I didn’t lose my luggage!

I landed (with all of my belongings—YAY!) in Vienna on September 1. After checking into my dorm, it finally hit me…scheiβe, I’m in Austria!! After several small mishaps (funny now, but not so much when they were happening), I finally started to get settled in. Gerald, my buddy from the WU, took me to dinner at a pub and I had my first Austrian meal—Wiener Schnitzel and German potato salad. Very yummy! On September 2, Lara’s plane arrived, and I took the Underground and CAT train to the airport to meet her. Over the past couple of days, we have been wandering around Vienna. Basically, we picked a different direction each day and started walking to see what we would find. Memorable highlights include:

• Maria Hilfer Straβe, which is one of the main shopping districts in the city (and relatively close to our dorm) – I will definitely be returning to this area frequently
• A Viennese wedding on Saturday (we walked up to the church and watched the processional)
• Wandering around and eating lunch in the Volksgarten with Blue, an Australian that Lara met on her plane
• Buying stamps that cost €1,25 each (equivalent to about $1.60) to mail postcards
• Wandering around the Museum District and listening to the street musicians outside the Spanische Hofreitschule
• Meeting new people in our dorm, including Diana (from Bosnia), Queenie (from Hong Kong), and Kirsten (from Singapore)
• Trying to learn some German so I don’t continue to look like the tourist that I am

I have uploaded my pictures here. Look in the album titled “First Impressions of Vienna” (it’s the only album up there right now). Feel free to take a look, and let me know what you think. For those of you who know about my internship with Progress Energy this summer, I have been fascinated by the lighting system in Vienna since I arrived, which is why I have included several pictures of the street lights in my photo album. Tomorrow, we head to Florence and the Cinque Terre (that’s in Italy, for those of you who don’t know). I look forward to sharing my adventures with you when I return!

~Andria