The First Week of Being in Vienna

As some of you should know, we had left for 3 weeks of being in Vienna, Austria on November 10th. We got to Vienna safely at 2:30 pm (Vienna time) Tuesday the 11th. We literally spent the rest of that day simply enjoying being at Oma’s house and talking with Dagmar (Oma was actually out shopping when we got to her house and didn’t get back for an hour or two after we arrived). Due to the jet-lag we ended up crashing into our beds at around 6:00-7:00 pm that day.

That first full day (Wednesday) was spent with Mary and I doing our work (seminar and project work for me, teaching an online class for her). That afternoon Eric, Nathaniel, and I went to Mariahilfer Str. to get Nathaniel a model for him to work on in the mornings and run some other quick errands for Oma and Dagmar.

As we had set ourselves up for 4 hours of real work in the mornings (I’m writing this during one of those periods) Mary and I did that Thursday morning. That afternoon we all left Oma’s house deciding to walk down Kahlenberg, but when we got to the bottom of Huschkagasse we decided it was too wet, and so went into the inner city to look for a book Nathaniel wanted instead. We went to the British Bookshop to look for it. His book wasn’t there, but I did find an interesting book that had a chapter in it on Beethoven. So we did get that. We also stopped at Fratelli’s for some ice cream (we’ve been doing this practically daily).

On Friday afternoon (as the weekday mornings for the first two weeks are consistently working on seminars and projects for me, teaching for Mary, and cooking for Nathaniel and Eric) we went to the Haus Der Musik. That museum had a TON of cool interactive exhibits on how sound works as well as a whole floor dedicated to musicians in Vienna. Beethoven’s room had many more useful things and bits of information in it than I was expecting. Quite useful for my project… At the very end was an interactive exhibit where you could direct the Vienna Philharmonica in a virtual simulation, they would refuse to play if you did a bad job.

Saturday was the first full day of doing stuff that didn’t include direct schoolwork. We went on our regular (more like daily for when we were here for 6 months) walk down Kahlenberg, through Beethovengang, and to Nußdorf (the way we did the walk that day included passing one of Beethoven’s residences as well as the walk through Beethovengang which you need to do based on our route down Kahlenberg). That afternoon we went with Dagmar on a hunt for a store she wanted to find, found it, and spent some time in it. Afterwards we just headed back to Oma’s house.

Sunday morning Mary made waffles for breakfast and we all (not including Oma, of course) went to Stephansdom for a german church service. We then headed home and really spent the rest of the day at Oma’s house resting and doing other little things.

That would bring us to today, so here I am writing this blog post Monday morning. We’ll see what else happens today. Enjoy, Alex.