Mom's almost here!

In an effort to improve the number of mid-week hits on my blog, and because I may not have time to update this for a long time, I’m writing one more “pre-mother visit” post.  It should be short though.

I thought I should include a few photos of where I
live my daily life.  This is the outside of my apartment
building. Our apartment is the second row of windows
on the far left.

Mostly I wanted to provide those who read this with an extended update about my semester schedule/traveling plans.  A week or two ago I pulled the trigger and booked a trip to Madrid.  My flight leaves next Thursday evening - the same day my mom leaves Vienna to head back home.  I’ll arrive that night and I will either be staying with Paul Ream and his host family or in Mike Anderson’s apartment (both are friends from Davidson).  I fly out of Madrid early Monday morning and will be back in Vienna in time to make it to my 1:15 class.

The next weekend Paul Britton (another Davidson friend) is coming to Vienna to stay with Pat and I.  The weekend after that is Halloween.  Thus far I have no plans although we may go to Styria/Graz for a night.  The next weekend, November 5-7, Pat and I are taking a trip to Istanbul to round out our trip to Cairo.  We haven’t book flights yet (though we probably will today), but I’m really looking forward to it.  The weekend following that trip I will have two more visitors in town: Laura Jerzyk and Quinn Rogers – two of my friends from back home.  We also may have two friends from Davidson coming to visit that weekend, but I don’t know for sure if that is a done deal.

Then, the weekend of the 19-21, another Davidson friend, Laney Schenk, is coming to visit.  I found out a few days after she told me she would be here that two other friends from Davidson will be in Vienna that weekend as well: Natalie Tagher and Kelvin Bates.  Finally, Patrick’s girlfriend Katie Lovett is planning on spending that weekend in Vienna with him/us, so we’ll have plenty to do. 

This is my U-bahn (underground) stop: Kettenbruckengasse.

The entrance to the Palais Corbellis where
my classes are held.

Thanksgiving weekend is going to be a marathon.  One of my friends from school, Peter Kelpin, connected us with a girl on our program named Allison (pictured here) who he worked with at camp.  We’ve since become good friends, and the other day we stumbled across a flight package over Thanksgiving that we could not believe.  For a total of 17 Euros (5 there and 12 coming back) we booked a trip for 4 days to Brussels.  Our tentative plan is to arrive Thursday night, get up Friday morning and take a 2-hour train to London.  Here we are planning on picking up my friend (and ironically Peter’s roommate) Paul Britton.  We’ll spend Friday seeing the sights in London and spend Friday night there.  I may or may not insist on dragging them to see the 7^th Harry Potter film while we’re there.

Saturday morning we’ll get up and train to Paris.  Again, we’ll spend the day seeing everything we can, spend the night there, and then get up the next morning and train back to Brussels.  Sunday we’ll see Brussels and spend the night, and our flight back to Vienna leaves early Monday morning so we can make it back for class.  After we leave Brussels (or maybe Sunday night) Paul is going to train back to London.  Obviously it will be rushed, but I’ll get to knock out a bunch of places at once, so I’m really excited!

The entrance hall of the Palais.

The last thing I’ll include in this post is a brief description of our tour of the first floor of the Kunsthistorisches Museum here in Vienna.  It takes you on a bit of a time-traveling journey (that can be a bit jarring at times).  First we saw the Egyptian collection.  Evidently, outside of Cairo and Berlin, Vienna has one of the best collections in the world.  They have set up a replica (with some real stones) mastaba that you can walk into.  It is exactly like the ones we went into, except it wasn’t 100 degrees inside.  Our professor asked if anyone had been to Cairo, and when Pat and I said yes, she got really excited and said everyone should take us out and get us a beer so we would give them a tour of the area and tell them all about it.  Some of the stuff they had was neat, but it still is not worth comparing it to the museum in Cairo, even though it was much more efficiently organized.

Click to enlarge. This is a classroom, fully equipped with whiteboards, a
projector, and because we have a music school, a piano.

We then went through the Greek and Roman periods.  The theme of the day was how the depiction of the human body changed over time.  Pretty much it went from the Egyptian pose (where the feet and head face one direction but you still observe the body straight on), to the idealized human form in the Greek era, to the Romans who were much more realistic.  Anyway, I’ll probably go back with my mom to see more of it, but there’s a bunch of interesting and pretty artifacts scattered through the first floor.  I’m sure the rest of the museum is interesting as well.

An hour into class, this is what was on our whiteboard for
the day.

That’s all.  Mom arrives soon (or she is landing almost as we speak) and we’ve got plenty to do this weekend based on the number of different lists I made.