so yes stuff is getting much better, as we all knew it would.
the city is BEAUTIFUL. I went to the picasso museum yesterday and it was so so interesting. i loved seeing his work progrss from when he was like 9 or 10 to the more ¨contemporary¨stuff. actually the paintings from when he was much much younger remind me alot of laura collins´stuff. really small and precise with lots of attention to detail and cute little birds and stuff. sorry im not being more eloquent or spelling things correctly but im in the IES center and there are about a million people waiting for computers.
i also had my first beach experience yesterday which was lovely. the water is amazing. it LITERALLY sparkles and when you come out you are sparkly. and the view from the water is absolutly indescribable. you can see the whole city and the miles and miles of beaches that were completely covered by people. its great. i just found out tofay about all these extracurricular activites i can do, like slasa lessons and a cooking or wine tasting session, and goingto see castellers, the people who build towers in a competition not too far from here. i cant wait to start traveling.
i would prefer the cat poster mom. definitly. i always had a problem with the dogs playing poker because thye have NO THUMBS!!!!
at the beach yesterday my friend kirsten and 3 of her friends all from u of i brought along 4 italian guys they met at the disco the night before. their names were fabrizio, gabrielle, giovanni, and giovanni. they were cheesy beyond all belief. staring at these girls, buying them flowers, etc etc. but very funny.
well i think im going to give up my computer to the public, but hopefully soon ill have more frequent internet access.
ahhh
4.9.06
the view from the water
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
When I first went to Europe in 1972 I was so completely broke it was insane. Since the plan was to hitchhike, we ended up spending hours on the side of busy roads and getting into cars with truck drivers and other people we couldn't talk to. We traveled through England, France, Spain and Italy with a side trip to Morocco and it was a pivotal experience, but I remember best the times I didn't know where I was going to sleep that night because there was no youth hostel where we'd gotten dropped off and all the delicious food I didn't have enough money to buy. The language gap made it lonely sometimes and the craving for a real American hamburger just got stronger every month, but I think the deprivation made the experience more vivid. So file that trip away to trade future travel horror stories and enjoy your nice dry bed and every wonderful morsel you eat. It's all part of a year that will change you forever.
Xan's account of our arrival rings pretty true, altho I had forgotten totally about Theresa's stash. We went to the Anne Franke house/museum, and I couldn't stand to be in there, thinking about what had happened to the child who wrote so beautifully and perceptively beyond her years. I waited on the cobblestones below for my friends to come out. And while waiting there, I learned that Amsterdam at one time taxed property owners based on the size or number of stairways or something, which was why people built such skinny buildings. You never know where public policy insight will come from!
And after we landed in Vienna, they stuffed us and all our earthly belongings into a school bus and drove us around for about 90 minutes in the dark, before stopping in front of a construction site after midnight and saying "Here it is, your new home."
If you can master the idea of enjoying travelling, even if the hotel isn't 4 stars, you'll be able to have adventures that many others miss. Most of them will be funny in hindsight.
I thought I spoke reasonably good German, but the people in Baden might as well have been speaking Martian (actually, the German equivalent of our phrase 'it's Greek to me' is "It's Spanish to me'...); their dialect shifted all the vowels, dropped syllables, etc. I was assigned an Austrian roommate who was highly disappointed with me, so she liked to have friends come to our room and chat in dialect, sometimes ABOUT me, while I was sitting there studying. I still remember the look on her face a month or two later, the night a nice Austrian came to our room to see Gitti, and asked me a few questions in dialect, which I answered easily! The bearded one had to be more careful after that.
I can still confuse Swiss people into thinking I'm Austrian now, altho they think I have some mental problems because my vocabularly isn't extensive.
By the end of my first week there, I felt like I had bananas growing out of my ears - people stared at me wherever I went. In a busy underground streetcar and shopping passage in Vienna, a woman almost fell off an escalator, because she was turned around to stare at me as the escalator carried her up and away. By then I had been advised that it wasn't my clothes, it was just that they don't see much red hair in Austria! So I bought a traditional loden coat and tried to blend in more, so I wouldn't injure anyone else.
It took me awhile to get used to the rhythm of life there. Fellow students would have to remind me to go to the grocery store on Saturday morning, because all the shops closed on Thursday and Saturday afternoons and all day Sunday. Actually, almost everything closed, except the heuriger (family-operated wine bars). After a couple of months, I came to really appreciate the enforced downtimes, and the respect it showed for family time.
A nice local named Peter very kindly clued me in to the rituals of the spoken greeting, when to use the formal one and what the informal greeting is, and the fact that you don't have to shake someone's hand every time you meet them on the stairs. And he good-humoredly reminded me of the appropriate way each time I goofed up. Other people probably just rolled their eyes, internally, at such rube-ish behaviour. Peter is still my friend to this day.
By Christmas, I felt comfortable in the culture, and when I returned to Illinois in July, I missed it terribly. But I also felt much more fortunate than I ever had before that I lived in a country where a person didn't have to vote for a certain political party in order to get a teaching job in their hometown, and where people are EXPECTED to speak up for their rights. I also saw a lot of things that we could do differently here. And I learned a lot about myself.
And since this is Zoe's blog, not mine, I'd better stop.
Post a Comment