Men in dresses, bubbles, dances moves from the eighties, mock beheadings, erotic sword dances… yep, the Opera was cool!

Hey friends and family- this is a very very short run-down of my first week, which I meant to post earlier. Therefore, there will be a second post right after this, and I apologize for the data overload...

Best experiences in the first week:

1)I’ve met the most AMAZING people—fellow Fulbrighters are an enthusiastic group of scholars who want to learn a lot here, love speaking German, and impress me thoroughly with their various arrays of humors, knowledges, and personalities… it’s like hanging out with my Doppelgängers
2)Taking a boat ride along the Danube, we stopped in a medieval town called Dürnstein, which has a rocky ruined castle on a hill above it where Richard the Lionhearted was captured and held for ransom while he was coming home from the Crusades. We took bottles of wine up to the ruins and had a spectacular view of the Wachau region (a famous wine-growing portion of Lower Austria, which had vineyards as far as the eye could see) just at the moment that the sun was setting…

L’opera

Going to the Opera was admittedly more of a “time filler” than something that I felt passionate about (although I still have fond memories of seeing “Barber of Seville” at the Opera house here three years ago). The first five minutes of the performance did nothing to chance such cynical behavior, as all I could think was ‘give me a beer and I’ll get up there and show you ballet.’ However, then something slightly more impressive occurred, and I realize that no amount of Stiegl would prepare me for a woman running up from behind me, using the back of my leg as a spring board and penduluming around my body with her thighs fastened tightly around my neck and swinging down to land gracefully at my feet. Wowza! That’s when things got interesting.

Things that made me laugh a lot
1)Went to the local flea market and saw wine for EU 3.00 and thought about it as the European equivalent as “Three Buck Chuck”
2)Got hugged by a drunken Iranian in my Studentheim when I offered him a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie
3)Went to Schönbrunn Palace on a picnic with a girl who’s also teaching English here (everyone else was sleeping off the evening before), and when we were taking to each other a Turkish student started talking with us. After explaining that we were studying/teaching in Vienna for the year, he asked us “are you lovers?”
4)Heard a story from my friend Matthew who biked from the east to west coat: apparently, while they were biking the MidWest, they called it MiddleEarth :) When I later mentioned something about “wanting to live in a cave” (implying like St.Benedict did), he asked if I wanted to be like Gollum…


TIMES I FELT AUSTRIAN
I ordered Weisswürste (a traditional sausage specialty), which came with a pretzel the size of my face and a decent-sized jar of mustard… why it didn’t just come with Lederhose and a polka band, I’ll never understand. I opted, however, NOT to eat it in the traditional manner, which involves slicing off one end of the natural casing and sucking out the soft sausage filling. Oh, Germans!

TIMES I FELT AMERICAN
I ordered Berner Würste (literally sausage from Bern) and it was actually just cooked hot dogs wrapped in bacon.