"Herzlich Willkommen"

There is something I must confess: most of the previous entry in this blog was written earlier today and not on Saturday as I would have you believe. I felt far too exhausted to write much on Saturday night and ended up completing it this afternoon right after moving into my room for the month. In the middle of writing it, Josh Lyons (the on-site coordinator) came by and asked me why I wasn't exploring the city. I replied by saying with honesty that I was going to venture out and get some food with fellow students at 4:00, but inside I felt a bit sheepish. Indeed, why was I sitting at my laptop when I could be out and about, exploring my European home for all of August?

No matter; after much walking around, looking for a suitable place to eat and trying to make sense of the menus, the six of us alighted upon a small place on März straße. (I should note here that grocery stores are closed on Sundays, so eating out was fairly necessary.) We communicated to the man behind the counter with simple expressions and finger-pointing at the pizzas behind the glass. I really wanted "ein schnitzel sandwich" but upon asking for one the man said something to me in German I didn't understand; another student next to me translated: "they're sold out." This bummed me out a bit, not necessarily because I couldn't get a schnitzel sandwich, but because I couldn't understand the man and was reluctant to have to use finger-pointing to get food (and I'm afraid of getting tangled in miscommunication in the process). I really wished that I knew more German. Discouraged, I stepped out of the line and sat down with everyone else, telling myself that I'm going to have to get used to using awkward forms of communication. Or learn more German expressions.

After returning to our apartments on Kandlgasse many of us decided to venture out again, this time towards Stephansplatz - more or less the center of Wien. (We'll have an official visit there Wednesday, but this outing was nice to gather initial impressions and to build up our mental maps of the city.) Even for a Sunday evening, the square had a ton of people, many of them watching a silent street magician make a bottle of Budweiser disappear. We watched him with the crowd for bit before wandering around the gothic cathedral, which appears to be undergoing exterior cleaning at the present. Eventually we found ourselves drifting off away from the Stephansplatz and wound up walking towards the Josefplatz at the Hofburg. I actually had trouble remembering what the place was, but as someone else said we'll come back to it later and will undoubtedly learn more.

Around this time I started to take notice of all the art in the architecture. So many buildings seemed to have statues on their roofs and in their walls. Every where I turned, there was something grand to look at. This was especially apparent while walking through the exterior courtyards of the Hofburg. (Though while stepping out into what I would later recognize as the Heldenplatz, I was at first awed by the majesty of the semi-circular building before receiving an inner chill; I knew that I was looking at the same balcony that Hitler stood on immediately after the Anschluss with Germany.)

Our impromptu journey took us counter-clockwise down the Ringstraße past the Museums-Quartier, stopping to visit statues of Mozart and Goethe before deciding to have some drinks at a cafe on Kärntner straße. It seemed like a good conclusion to our evening's exploration and my first full day in Wien. As we were leaving, our waitress said "Danke!" towards us; I wanted to politely say "you're welcome" but wasn't quite sure if I knew the correct term in German. So I asked her earnestly and after a quick pronunciation lesson, she gave me this: As I had enjoyed the Wiener wein I had drunk and because I ended up having a nice chat with her about why a group of Californians were in Wien, I'll consider it my first souvenir. I've scratched the surface of the city, and am ready to dig more tomorrow - our first real day of Vienna: At the Crossroads of Central Europe.

The German word of the day is "Beispiel," meaning "example."