{"id":1825,"date":"2011-03-10T10:37:29","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T18:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ups.edu\/studyingabroad\/?p=1825"},"modified":"2011-03-10T10:37:29","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T18:37:29","slug":"schon-marz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/2011\/03\/10\/schon-marz\/","title":{"rendered":"Schon M\u00e4rz"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are so many things that I could write about, so where should I start?\u00a0 Well, I am naturally inclined to give some excuses for not writing in a long time… first of all, my computer hard drive crashed, fortunately it was mostly fixed after two weeks.\u00a0 And then classes officially started, and all of a sudden I find myself spending a lot more time doing schoolwork (or mostly worrying about schoolwork), practicing, rehearsing, and so on.\u00a0 Between school time I also managed to find time for other small weekend travels and trip planning.\u00a0 Many students on the program have used regular two-day weekends traveling to nearby cities like Budapest, Prague, or Salzburg.\u00a0 Last weekend on my Facebook homepage, there were albums of Munich, Rome, Paris, Venice, and some other cities that my study abroad friends went to over the weekend.\u00a0 My friend and I also picked out a few weekends, mostly in April, for traveling.\u00a0 In addition to the cities I just mentioned, we really want to go to Graz.\u00a0 But we decided it would be a better idea to go to some of these places and enjoy the beautiful scenery when the weather gets warmer.\u00a0 My last excuse for not posting in a long time would be this: overall I was just not in a very good mood \u2013 I think I might be going through the phase when things start to get hard after the initial excitement passed \u2013 I was constantly having too much on my hands, sleep deprived, and I think I will blame that mostly on the research proposal.\u00a0 That said, I did figure out how to utilize the Universit\u00e4t Wien library, including its online research database, so that was very gratifying.\u00a0 When I cannot write merrily about travel and life stories, I feel that I should refrain from posting, because who wants to read about me being depressing, stressed, or angrily complaining about every little detail that does not suit me?\u00a0 Anyway, enough of the excuses.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I rather wish we get to have home stays in Vienna.\u00a0 That way, I get a chance to really experience the Austrian life style and know what time they have dinner, what sorts of food appear regularly on the dinner table, speak more German, and potentially form stronger bonds.\u00a0 While host family was an option, I chose apartments because from what I understood, the relationships with host families here are more like that between landlords and tenants \u2013 the students are not just automatically regarded as part of the family and invited to participate in all the family activities.\u00a0 As it turn out, my study abroad program has very limited number of host families this semester, and even students who expressed interest in living with host families didn’t necessarily get that assignment.\u00a0 As for the small handful of people I know that are in home stays, they are often just one “landlord,” in a few cases, a person in his\/her thirties or something.\u00a0 To make up for this lack of Austrian host families, we have a system called Language Buddies.\u00a0 My study abroad program can pair us up with an Austrian student, most likely between the age pf 17 and 27, and we can decide on our own how often we want to meet, what to do, and what language to speak.\u00a0 Because this semester they have many extra language buddies, I got two!\u00a0 I have met with both of them and both of them are really sweet girls.\u00a0 E is 25 years old, and is a second-year history major at Universit\u00e4t Wien; V is 22 and is working on a six-year education program to become an English and history teacher at Uni Wien (I like history too!).\u00a0 I have yet to figure out a very good way to practice English and German at the same time.\u00a0 Currently, my conversations with E is always entirely in German, and we used English at my first meeting with V last week.\u00a0 My favorite activity for these meetings is walking.\u00a0 When it was cold, we walked around in city center,\u00a0 down the narrow, quiet, old streets of Vienna; we walked by churches, coffeehouses, and we just talked.\u00a0 When the weather was nice, we went to the garden of Sch\u00f6nbrunn palace, and we talked \u2013 it was fabulous.\u00a0 When I can find a larger chunk of free time, E is going to show be some trails in the 18th and 19th districts, and I am very looking forward to that.\u00a0 One thing I found out was that both of my language buddies have done au pair for a year before college.\u00a0 E nannied for a family outside Paris and V was in Stockholm.\u00a0 She loves Stockholm and highly recommended me visiting there, so now I really want to go to Scandinavia!\u00a0 By the way, she did not know any Swedish before she went, and communicated with the family in English, but was able to pick it up in three months (granted that Swedish is also a Germanic language)!\u00a0 I think it is exciting that au pair is a pretty common thing here, because I have always thought it is a fantastic idea to work in exchange for room and board in a foreign country \u2013 what a nice way to learn languages and cultures!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Oh, I am supposed to contribute a roasted vegetable salad to our dinner this evening… I have some garlic and rosemary.\u00a0 So I must start making the food now.\u00a0 My roommate’s chicken has already been in the oven for a while (I am not sure if I am going to try some or keep pretending to be a half-vegetarian tonight)!\u00a0 Tsch\u00fcs!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are so many things that I could write about, so where should I start?\u00a0 Well, I am naturally inclined to give some excuses for not writing in a long time… first of all, my computer hard drive crashed, fortunately … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joan-hua-12-vienna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}