On Saturday, a few of us jogged to the Naschmarkt, which I previously posted a picture of. It is a fantastic market, that is open every day in Vienna! It is a combination farmer and flea market, with tons of permanent stands. They have every kind of produce, as well as meats, fish, cheese, bread, hummus, olives, honey, jams, nuts, dried fruit, spices, pastries, chocolates, coffees, and any other food product or ingredient you could imagine! We spent a while walking around and deciding what to purchase - most of us bought a combination of fruits, veggies, bread and hummus! We took the U-Bahn back, instead of running, because we couldn't carry all of our bags.
We went for a walking tour of the center district of Vienna on Saturday afternoon, led by our professor. The temperature had dropped drastically since the morning, and we were all immediately freezing. The tour helped us orient ourselves even more, and we saw many monumental sights and buildings that we hope to return to and spend more time exploring! As we now find typical on Saturday afternoons, we rushed to the grocery store to get any remaining items we would need in the following days, as the city entirely shuts down from 6pm Saturday until Monday morning.
Sunday was spent doing laundry, working out, researching what we plan to do in the countries we will be traveling to soon, and generally just hanging out at our building! A few of us went to coffee later in the afternoon, but that was the only mildly exciting part of the day!
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Caffe Latte & Shokotorte
Yesterday we had orientation in the morning (we learned to count to 100, and we also learned the days of the week and months! for homework, we had to do a word-search of the months!) After orientation we went back to the Naschmarkt to pick up a few more things, and show some of our other friends that didn't make it on Saturday. It was an even more enjoyable experience this time, because it was significantly less crowded, so we were in and out in no time!
Today we had language lessons in the morning, with a focus on food items and ordering in restaurants. This afternoon we had a guided tour of the Parliament of Austria. It was very interesting, but much of our tour was in german so we were relying on our german language students to translate for us. We were told by our professor to not bring our cameras in, and we had to check them with our coats at the entrance to the building. Once inside, we saw many other people taking pictures, so we may end up going back to take some another day. The architecture inside the building was very interesting, as it was completely based on ancient Greek architecture. Many aspects of the building were designed to exactly mimic the Parthenon and other monuments in Athens. Along many of the walls there were also large statues of many of the Greek Gods. We found it intriguing that a government building, finished in the late 19th century, would be modeled after Greece rather than utilizing Austrian influences in the architecture. We asked our guide why this was the case, but unfortunately she did not understand our questions - so we are going to try and do some research of our own and see what we can find!
We continue with orientation through the end of this week. Almost all of our group is going to Prague this weekend, but there are a few of us (including myself), staying behind in Vienna. Those of us staying have other plans to go there later in the semester, at least once, so we decided to save some money and explore Vienna some more! It will actually be nice to have only 6 of us here for the weekend, because we will actually get out and see the city in a more organized manner! When all 30 of us are here, our groups get too large and we end up not accomplishing much in terms of sightseeing. This weekend we are already planning on going to Europe's biggest "underground" lake, which is just outside of Vienna. We are also looking into going on a hike in one of the outer districts depending on the weather!
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