Vaulting in various churches
A Picture from Each City
It is impossible to choose a picture that is representative of each city, so I’m not even going to pretend to do that. These are just pictures, and there happens to be only one from each city.
It’s been a while…
since I posted, I know. I was on spring break for the past couple of weeks, and I’m just getting caught up on everything from school work to posting here. It was an excellent break - did a lot of traveling, saw friends who I haven’t seen since the fall, and went to three countries that I’ve never been to before (okay, one was just the airport, but whatever). I was stopped by the French authorities, spent a large amount of time arguing in a Paris train station, ate ridiculous quantities of gelato and am also a little sunburned, but it was completely worth it.
I put up a lot of photos on Facebook, but I’ll try to put up a couple of highlights here as well. The trip started with at 5:00am on March 28th, where I took a bus from Vienna to Bratislava to catch a flight to Paris. I started out the trip with a friend from the Vienna program. Although there were some major issues with the Eurail pass I bought before the trip (don’t even get me started on that…), we got to see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and enjoyed delicious, delicious crepes while we were there. The next day, I took a train down to Aix-en-Provence to visit my roommate from this summer. Although she was probably sick of me taking pictures by the time I left, I couldn’t help myself when it came to all of the open air markets and fountains in Aix. There are markets every day of the week, and on certain days there are flea markets and flower markets as well.
From Aix I took a series of trains (Aix to Nice, Nice to Ventimiglia, Ventimiglia to Milan, and Milan to Venice). It was quite the trip - in Ventimiglia I got off the train, ran to the ticket counter, bought three train tickets for my travel in Italy, and got on the train to Milan in under fifteen minutes. Once I finally arrived, though, I met two friends from the Vienna program, and we spent the next couple of days getting lost in Venice. For the first day I relied on a couple of key phrases - “Guys, guys, guess what?…We’re in Venice!” and “I’m on a boat, and…it’s going fast and…I’ve got a nautical themed pashmina afghan” but I slowly got over it. It was amazing being out on the water. Every corner in the city was a picture. Although we spent a lot of time in the city, we also saw two of the islands, Murano and Lido, and our youth hostel was on a third island (where, coincidentally, they were filming scenes for the upcoming movie The Tourist…I didn’t see Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie though).
From there we went to Rome, where I met up with two Wellesley friends I hadn’t seen since December. We toured the Vatican and saw the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. The last part of the trip was Bologna, where I stayed with a friend from Wellesley who I also hadn’t seen since December. In the two nights I was there, I saw San Luca, was introduced to apertivo, went to a flea market, and again enjoyed delicious, delicious food. On April 11th, I caught a flight from Bologna to Bratislava and took a bus back from there.
All in all, it was a crazy, coincidental, busy, relaxing, fun two weeks! Now I’m looking forward to friends visiting, seeing my parents, and planning the next adventure to Prague.
Basically…
…classes in German are hard. Especially with professors who speak in dialect. But the architecture of the academic buildings makes up for it.
Coffees of Vienna
Basically, there are a million different kinds of coffee drinks in Vienna. It is kind of overwhelming sometimes. I’ve been ordering different kinds when we go out to coffeehouses, but I think it will take me the better part of the semester to try them all. Here is a short list of some ones I have tried/would like to try:
Brauner - Black coffee served with a small jug of coffee-flavoured cream.
Einspänner - Strong black coffee without milk served in a glass instead of a cup, with whipped cream on top
Franziskaner - Light melange (half coffee and half hot milk, see below) with whipped cream and chocolate flakes
Kaisermelange - Coffee without milk, mixed with egg yolk, honey and cognac or brandy
Melange - Half coffee and half hot milk, topped with milk foam or whipped cream. Served with sugar.
Maria Theresia - Black coffee with orange liqueur, whipped cream and sugar. Named after the Empress
Mokka - Strong black coffee.
Mozart - Large mocha with cherry brandy and whipped cream
Pharisäer - Large black coffee with rum and whipped cream
Verkehrt - Small black coffee infused with hot milk and milk foam.
(The hot chocolate here is also delicious…)
When I first arrived in Vienna, I couldn’t figure out why there were poles randomly propped up against buildings. Besides creating the possibility for people to trip over them, they didn’t seem to have any purpose. They were in all different colors - sometimes yellow and black, sometimes candy cane striped red and white. They were all over the city, sometimes with signs attached, most often not.
Well, the mystery has been solved. The name for the poles is “Dachlawine.” According to dict.leo, it means “roof avalanche.” Because many of the buildings in Vienna are so old, there aren’t very good gutter systems. Snow will pile up on the roofs and then unexpectedly come crashing down, sometimes on innocently passing bystanders. The Dachlawine are there to tell people how far away they should walk from the building to avoid being hit with a pile of snow. Strange, but effective?
