Jause Zeit!

30.August 2012

I think it’s appropriate to give you all a virtual tour through my housie house! We’ll start in the most important room…

yeaaahhh baby!! oh, and please note the giant jar of Nutella on the counter (sorry, it's a little small in the picture, but for your imagination: I can fit my head in it)

 Then we go onto the deck where there is a lovely pool to paddle in or to take a sun bath. Oh, mum and pop, no worries, I wear sunblock.

careful, if you lay face down without a towel you get imprints on your belly that look ones on whales! Of course I do this on purpose...

My rooooooommm!!!!! It's so Bad Ass

this is where I sleep, for you information. I probably should have cleaned it up a bit before I took a picture....
HA HA HA

 One of Dette's friends gave me TONS of her old clothes! yay! I totally didn't bring enough. (which, by the way exchange students is realllly good to do. don't bring a lot. ever. just don't do it.)

Balkon :P my room and Dette's are connected via this incredibly intelligent design

view of the backyard

MY JACKET!!!!

 That was a great tour. Onwards. Today we went shopping for some Lederhosen for a friend of Dette's, here are some of the dirndls in the store. AREN'T THEY COOL??? (look downwards)

Dirndl and Lederhosen store

Guess what those are!!!

 Oh, and I should add, McDonalds in Austria are FANTASTIC. I've never had a good meal at a McD's until this day. (which I think was yesterday) The McCafe even had fancy schmancy pastrys! Toll!!
The over all quality of the food and the building were 10x better than any McD's in the States. I don't think I want to come back...

oh yuuuuummm..

Gasp!

 One last picture of what has been going on here! We went to the pet store one day to buy a doggie bed for Willi (der Hund) and I came across this!

Even dogs in Austira get beer! HA! love it!

SEE YA LATER, GUTS! Thanks for reading :P

Nach Sprachcamp

Austria blog Aug 27

It has been 17 days since I’ve touched down in Austria! Howooga! I’ll do my best to fill you in….

I was just at a two week language camp in Altmünster with all the other rotary dudes. All together there are about…70 of us. I think. I haven’t counted.

The first day of camp we were interviewed to see our progress in German and split into 4 classes: Beginner 1, beginner 2, intermediate and advanced. (I was put into intermediate) We all ran around like headless chickens that day, it was fun.

Altmünster is located on a big, sparkly lake under a big rocky mountain. It was very pretty. The catch phrase that day was, “this is not Earth.” The mountain really didn't look real.... Ehrlich. 

The rest of the two weeks consisted of classes, eating chocolate, swimming, Tarot cards, dancing, learning swears in Spanish and Portuguese...

OH, I held a contra dance on night, it was awesome. Just thought I would tell you all. 

German update: my grammar is getting better, however we really didn't do that much speaking! (bummer) so I don't feel like I've improved greatly.

We went to a salt mine one day, took a hike another day, went to a disko on the beach: and then got in trouble for showing up a tad late for our 9:00 snack.... YOLO!!! (I apologize for that. I had to)

Our view everyday. The story is that there was a giant who fell in love with a mermaid who lived in the lake. When she died he carved her face into the mountain and then jumped into the lake and drowned. How sweet!

Salt Mine!!!!Huzzoooo!

This is the view from a hike we took. ooooh man this is *not earth

Couldn't help myself, sorry. 

Roland! He was a teacher at the camp and was superbly suberb

  

Day 1

Hallo Österreich! I got here!

The plane ride was boring, of course, I was kept alive by Dr. Who and Cabin Pressure. (for those of you who don't know these things look them up. it's fantastic.

I landed in Madrid a half an hour early which was great because the airport was HUGE and I only had about an hour to get to my gate. Thankfully this flight was only a couple of hours long, so I didn't have too long to wallow away in my anticipation and nervousness. Which I actually didn't have much of.

To all the outbounds, the rotary jacket, i found, is magical! As soon as I put it on I had this feeling that I was in charge and that I was going to march up to this exchange completely calm and cool like a business woman. I recommend wearing the rotary jacket to any nervous outbound.

I was awaited at the front of the airport by Dette, my host sister and Margot, my host mummy, a fantastic cake and an Austrian flag! WAHOO!! Perchtoldsdorf is a cute little town right next to Vienna with lots of cute things that I need to explore. I think i'll wait a day, though. My family was really good about not letting me go to sleep so I could combat jetlag with full force! At 8:30pm I'm calling it quits, though.

We drove home and I brought my stuff upstairs, took a shower, realized just how starving I was, and went out to lunch at this beautiful lokal run by local farmers. We then went to the Haupstraße (main street) and checked out the music school, which we found was closed for summer so I can't really say anything about it.

The Baiers have lived in Perchtoldsdorf for a long time and practically know everyone! Meaning practically everyone in Perchtoldsdorf knows me! It makes it a little less awkward to try out my awkward Deutsch to everyone! (which is way less awkward than I thought it would be, by the way.)

You have to forgive my grammatical mistakes, I am running on verrryy little sleeeeppppp....

So, after all that, we went home and started decorating another cake for my host bro, Ben who is turning 15 tomorrow! It's a football field with goals and everything! I made a shark and a flower out of the extra marzipan. I've learned a lot of new words today, which I actually forget now, so I guess I didn't really learn them. I tried to save them in my ipod, though so maybe tomorrow I can get them into my memory.

I need to learn how to roll my Rs; when something little is even smaller, instead of adding "lein" to the end, you roll your R. or something, I haven't really caught on to it. But it's only the first day so I'm not worried.

Dinner was fabtastic, really yummy, and we all just sat around and talked! I tried to listen, and not speak too much english, but they're really good at including me in the conversation and getting me to use german, but not pushing it too much. My host mom is a teacher, and is very patient, and also knows how to encourage german in an encouraging, teacher-like way. Me gusta.

Tomorrow Dette and I are going out to meet her friends :) I am prepared to say Ja! a lot.

P.S. don't get used to this length of entry because it's the first day, ya know....

The Green Gate which I remembered to go through. 

-Cleo

Day Negative 5

How fun! I have officially made a blog for this trip/exchange/thingie that I'm going on. (in case you skipped reading the title and moved on to the extremely interesting, compelling tale of my adventures in far off places and still are confused about whereabouts I'm headed, it's Austria. or Österreich as we call it in german.)

Phew, got that that over with!

So. Here's the story. I am pretty much just doing my normal New Hampshire routine, save for randomly jumping up and down singing "Austria in 5 days, Austria in 5 days," and making my totally interesting blog: which I am sure all of you readers will stick with me till the end, reading every single longwinded entry that I put up. Because it will be a very normal, consistent schedule in my normal, consistent life that I'm about to embark on.  (If you couldn't catch my sarcasm in that, trust me, I was being sarcastic.)

I have nothing else interesting to say, so i'll say some pretty uninteresting things. you can abort this mission if you have better things to do, reading this entry is a biggggg time waster. and we all hate time wasters. }:)

For instance, types of fonts. I spent far too many hours picking out the perfect font for my blog. I could chose from Yanone Kaffeesatz (the last font on the list) which, despite it's interesting name, does not have an interesting design. Then there was Lobster, also known as Kupurrwya, Chewy, Reenie Beanie and Mountains of Christmas. (These were the finalists, of course, there were tons of other interesting types of fonts but they didn't fit my needs of crazy and schweetness.) The title ended up being Mountains of Christmas because Austria is Alpie and they celebrate Christmas, and it looked like the font of one of my favorite children's books. The text ended up being Reenie Beanie: mainly because it looks cool. like the internet! (and now you are enlightened.)

So there you have it. that is what my life is like at the moment, stand by for some more schweetness. because rr merr grrrd there will be schweetness galore!!!!

LOS GEHTS, ØSTERREICH!!!! XD