Thanksgiving and More Austrian Adventures

I feel like the busy period at the end of the semester is just starting to kick in now. I had a crazy Wednesday and Thursday last week preparing for Thanksgiving here, left for Vienna on Friday morning, got back on Sunday night and had a bunch of things to get done. I've got two weekends left, final exams, and a ton of papers hanging over my head.

So Thanksgiving turned out to be a big success! I definitely got a little homesick missing a real Thanksgiving at home, but Prague "Thanksgiving" was a lot of fun. As Caity and I were way behind on all of the side dishes around 17:30, I started getting really worried, but as people starting showing up around 19:00, we had a little help. We served dinner to about twenty guests around 20:30, and remarkably, everything on the table was warm. Although, we did end up with (delicious!) chicken instead of turkey. A lot of improvising was involved in our feast (chicken, pumpkin pastries instead of pie, and a bunch of ingredient substitutions), but most things tasted pretty good. We even invited some Czech friends, which is funny because we ended up with a "Czech end" of the table.

After going to bed around 3:30, I woke up (miserably) at 6:30. I made it to the bus station about ten minutes before our bus left for Vienna, however Caity wasn't so lucky. Perhaps a result of throwing a big twenty person feast at her flat, but she overslept and missed the bus. Chris and I arrived in Vienna around 12:30, and luckily, Caity was able to catch another bus and met us at 22:00. In the meantime, Chris and I dropped our stuff off, wandered around one of the Christmas markets, went to the Austrian Natural History Museum, and took a short tour of Vienna with a professor from our program who was in the city for the weekend. It was a gorgeous evening, clear and beautiful with the all the city's Christmas lights and markets. The professor who gave us the tour even bought us all hot wine at the end!

Now, Caity, Chris, and I decided to couchsurf in Vienna. You know, the website where people offer to host travellers in their houses/apartments in return for a "cultural experience." I don't think my parents were too thrilled to hear about this... However, it worked out really well. We stayed with Christof, a 27 year old PhD student. He was really cool and a borderline hippie, and his flat was really large and located right near a main metro stop. We slept on beds in his four year old daughter's room the first night and on mattresses in his study the next night when his daughter was visiting. We talked over tea on Friday afternoon and chatted when we came back at night, but we didn't see Christof too much otherwise.

So during our the rest of our Vienna excursion, I saw the new James Bond movie, went to the National Library, saw five of six different Christmas markets, ate ridiculous amounts of candy and sweets, went in City Hall and the famous main Cathedral, heard the Vienna Choir Boys sing at Sunday service, got my pumpkin soup again, and toured the Schonbrunn Palace. We did a lot of things, however, I can't say that anything in particular stood out. I had a really good time (besides being FREEZING COLD the entire time, but my fault), but it was a pretty average travel weekend.

I really liked Vienna overall, in the sense that I feel like it's a city that I could actually live in. It reminded me a lot of Madrid, although probably only because it's more Westernized. If I visited Vienna or Madrid coming straight from the US, I wouldn't notice it at all. But it's a surprising yet comforting reminder of home after being in Prague. Vienna also isn't intimidating or pretentious like other cities. And it's pretty small population-wise and filled with gorgeous buildings, like Prague. I'll be honest though, I went to Vienna expecting to like it because I like Austria so much in general. Coffee and beer especially were expensive however, and that's definitely a pitfall. And the biting cold.