Breaking Dawn

This weekend I went to Forks.

It was a quick visit, but even through the fog (you know how that Washington weather can be!) I managed to see a lot. KIDDING! I know I had you fooled and jealous (and by you I mean Meggy O'Roark, Ellie Feitl, and Sarah Gianopoulos, of course), but look at those pictures and tell me you don't get excited about the movie New Moon. The second picture is the spitting image of the field where the Cullens play baseball. Have the connections my mind makes between Austria and familiar places progressed to full-on delusions?

While I didn't visit Twilight-central, I did do something else very exciting and probably more beneficial this weekend. I MADE FRIENDS!

As I was standing in line to get my student ID a few weeks ago I met a girl from the Czech Republic named Michaela. She was really friendly and asked me if I wanted to come with her and a group of other international students on a day trip the following Sunday. I was so excited to be making a friend and so flustered by having to do it in German that I didn't actually hear where she said we were going, and by the time I realized this had already enthusiastically (with my signature "my German may be bad but at least I can smile really big at you!" grin plastered across my face) agreed to come along and would have looked even more stupid had I asked for her to repeat where we were going.

It turned out that we were supposed to go to cave nearby (which I'm sure had nothing on Indiana's most popular natural attraction, Marengo Cave- shout out to Mrs. Racster), and I ended up not going because I was exhausted from the previous day's excursion to Carinthia. Luckily, though, Michaela is persistent and super-friendly, and she kept inviting me to do things. Like going hiking on a nearby mountain called the Schöckl yesterday.

We left around 9 AM and hiked all the way up to the Spitze (that's "summit" for all of you Anglophones). The trails here are marked with Austrian flags painted on rocks and trees, which you can see in this picture. I'm sure the view from the top would have been beautiful had it not been so foggy (the word "Nebel" (fog) is forever engraved upon my brain), but I was happy to go out and do something and practiced lots of German. Most of these students are Czech, Slovak, or Slovenian, so while I might end up speaking German with a slavic accent, at least people won't respond to me in English.

It was so cold at the summit that we went to a Gasthaus (which Michaela, Katka, and I are standing outside of in the picture) and had hot chocolate and soup (Gemütlichkeit, anyone?). I had cream of pumpkin soup because Styria is world-renowned for its pumpkin seed oil, which I had never heard of before but actually kind of enjoy. We didn't spend much more time at the top because of the cold and the fact that we could barely see 15 feet in front of us, but the hiking itself was really good exercise. I was exhausted at the end of the day but in a good, I-just-spent-the-day-at-Holiday-World kind of way.

This weekend was also important because my roommate Yasha had a birthday (he's the Latvian violinist that I told every one was Polish...oops). He turned 21 so Laura (Italian roommate) and I baked him a cake. Yasha is on the right, Laura is in the middle, and Zach (from Texas) is sitting next to me. At one point every one was wearing the Sponge Bob birthday hats I bought at the Allerlei 1€ store (roughly translated as "Everything's €1!" it's tied with Interspar- which is as close to Target as you can get and thus where I go when I'm homesick because it reminds me of the US- as my favorite store in Graz). I'm not sure why Zach and Laura took theirs off, but I doubt that they would have preferred Winnie the Pooh, which was the only other option.

To top off this wunder-weekend, Monday was the Austrian National Holiday (celebrating what neither the Austrians nor I know), and because I have Fridays off anyway it was a 4 day weekend for me. Thus, we'll end this on a high note, with a group shot of my new Slavic friends.