Vienna

Last weekend was 'Long Weekend'’, our 4-day vacation. After much trial and tribulation, manindecisionns and revisions, and a lot of looking at flight/train ticket prices, we decided to go to Vienna for three days. The group consisted of: Vanessa, Nidhi and me (the Weird Sisters)

and our first-year male companions, Nidhi's primo, Shashank, Vanessa'’s boyfriend, Bar (Israel), and my adopted primo, Lorenzo.

When we got to Vienna, we met up with my co-year, Leah, and Andrea from Brazil. So this is all of us:

We had a fabulous time. We left Saturday evening and took the night train to Vienna. We didn't get much sleep, but that was mostly our own fault, as we stayed up most of the night talking and laughing and watching a movie. When we got there, we made our way to our hostel, the Blue Corridor (you can imagine why I chose itJ), deposited our bags, and went out to explore Vienna. We went to the Schonbrunn palace of the Hapsburg emperorsgapedawped at beautiful rooms and paintings while listening to the commentary on headphones, enjoying making a running commentary on the commentary in whispers.

Then we went to the Stefansdom Cathedral, the cathedral I had marveled at last year when I went with Street Performance. If anything, it was more awe-inspiring and more beautiful than before. We sat there and looked around and talked about the art like good Art History/World Cultures students, pointing out the differences between the gothic and baroque styles and how it differed from the renaissance style of the Venetian churches we had just seen and generally feeling very educated and prouourselves. Then.Then we went to meet Leah and Andrea at the Opera house. When we finally got there, after walking around the entire city of Vienna looking for the Opera (it turns out that the first building we found was actually the correct one, but we didn't recognize it from the back, so we walked all around the rest of the city to finally come back and realize our mistake), we sat in line for tickets again, this time for Carmen. After 2 hours we ended up with almost exactly the same spots as last time, which was really cool. The opera itself was fantastic. I love Carmen! All the music is fantastic, even the minor melodies, and the performance was awesome. The sets so real you couldn'’t tell where the stage ended and the backdrop ended, the costumes were of brightly colored swirly gypsy skirts and Toreador capes, and the actors that you into the story without even needing the subtitles on the screens on our seats.

The next day we went to the National Treasury, an amazing collection of insanely expensive stuff, from beautifully embroidered cloaks to ornately carved reliquaries to portraits of the Emperors and their families. My favorite was the huge sapphire, cut in such a way to reflect as much light as possible:

In the afternoon, we split up:– some to the Freud museum, some to go shopping, and Lorenzo, Shashank and I to go to the Kunst Historische Museum. When we got there, Shashank learned two new words in German: "Montag Geschlossen" (Closed Mondays). Aahrg! We sat and fumed for a while, but then decided to go enjoy our day somewhere else. And you know what? we had so much more fun than we would have had if we'd gone into the museum.

If I write it down, it'll sound dumb - we walked around Vienna, laughing about German, we almost went into an Italian church until we realized we lived in Italy, we sat on the steps of the Parliament building, we walked around a garden somewhere, and we went to an Esperanto museum. You may think that an Esperanto museum is about the dumbest place imaginable, especially when it's one small room that documents the history of a well-intentioned but useless language, but it was so much fun!! Lorenzo and I could basically understand the signs in Esperanto if we worked together, and we played pakman with Esperanto grammar and had fun with the interactive maps of where Esperanto conferences were being held around the world. They had to kick us out when they closed, and we walked to the meeting place planning a Project Week to learn Esperanto in a host family somewhere far away.

All together again, we went out to dinner at a bar called "The Centimeter" and had a wonderful dinner that came in a wheelbarrow which we all ate out of. Before we ate, Lorenzo proposed a toast, and said, "To the person who helped organize this trip and made it a wonderful weekend, to a great friend, and a great EE friend, Anika." I was so surprised, Lorenzo was my EE friend? I squealed and jumped up to run around the table and hug him. Suddenly it all made sense, the fact that he never wrote long letters was explained by the fact that I already knew everything he might write, having stayed in his house at the beginning of the summer while getting my visa. And having a face to put to those wonderful gifts he gave me was so nice!

Then we packed up and got on the train, sadly leaving Vienna behind. Once again, we stayed up all night talking, and when we got back to Duino we slept all day. Or rather, I slept half the day and spent the other half of the day feeling sorry for myself and wishing I was back in Vienna. But long weekend was over, and I had other things to look forward to...like the EE show!