Another Successful Weekend

  

Geez, the days are just flying by.  Was it really last Wednesday when I wrote my previous entry?  Thursday consisted of the conference the whole day—it was about migration which is important and everything but I have found that typically conferences like these consist of reiterating the issue at hand for hours on end, while usually the last half hour of the program addresses the solutions or outcomes everyone is hoping to achieve.  So, at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem that productive, but it sure beat sitting in front of the computer all day in the office.  During the coffee break, I talked to two young women from an NGO based in Vienna and their experiences working for an NGO gave me something to chew on for the rest of the morning.  During the actual presentation parts, I took notes and I tried to follow along but even though I didn’t catch all of the German discussion (it was half in English, half in German), I nevertheless got the underlying points of EU migration that were stated repeatedly throughout the conference and practiced my German vocabulary, if nothing else.

Friday afternoon took forever to arrive, it seemed, but at last I was headed off to the Language school for my first official Arabic lesson!  The class was mainly review, but important review, and I was really pleased with how much I have learned in the past year, how much I remember, and how much my new instructor covered that I was already familiar with—I think he was pretty pleased, too, especially when it came to reviewing numbers and past tense.  I got my first homework, a little story, which I just finished reading through but I really ought to read through once or twice more, at least.  I’m so excited to see what kind of progress I’m going to make over the next month and a half.

After class, I made it home just in time for Shannon and I to get dressed into our pathetic excuses of 80s clothes before grabbing the last of the burgers at the party.  It was super fun and Shannon and I definitely decided, who needs boy intern friends when you can become friends with a houseful of marines???

  While Shannon and I took our time getting out of the house the next morning, we still totally got a day’s work of walking in because we spent over 4 hours strolling just through the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace and by the time we decided we’d seen enough of the gardens, the Palace itself was closed to tours that day… so we’re going to save Sisi’s summer house for a colder, winter day.  The flowers were all pulled out by this time of year, but the colorful trees depicted a perfect October afternoon instead. 

Sunday consisted of actually making it out of the house by 9, where we met up with one of our new buddies and headed off to the village of Krems, which is about an hour train-ride away from Vienna.  It was overcast all day and it turns out there actually wasn’t that much to see or do there (the village 5 minutes away that we wanted to take a bus to, of which there were of course no buses running that day, was a temporary dungeon-home to the Crusades’ Richard the Lionheart!) but we went in a beautiful church, had a lovely little lunch, and were just pretty awed to be strolling through the streets of a village that is—no joke—over 1,000 years old.  Speaking of old, I was on my lunch break one day last week and there was a truck at a stop light that read “The Black Camel—in Vienna since 1618” or something and all I could think was, dang, that company is older than my country is.