Vienna: almost abducted.

Last week (Sept 30 – Oct 5), we had the pleasure of going to Austria and visited Salzburg and Vienna. So far, Vienna has definitely been my favorite city. It is busy, with cars everywhere, there is life after midnight, and on top of everything there is history and art EVERYWHERE in it. If you walk at the center of the city it is hard to not see a gorgeous building, a random monument, or a huge museum a block away from each other. Also, transportation is pretty effective there, but that I think also applies to Germany. Since somehow I ended up separated from the group a few times, I thankfully got to see a lot of places that I wouldn’t have been able to see if I wouldn’t have been lost so many times.

With all that said, I don’t necessarily want to talk about all the beautiful places I got to see, or the several times that I randomly ran into people from the group while being by myself, but mostly about the 35 minutes of the entire trip that I would want to… let’s say… wipe off in order to make that whole trip amazing. (Though some close friends/family would’ve made the whole thing 1000x’s better.)

On Oct 3rd, Vienna had this event called “Night of the Museums” where over 99 museums are open from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m, and for the price of only one ticket people can go to any museum they’d like until they close. Looooong story short, there was a mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral at midnight that a few of us wanted to attend. For the fourth time in Vienna, I was again separated from the group at the Music Museum and was supposed to meet four other people (Jon, Naomi, Karl-Friderick, and Wellington) at 11:45 p.m. in front of the cathedral. At 11:30 I left the museum and walked to the cathedral, and that in itself was a bit dangerous since the whole way to the cathedral was full of clubs, bars, and drunks all over the streets. I got there right on time but the church was closed and obviously assumed there was no mass, or at least that it wasn’t open to the public. Also, none of the four people who I was supposed to meet were there, so I decided to sit in front of the church in one of the several empty benches that were there.

Here’s where things got a little creepy…

As I was sitting there, three random guys with cigarettes walked right in front of me. One decided to sit about 5 inches away from me on my right, while the other two sat on the bench next to me on my left. While they were sitting, they were constantly looking away, at each other, and unfortunately at my gestures. The guy on my right kept on getting a little closer every time. While this was happening I was looking at my watch, hoping that someone would show up, but decided that by midnight if no one was there I would immediately leave.

Midnight hit, no one was there, I had to leave. I first wanted to join a random group of people that was walking by, but realized that was going to obviously seem like I was getting away from them, so instead decided to join a random group of two or three people once I saw a safe one walk in front of me. I noticed two old ladies passing by, I got up to join them, took about 4 steps and the three guys got up and walked right behind me at the same time. I powered walked my way to the ladies and kindly asked them if I could walk with them for about a block because the guys behind us were following me. The only lady who spoke English replied to me and said: “No. You can’t walk with us, we gotta walk fast, we have to go. No, you can’t walk with us…”  Without knowing what to do, I insisted on walking with them, but since they were obviously hesitant about this, I joined the next couple of people I saw, but the guys also noticed this and kept on following me. Finally I noticed the escalators that take you down to the train, separated myself from the other couple, and walked as fast as I could to the stairs. My idea was to get on the first train there was in order to be in a secure place with cameras, get off on the next safe stop, and then figure out my way back to the hostel. The guys insisted on following and at this point, since I was alone, they were pretty much running towards me. I don’t like running in public, but when I noticed they were running, I ran down the escalators as fast as I could. Of course, throughout all this time I’m shacking like a maniac and my heart beat was faster than ever. Once I got to the bottom of the stairs, there was a train with the doors open and I was very willing to just hop in and go, BUT to my surprise Karl-Friderick and Wellington were walking out of the exact same door I was going to walk into. I had never been so happy to see those two guys as I was at that point; I even gave them both a hug out of my excitement. I looked up behind me and the three guys were no longer there. I was finally somewhat safe again =].

After that we decided to go to another museum for the time we had left before the museums closed. Once they closed, we walked all the way back to the hostel and got there a little before 2a.m. First thing I did when we got back was to ask if Naomi and Jon were home, and they weren’t. Since the night before I randomly found them both completely lost in the middle of some street, I got fairly worried when I heard this, especially because there was no transportation running. Thankfully, five minutes later, they showed up and finally everyone was safe at the hostel.

I definitely think I learned my lesson. Never again will I walk by myself in an unknown urban place late at night, especially midnight. But regardless of all of that: I LOVE VIENNA and all the beautiful things I got to see there.

Just a few of the several places I got to see :

St. Stephen’s Cathedral

Vienna Opera House

The Schonbrun Castle

The Parliament

The City Hall

Volkstheater

Inside a museum

The Cemetery

I’m having fun =)

Brother’s Birthday.

Your Birthday a year ago (10/03/2008). We look so different from last year! And this is the only good picture from then.

As many of you know, my brother and I are pretty darn cool. I mean, we get along very well. Ever since we moved to Duarte I’ve bought him a little tiramisu for his birthday just for him to eat. Sorry, David, this year I can’t =(. If there is something I miss from home, is definitely our talks while driving out all the way to 29 Palms as slow (or fast, depending if we found people who wanted to have fun for a while.) But still, enjoy. Leave the marines for the afternoon, go home to take a nap in the family room like you always do, and eat some good ceviche from mom.

Happy Birthday!

Feliz Cumpleanos

I miss you.

Love you tons.

Andrea

P.S. Say hi to Karla for me

München.

I know I’ve been horrible at this blogging thing. In fact, I’m pretty bad at this, but if I don’t start catching up with the places we have visited, I’m going to eventually be mad at myself for not doing. I’ll start with München.

Heide, Brice, Phil, Naomi, and I visited the beautiful city of Munich from Thursday (09/24) to Friday (09/25). Those two days felt like an entire week after all the things we did.

Because my mind works better when I think about dates and times, here’s the chronological order:

6 a.m. Rode bikes to train station

7:xx a.m. Took train to Stutgart. Once there, changed train to go to Munich.

10:30 a.m. Arrived at Munich, walked to our hostel, dropped off luggage, headed to “Old Town” Munich. While being at Old Town Munich we visited:

St. Peter's, when you first walk in

St. Peter’s Church: The outside of this church was some sort of tapestry that had the images of how the church was supposed to look like and to be honest, it didn’t look that appealing, but the moment I walked into the church I was speechless. The place was gorgeous. I was not only at this amazing historical site, but I was also at the house of the Lord, that just had an incredible amount of history in it; it was a weird thought.

At the top of the Frauenkirche

The Frauenkirche: Though at a first glance it was not as impressive as St Peter’s, we got to go to the top of the church and see the entire city.

The front of Old Town Hall

The Old Town Hall: It was this massive palace-like building that now has restaurants inside, among other things. When we walked by it, there was this massive political thing happening, with an angry lady screaming, and a cuban band playing in between. Hearing the cuban music felt like home =]. The Hispanic Andrea in me woke up and was pretty happy for a while.

Marienplatz: This is the Munich’s version of our “Haupstrasse”, it is pretty much a long street with lots of cool little stores everywhere. Because Oktoberfest is happening, there were SO many tourist and locals in the entire city wearing lederhosens and dirndls, and, of course, majority of them had a good amount of beer in their system by 3 in the afternoon. It was fun to watch.

Hofbräuhaus! The empty side.

Hofbräuhaus: Apparently it is the most popular beer hall in Munich (though I’ve read in many places that it is actually the most popular in the world, who knows.) We decided to go check it out since it’s one of the attractions of the city and it definitely was. The place was packed, with a band in the center of the hall playing Bavarian music. The fun part about it was when we were leaving the hall and suddenly many people in the hall stood up with their beer steins and started sing along with the band. It must have been some sort of national song, or whatever, but everyone knew it.

The Residenz

The Residenz: This was a former Bavarian palace, but unfortunately we had to pay to get in so we only saw the few gardens that were open to the public. Brice, Heidi, Naomi, and layed on the grass right in front of it and rested for a while.

Performers at the Englischer Garten

The Englischer Garten: This place was right across the street from the Residenz, and I think this was one of the highlights of my day. We got to see it twice, but the second time there was a baby grand piano, a bass, cello, and a flute all playing short little tunes under this cute, round, open section. We sat there, watched little babies dance, and enjoyed the free music with the rest of the crowd.

Travel Buddies (-1)

Some random nude park: Something we have all discovered while being here is that children are exposed to different types of sexual content at a very young age. As we were walking around the city we found out one of the attractions was this random nude park, so, of course, we had to see it to believe it. Instead of finding the park, we found a section where people where surfing in this little river and, as the Californian that I am, I remembered that the ocean is extremely far away from here instead of 45 minutes away from how it is for me at home, and that little river is probably as good as it gets for some of them. We watched for a while and then decided to keep on walking. During our walk one of us noticed a cute dog and decided to take a picture, then without even trying he noticed there was a nude man running in the background of the dog picture. We had found the park! There were several nude men, dogs, families, etc, picnicking in the grass. But, since we are not European, we were fairly disturbed 5 feet after realizing where we were and turned around. I realized that the world is not missing out without these in every city, seriously.

5:xx p.m.: bought bus tickets, returned to the main station, picked up Phil, went back to the hostel, checked it. headed to Oktoberfest….

Now, Oktoberfest is a story I will write about later. We also visited the Dachau Concentration Camp during our trip, and as cliche as it may sound, it was quite life changing and intense.

As part of the study abroad program, we have several trips schedule throughout the semester and this week we are currently in Salzburg, Austria. Tomorrow morning we will head to Vienna and then Sunday we will be back in Heidelberg sometime in the evening.

I have SO much to tell and so little time. Maybe sometime I will try to explain my thoughts/feelings about this place rather than the activities we have done.

Until then, gutten nacht. It is 2:30 a.m. here…