First week in Austria

Well, I made it to Austria safe and sound after an interesting 8-hour flight to Frankfurt and a considerably more tolerable 1-hour flight to Salzburg. Once actually in Salzburg, which I made it to with the help of a fellow NU alum who found me in the airport, I reconnected with Alison, a friend from study abroad in Freiburg. She's been in Salzburg for over a month now and let me crash on her floor until we left for orientation. They held our orientation in a small town called Hinterglemm. It's really a ski town. Probably 4 out of 5 houses there were hotels. Since it's too early for ski season, the place was absolutely dead, but that was fine. It meant we had the whole gorgeous place to ourselves - the American, British, and Irish English TAs. Each day we had a few required sessions about different aspects of teaching English or living in Austria. I wouldn't say they were too tremendously helpful, but it was with a good bunch of people, and that's probably more important in the end. On the third day of orientation, we took a hike on one of the mountains nearest our hostel. I wasn't sure how the knee I injured last year on ski trip was going to hold up, so I bought a brace. Even with the brace, the climb was rough, but the view was worth it. Check it out.


We were headed to a cafe on the mountain which, thankfully, wasn't all the way up. I needed the break. But some people felt like they hadn't accomplished enough by getting to the cafe so decided to hike the rest of the way. And I joined them. We took the long way round to the peak by accident, which my knee wasn't too happy about, but it worked out in the end.

Then we walked back down to the cafe and Hans, one of the Austrian teachers leading the orientation, entertained us with some accordion music, joined by an American on violin and a Brit on vocals. It was one of the best jam sessions I've ever heard.


And on the way back down the mountain, we ran into some goats. The whole experience was so perfectly Austrian, it was most surreal.


The next night, the last of orientation, we had Bunteabend. It was somewhat of variety show. Each group (we were split by state) was supposed to present two things. Mine sang Schnitzelbank and learned an Austrian folkdance. Another commemorated the great accordion-playing Hans with a Queen parody.

But the real highlight of the night was probably when we learned a song the Von Trapp children actually sang and then got to sing it to the real Maria von Trapp (who was one of the children, not the Governess. Her name was Gustl!). Hans, of course, personally knows the 96-year-old who now lives in Vermont. We all tried to crowd around the pay phone in the hall so she could hear us.



The day after returning from orientation, a few os the TAs in Salzburg got together for Lange Nacht der Museen. The idea was that you would pay 13 Euros and get into any museum in the city between 6pm and 1 am. We ended up only hitting four of them, but we got in the two most important. Namely, the Festung (upper right):


And Stiegl Brewery, the pride of any Salzburger and Mozart's home brew:

It was a good way to spend the last real night of freedom we all had before beginning our teaching duties on Monday, and a good way to end my first week in Austria. But something tells me we'll be back to both the Festung and the brewery a few more times...