Things other than travelSo,

So after a week of filling you in, I didn't really have the mental energy to talk about things other than pure travel and reactions from that. For this post, I want to sort of paint a picture of how I am living over here, the everyday stuff, and how it feels different, better, worse, and what not.

First off, I am a guy who is used to wing 2A in corrado hall. We are up until the fat lady sings...which happens usually around 2 or 3 am on any given day. Here, the night seems to creep up on you and tell you to go to bed right around 9:30 or 10. I'm positive this is a result two things. First, it is custom here to shut up around 8pm every night, and the neighbors aren't afraid to tell the police how loud the Americans are being. And second, its much easier to get exhausted here. Between walking everywhere, traveling, learning, cooking, and "celebrating" :) its easy to get tried as hell, and just want to go to sleep, all the time. I guess this will be good habit forming for the rest of summer.

Our rooms are quite nice. My bed is almost as comfortable as the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in (Will's guest bed in his room at home). It has made me realize I like firm beds. So when I get back to P-town, with my current bed fiasco, I'll keep that in mind. Our desks are great, and there is more than enough room for everything we brought. I am trying desperately to prevent myself from associating hw with my bedroom. Thanks to my psych teacher, Dr. Bailey, from last semester, I realized doing hw in my room all year probably contributed to my lack of sleep abilities. So my room here is for relaxing activities only. The showers and bathroom, one in each room, are nice as well. The rooms really feel like hotel rooms. We have one small table at the center, and a balcony with a glass door opening out to it. Nick and I are on the third floor so we have a great view of our courtyard and basketball court. I have enjoyed multiple warm nights out there, either skyping with Whit:), reading, or just enjoying where I am.

That's a good segway into my main topic: down time. I have really noticed this week that we really don't experience much of it, at least so far. Currently, my conclusion is that I have not gotten past the mental status that I am here on a temporary vacation. And thus I have a tendency to want to cram in everything I can while I am here. Unfortunately, you can't go non-stop for two full weeks without feeling depleted, let alone 8. So I am going to try to come to the realization that I am LIVING here for 5 1/2 more weeks as part of my (temporarily) permanent life. Maybe that will help me pace things, and not feel so rushed. I have always been a bit of a rushed guy in general, so I have going against me. Hopefully I can start to settle down and relax just as I would at home during the summer....

But that brings up another thing. I really miss the people closest to me. This last weekend in Budapest for one reason or another the homesickness set in. My guess is that its because I have started to reach that maximum time I can go on max speed and I start to want some comfort from them. So I'm hoping my attitude change will heal a bit of it. Me being the optimist, I also started looking at it in a brighter light. This trip has really made me appreciate things like mom's absolutely fantastic cooking. I have never had so many Nutela sandwiches in my life, and I love that stuff. I think I am doing an okay job of cooking. We don't really go out to eat. In fact, I have not been out to eat once on this trip other than when its paid for on our class trips, or on this last trip to Budapest when we didn't really have a choice. During the week here nobody goes out to eat. Guess that's good for a money standpoint. Still, I have found a bunch of really cool restaurants and cafe's on a few of my runs, and want to eventually have a bit there before the trip is over.

Once again, that leads to the next thing: runs. Coach Conner put a pretty concrete milage schedule on us before we left. Lets just say I haven't quite lived up to that. However, I do think I am doing much better than I thought for this trip. The altitude is a bit higher, so its difficult to go farther and faster. Plus the exhaustion I mentioned earlier makes it hard as well. But I have been regularly going on runs every other day, about 50 min on average. That may be a good amount for most, but realistically I should be at about 60 miles a week by now, which is about 8 miles a day, everyday. Hopefully I'll continue to work up from where I am at. As the sun comes out more I'm sure that'll help.

SUN! We have only seen three days of sun since landing in Salzburg. Now those three days were phenomenal. They keep saying its going to get better.... I am sketpical....but hopeful. One of those three days I went on an exploratory run (all of my runs have been pure exploring runs, with lots of turn-arounds and discoveries), and discovered a perfectly picturesque field on a high hill that wound around to a view that took my breath away...not good on a run, lol. I have been aiming for hills I can see from the center on all my runs. If I can reach them I get three good things from them. 1) A hill workout 2) An incredible view of Salzburg and the Alps 3) Visual orientation to find my way back to where I came from (this also has really helped general orientation for the city as we walk around).

This next thing has to do with last week, I forgot to mention it in my last blog. However, I am not sure how I did because the Brussel's Symphony is one of the highlights of this trip so far. Now you all know I am a band geek, and a general music buff of all kinds of music. And I have listened to quite a bit of classical and symphonic music. After all, a third of my iTunes is easily symphonic music. So I have alot to compare to. But this talented group of music God's from Belgium blew me away. I have never in my life heard such a beautiful sound come from a group this size. Yes the technical skill was there, but the intonation among every player in the ensemble was so pure, so perfect, I thought I was back at home listening to a movie score through my noise canceling headphones. The sound filled the room from the bottom up. It was absolutely amazing, it was pure grace. I was in heaven for two hours in a 1000 year old concert hall in downtown Salzburg. They featured a pianist in their first piece, which lasted 45 minutes. He played the entirely of this song with his left hand. His right fell down at his side, neglected as if he forgot he had it. Then, after the intermission, as if he had discovered it, what he did to that piano was unbelievable. I instantly thought of the movie August Rush when the little boy discovers his hidden talent for guitar. The speed at which he played those notes, without sounding scattered or "too much", resembled dominos at first. Then it wasn't in any order. It was more like a circus, his fingers, moving around, over lapping each other, all while his head stayed still (unless he slightly stood up sometime, kind of like Ray Charles' signature move). The way he moved reminded me a little of a hurdler. His limbs moved with skill and speed, while the rest of his body was constant. Amazing. I was in awe when we left.

I am taking two classes right now, Engineering Statistics, and History of the Cold War in Europe. History is by far my favorite of the two. I really enjoyed studying the cold war in high school, and much of what we are learning now over laps with what I did then. My favorite book of all time is 1984, and we watched the movie and discussed it in class. Dr. Eifler is the most amazing lecturer I have ever had. His presentations, although fast paced, are extremely fluid and intriguing, almost a little dramatic. The power points must have taken weeks to make haha. Statistics is less than exciting... Dr. Kennedy is an interesting guy. He is probably the best guy for the program director job. He'll down a full liter with us any time of day and plays foosball regularly. But statistics is a hard class to make exciting. I am learning, but history just over shadows a bit. We have regular and heavy hw for both classes, which is difficult to complete between travel. But we manage. The first exams are next, and I still don't feel like I am in student mode yet. We'll see how it goes.

So that just about covers my life here so far. This wed we are going, as class, to a concentration camp in Germany, then to a lake country afterwards, probably to get rid of some of the dismay I imagine we will be left in after the camp. Then this weekend the plan for Nick, Rachel, Erin, and I is to go to Switzerland and spend the weekend hiking at the base of the Eiger. This is where I'll get my pictures to make Chase jealous haha. I have been looking forward to this alps trip since we left, so I hope it works out well. We'll take a cable car to about 5 thousand feet, then hike another 2 thousand to base camp. I am STOKED!

Until next time.

A Week of Catching up, Eagle's Nest, Munich, Classes, Budapest

So, its been a solid week since my last update, and for that I apologize. I don't want to say I've been "work busy", but I have been busy. Between the different trips, outings, and homework (yes it is still substantial), its become increasingly difficult to find time to reflect on everything. But I'll always make it my goal to catch up on everything I missed.

After Saturday at Hallstatt and the toboggan ride, I was afraid that was going to be hard to beat. And for that weekend, my fears were realized. The Eagle's Nest wasn't as interesting as I had hoped. I mean, I'm the concept was cool to think about, and the documentation center at the base of the mountain displayed mountains of information about Hitler, yet the way our group was presented to everything was not as I had expected. The first thing we did was drive an hour to the base of the Ubersalzbuerg, which is the name of the entire base-like area of hills that surround the Eagle's Nest. On these grounds were dozens of other buildings serving purposes like barrack, tea house, tactical center, cafeterias, etc. It was a sort of pseudo base for Hitler's disposable activities. The Eagle's Nest was the high point of the base located on a mountain tip named after him with a magnificent view of the tallest alps, as the mountain itself is apart of them.

Before we went up to the Nest, we spent 2 long hours walking around the Documentation Center, a museum about everything Hitler and Nazi, while we held little red audio players to our ears, with about 85 different stations of information. We would walk through the center and press the appropriate number for the exhibit we were looking at. It took way to long to get through, but once we got down to the actual bunker, things were more interesting. Talking later in our history class, we discussed how the center was purposefully designed starting a window covered room and slowly working our way down into the darkness of the broken cement bunker, and how that affects our perception. That was cool to think about.

The trip up to the Nest consisted of a bus ride to a large walking tunnel that went deep into the mountain about 200m below the Nest. All 22 of us then boarded an old, brass elevator that took us up to the Nest. Once there we realized the whole place had been turned into a restaurant! The only thing we could really view was the exterior, and walk around the top of the mountain. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVED climbing up and down the different rock passages. It resembled the top of the Haystack actually.

Monday was a full day, kinda of. I had class from 8:30 until 1. After that, Erin, Ranchel, Avery, and I (Nick had class), hiked up the Kapunsenburg, a small mountain right next to the center. Took us about 3 minutes. We passed a gorgeous villa on the way, and when we got to the top, we found a castle. Go figure right? We were really stoked when we saw it because it was sort of hidden in the tress and kind of creeped up on us. Once we explored a little, took a few pictures, and made our way to the other side…. lo and behold, a restaurant. It was still really cool though. Guess thats what they do with they're old building here. The date on the castle was 1500 something.

Monday night was Rosemary's birthday, needless to say, the entire group went out to our so far favorite Irish pub, O'Malley's, and followed that up with a great dancing place. It was a great night. Pictures say the rest.

Tuesday was an ordinary day of classes and hw from 8 until 10:30 (pm) or so. Not much to say there.

Wednesday was Munich. We left at 7, drove 2 hours, and spend the day touring the 1972 Olympic Park, and the BMW headquarters plant. Both were awesome. I was especially excited to see the track where Dave Wottle ran for a Gold in the 800 with his signature come from behind kicks, and where Pre lost to that Norwegian guy.

The BMW plant was incredible. The lobby made us all feel like we were in a space craft. I have never seen a place so high tech in my life. There was small little game exhibits having to do with the technology of their cars, such as a game where you extract hydrogen from water through electrolysis. The tour of the actual plant was almost scary. All I could think about was the movie Terminator, the machines had taken over! Our guide told us the entire plant, that puts our 800 BMW 3 series a day, is 97% automated. It was insane to see the millions of dollars worth of robot arms that seemed to move like humans, picking up and really throwing around the doors, chassis of the largest luxury car maker in the world. No pictures allowed though, can't steal any of their trade secrets!

Thursday was another normal class day. I get to sleep in on thursday until about 10. The schedule switches everyday for the three classes. The time slots are 8:30-10:30, 11-1, and 2-5.

Friday we left for Budapest, Hungary. It was really exciting to head to an eastern European country I knew nothing about. Our history teacher offered this trip as a connection to our class through the Terror House in Budapest, depicting the fear through the cold war. It was very interesting, but yet again, too much information at once, with not a whole lot of background. The house itself had been used by the Nazi's and then the Soviets as a headquarters for Hungary, and place of interrogation and execution.

Nick, Rachel, Brent, Avery, Jacob, and I shared a hostel in downtown Budapest. This was our first hostel experience. It was pretty cool. The place was on the third floor of a classic building downtown, near the river. (Not that the floor's in Europe go 0,1,2,3,etc. The first night we tried to check into the second floor (1,2), which was a private apartment. Once we found it, the hostel manager, a young hippie ish guy showed us the whole place and told us about the city. Greg was his name, or so we think. He was a weird fellow, to say the least. Both nights we were there, we had two new people in the two extra beds, both were older couples that didn't talk to us at all, boring. But we did meet a couple guys from Boston, and then two guys from Sweden (Whitney's homeland!) and Norway (Lars' homeland!).

Friday evening, we all ate dinner at this place along a cobblestone street eating at an outside table. We had traditional Hungarian food, which was delicious! They serve a lot of paprika, and goulash. The food and the atmosphere was fantastic. It was sunny and warm the whole weekend. My family- if you guys remember the irish place we ate at in Spain across the street from the cathedral, this was similar. After dinner we walked across a famous bridge there, and up a mountain through a jungle-like trail to the top to see a huge greek-looking monument with epic statues of men beating up dragons, and an elegant woman holding some religious relic out. From the top was the best view of a city yet on this trip. When back down we found a gelato stand, then spent the night dancing at a jazz club near our hostel call Fat Mo's dancing to a live funk band! That city really turned on around 10 pm, it seemed like every person under the age of 30 came outside at that time.

Saturday we all met up to see the Terror House with Dr. K and the Eifler's and Dr. Bailey (the Scottish ethics prof). After the tour, we all split off for lunch, some market time, and then the Thermal Baths! There are over 50 thermal springs in Hungary, and the largest 5 are in Budapest and are utilized as public thermal baths. We spent a few hours wading around the sulfur deposit heated pools. They looked the same as a resort swimming pool, but were heated like hot tubs with the natural heat deposits.

That night we ate dinner at the same place, haha but all ordered different meals (expect Nick). We then search around for a long time trying to find this roof top bar place we had heard about…and after an hour of walking and navigating, we found it. At the top, we ran into some English guys at the beginning of their bachelor party. This was one of the best parts of the trip so far. We spent a good two or three hours talking to these guys. I have never had so much fun talking about sports, politics, and general shooting the shit was people before. They were hilarious, more than willing to talk and hangout, and just generally awesome people. The accents helped. I talked to two guys named Andy and Woody mostly. It was awesome.

After wards, we went back to Fat Mo's again for another hour of dancing, then went to bed back at the hostel. The hostel cost each of us about 16 euro total for both nights, including breakfast. It was a really cool place. Oh! That's the other part of Hungary I wanted to talk about, the money. One US dollar is equal to about 230 Forins. When we got cash out, we would withdraw about 20,000 of this currency. So it was fun trying to calculate that in our heads to figure out prices. The best way for us to get around was the subway. The system was very similar to London's underground, and was the 2nd built in the world, after London.

Sunday morning (this morning), we woke up, and headed to the train station for our 9am train. We were all talking about how crazy it is that 48 hours ago, we were intimidated, and knew nothing of this country, and now we feel like we cold navigate Budapest like we lived there. Another thing that has been on my mind is how I have begun to really miss home. I have been basically fine thus far, but this weekend for whatever reason, I am missing my mom, her cooking, dad and Lauren a lot right now, and don't even get me started on Whitney. It is fantastic to travel with friends and have this much fun, but sometimes you just want to share these huge experiences with your closest. The train ride is almost 6 hours back. I'm back on it now, with 5 to go. Time to catch up on some sleep.

....................

It's now 5:30 and I am back in the dorm. I am just now realizing that we really don't have any down time here at the program it seems like, and I didn't realize how much I need it. Better go get some. Adios.

Lake Country, Salt Mine, and Toboggan!!!

Today was an absolutely epic day. We woke up this morning after a looonnnngggg night of dancing which I will leave at that. A big blue charter bus took us about an hour away from Salzburg to a place that resembles almost any rural european post card, Hallstatt, Austria. This is one of the oldest towns in Europe because of the large salt deposits in the mountains. The history goes back 7000 years when the mine was first being worked on! We toured the salt mine, still in use today, and were told the story of the salt mine itself and how it formed, and the story of the people who first mined it. We got to see tools used over 3000 years ago and SLIDE down the miner's "fireman's pole" which are wooden slides they used to get to the different levels. It was an amazing place.

After that we walked around the town in awe at its preserved beauty and peacefulness. We ate lunch at a local eatery and ordered some traditional Austria an food, including their famous apple strudel. Delicious. Hallstatt was easily the most beautiful location I have ever been. I still can't believe we were just there. The city was built strait into the mountain, without ruining any of the natural mountain land. Most of the buildings were just built into the rocks, with much of the mountain protruding from walls. Europe seems to have the whole natural preservation of land and eco thing down much better than we do. Well they just practice clean building and minimize reduction of land without all the trendiness behind the "green".

After that we stopped at a toboggan place on the way back. We all bought two rides and grabbed a little plastic sled, were hooked up to a ski lift, towed 10 minutes up a mountain, and had a 3 minute ride of craziness down the mountain overlooking the amazing lake country. However this thing would not fly in the US. We didn't sign and liability forms, we were barely told how to operate the dam things. It was amazing. I was confident in my toboggan skills because I have been on a similar (but much smaller) one at Mt. Hood....but apparently I wasn't skilled enough. I feel off the ride half way down my second run. Sketchy huh? About 5 people fell off, and nothing was done to stop the other from coming behind. The whole ordeal was just sketchy, but I loved it.

Hitler's Eagle's Nest tomorrow.

Orientation Day

So last night I didn't update because I spent the evening out at my first bars! Both bars we (Nick, Avery, Rachel, Erin, and I) went to were Irish pubs. Of course. Actually, most of the bars in the Salzburg area are Irish, go figure. Anyway, we spent most of our time (and money) at O'Malley's Irish pub in the back of the place with an Irish bar tender named Danny, I think it was. He was a funny guy, kept calling the girls "cheeky". We tried a variety of drinks, including the "Red Headed Slut", Nick, naturally, was brave enough to try it. We had a blast there and made our way home. The 15 minute walk was colder and wetter than we had hoped after a long night. But we were back and warm in the center watching The Hangover by 11 and then promptly wen to be at 11:30.

Waking up at 8 was tough, but a nice hot shower in the amazing tall showers we have here. At 9 we all attended a longer than necessary meeting covering all the rules and info about emergencies. After that I went to the store with Erin, Rachel, and Avery to get the weeks food. I can tell grocery shopping is going to take some getting used to. I tried real hard to plan out my meals. All I could do was try to think of the meal Whitney and I cooked all school year together in her appt. So I have stuff for about 5 different meals. I'll get better as I go I guess.

When we got back it was time for the main event of the day: The Salzburg Scavenger Hunt. The whole thing took about 5 hours. We were given a two sided piece of paper with psudo directions to places we couldn't pernounce and barely make out on the map we were also given. We were split into groups of 5 and set out on the adventure. We had to get pictures with a bunch of different objects, buildings, people, and places. This ranged from yodlers, to churches, giant red cows, giant chess boards, graves of Mozart, irish pub bar tenders, and castle gates. My feet hurt afterwards as we all met at the oldest brewery in Austria, established in 1492, he year Columbus sailed the ocean blue. There were a ton of little food stands in the brewery and three huge cafeteria type rooms where we could sit. Afterwards it was a long quiet and exhausting walk back to the center.

I went on my first run with my friend Brent. We both felt the elevation difference. We made it 50 minutes before finding our way back. Dinner tonight was on our own so the kitchen was full of everyone trying to find pots and plates and cook all our grocery food. Nick and I made pasta. Tonight its Faculty clean up for the kitchen. From now on kitchen duty rotates two people a night.

Tomorrow we start classes at 8! Saturday we're going to the Sound of Music's lake country where the house was. Sunday we're headed to the Eagle's nest where Hitler hid and eventually killed himself. Cool huh?

Awesome time so far.

We made it!

Well, Mr. Etheredge and I made it all the way to Austria without a hitch. I'm not gonna lie, it was tough to hang up the phone with Whitney in Chicago and say goodbye to easy communication, but the center has a good wifi thing set up so skype will work :) The flights in were long, the first flight to Chicago actually felt the longest, maybe because we were nervous and excited and a bit sad (or at least I was). The 9 hours flight to Frankfurt was full of characters. Of course there were a minimum of 3 babies screaming there little lungs out like they were on a mission to make the most noise possible. Then there was the woman sitting in front of us with that mucus-y couch and would vigorously and repeated couch 10 times and follow that with a large hock-up and spit the loogie that followed into the puke bag. All nine hours this went on. The media screens were awesome, however the man behind me didn't seem to understand that he didn't need to punch the computer screen. Beyond that the flight was a breeze.

Dr. Kennedy (not murphy mom), was right outside baggage claim to pick us up and took us right to the center. We get to stay in the center tonight! Jet lag to make up for, bed time.

Last weekend at home

Well this is really a testing blog to make sure I am doing this right. I have two nights left at home and it has definitely hit me in the last few days. 2 months isn't that long but the isolation from family, friends, and Whit plus the distance will be more than I have experienced before. Nick too I think. I am stoked beyond belief but I can tell its going to be big, if that makes sense. I plan on updating this blog whenever I can with pictures and video, so check often. I am not sure if you can comment on it or anything like that, but feel free to do that on my facebook, I'll check that too but I figured this would be better for longer blogs.

48 hours and I say goodbye to FW and hello to SB (Salzburg)!