic Skype call to my mother. Still we managed to create batter (with normal eggs rather than the coloured hard-boiled ones which Christina had opted for), and get it into two frying pans, which Christina and I were put in charge of. So far so good.

Or perhaps not. My first pancake was successful, but while making my second I got distracted, and the next thing I knew the hob was covered in batter. Trying to save her kitchen, Hannah tried to mop up the mess, but unfortunately just ended up setting fire to the kitchen towel she was using to wipe away the batter. Pancake Fail #1. I was then relegated to photo duty (and cutting up phallic banana duty), but was quickly invited back to the stove when Hannah's efforts to create a pancake resulted in Fail Pancake. She swears it was delicious, Christina and I were doubtful.

Once we were done pretending to be domestic, we settled down to watch Eurotrip. And just in case the ridiculous European stereotypes weren't enough, we decided to drink every time one appeared. Thus it was that the next morning I lay in bed for ten minutes thinking "hmmmmm, loud noise," before realising that it was in fact my alarm clock, and I was meant to be at work.

This didn't faze me, and the next night I was out again to celebrate my flatmate passing her university Master exams. In Austria, most degrees finish with a thirty minute oral exam (regardless of the subject), which can be arranged for any time that suits you and the professor examining you, hence the fact that she was finishing at the beginning of the semester. The celebrations began in a bar on the university campus, and later moved on to a 'Wunderbar' (apparently one of many across Vienna) - by the end of the night I was wishing I'd had more that 4 hours' sleep in the past 48 hours, but it was a good night.

I also spent the next three nights socialising: meeting my flatmate's boyfriend (whose room I'm renting, so I probably should have tidied it before he arrived) and celebrating the beginning of my flatmate's birthday at midnight with Sekt (the Austrian answer to champagne) and a 'birthday crown', meeting a fat blonde man in short and a Von Trapp hat at a CouchSurfing meeting who introduced himself as Hans (Oh GOD the stereotypes!), and swapping coats with Christina on the way home from a night out because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Good job I didn't give up alcohol for Lent!

And, finally, there was the Austrian culture. For this was the one week of the year in which Lederhosen and Dirndls were sold in Hofer (the supermarket which we in the UK know as Aldi). For those who don't know, these are the national costume of Austria (and also of Bavaria) and they look like this:

Innocently trying to buy energy drink, the sight of a rack of these outfits was nearly the death of Christina and I. It didn't help that the woman queuing in front of us was buying a dirndl apron. Or that when I told my flatmate about our 'experience', her boyfriend interjected to inform me that his sisters had two dirndls each - one for Sundays and one for weddings. Apparently I'm in the minority in finding them hilarious...