Gmail Video Chat!

I don't have any more pictures yet, but I did just talk to my parents through gmail chat and that was way awesome!! I recommend it to anyone who wants to talk to someone that they don't see very often, and it is free too!!! Yippee!!

Soon, I will be writing about church in Vienna... it is really awesome! Last Sunday, there was a baptism, and guess what?... LDS baptisms in Europe are the same as in America!!! WOW! lol of course! It is so amazing to see what I already believed, that our church really is a world-wide church and the Holy Ghost really does speak every language! Although my German speaking skills are still really terrible, I can understand the general idea of each of the church meetings, as well as my German teacher who speaks to us only in German.

So here is a little piece of the Vienna 1st ward....
in church this past Sunday, the theme was the priesthood, and one of the sister missionaries gave a talk about her personal experiences with the priesthood in her life. I could understand her almost perfectly because she was speaking "hoch deutsch" which means high German, which is like perfect German without an accent, and the dialect that i learn in school, so i was able to understand her so well!!! And, I could feel the spirit very strongly as she bore testimony of how the priesthood has blessed her life. I love the gospel and I am so grateful for it in my life!

Saturday - a beautiful day!

Saturday morning, I went with a group of students, and our professor to this awesome Medieval Castle, called Kreuzenstein. It was a 40 minute hike up to the top, through luscious green trees and plants, after a 30 minute train ride on the S-bahn out of the city. We took a tour of the castle (it was all in German so I didn’t understand very much), but I saw awesome medieval armor. There was so much of it too. I kind of felt like I had walked onto a movie set, and I imagined soldiers in their heavy metal armor walking around to guard the castle. It was a pretty neat experience!
Saturday night, Danny and Shelly (the group facilitator and his wife) took a few of us to a place called Schnitzlwirt, a place that they both came all the time while they were here on their missions, and where you can get huge Wienerschnitzl, which is a big slab of meat thinned out and breaded, a Wien specialty. Anne and I shared this schnitzl, which has ham, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, spices, and cheese on top, with some kind of gravy and potatoes with it. HOLY COW!!! It was so super tasty!!! Russell, I will definitely be taking you there when you come!!! I was so glad that I had gone running Saturday morning, and done all of that walking! Anyway, it was totally a very Wienerish meal that we ate!

*the middle two pictures are from Friday at Schönbruhn Palace.)

Friday night movie night!

Friday night is movie night at the LDS Outreach Center, so we went and watched some movie, but I was not really into the film, “Overboard”, I don’t recommend it… and since I didn’t have much to do, I started feeling homesick. Finally, the movie was over, and Anne and I walked home. It was kind of funny because she started telling me how she felt homesick, and the I told her that I was also feeling homesick, so before we went to bed we said our nightly roommate prayer, and she said it and asked Heavenly Father to help comfort us. Immediately after the prayer, I felt comforted, knowing that Heavenly Father loves me, and that I am where I am supposed to be at this time in my life. It is so amazing that one simple prayer, in another language, can bring so much comfort. The Holy Ghost is so amazing! I am so grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ, and for my Savior, and for all that He does for me. I do not know what I would do without the gospel!

At the Top of Stefansdom!

A Hike up 343 steps!!

On Friday, Anne and I went running/walking by the Donau Kanal (auf deutsch) mostly walking. We live right down the street from the canal and I realized that we live really close to the inner city. We really live in a great location. (Today, Sunday, we went for a walk with our host-mother’s dog in the other direction down the canal and it is way prettier that way, so I think we will go in that direction from now on.) After our run, we met up with some of our classmates and our teacher and some of his kids and we all climbed the 343 steps to the top of Stephansdom! (It’s the gothic building that we went inside on Wednesday.) It is a straight up shot, and the stairs just keep winding up and until we finally reached the top, and looked out the windows and could see the city. It is so beautiful here!
*we normally have class Monday through Friday, but because of the holiday on Thursday, the schedule got thrown off a little bit so class was also cancelled on Friday.
After the climb back down the steps, our professor took us to another one of his favorite Italian Gelato Eis places. This time I got hazelnut and strawberry… sehr lecker!!! (It tasted sooo good!) After the ice cream, a few of us took the U-bahn to Schönbruhn Palace. We walked around the grounds and saw the beautiful gardens and huge palace. Another day we will go inside with our class and I can tell you more about it. Across from the palace is a hill to climb up and at the top was this pretty building that is now a café. I was thinking of dad as we were hiking up the hill, because there were a lot of hard-core runners in their running outfits running up the hill, and all over the grounds. Dad, good luck on Monday running the L.A. Marathon!!! I am excited for you and I will be thinking of you as you run! This palace sort of reminds me of Versailles in Paris, only I think this palace is smaller, and doesn’t have so many gardens. It is really cool to be able to compare one palace to another… I feel so cultured!! Thanks mom and dad for allowing me to travel the world!! ☺

Feiertag!

21. 05. 2009
Today is a Holiday! It is called Himmelfahrtstag or Ascension Day, the day Jesus ascended in to heaven after He was on the earth with the apostles for 40 days after He was resurrected. Therefore, we had no school today! So, we went swimming at this place called Gänsehäufel, that apparently all of Vienna goes to on warm days with no school or work. It has a wave pool, a pool with a slide, a pool for little children with water toys, and of course the Danube River, which is actually where the river used to go through, and is now a lake. There are tons of people sunbathing and playing in the water, and the weather today was great! It is interesting because here in Europe, people don’t really care about what other people think because here the idea is to wear as little clothing as possible, so all of us BYU students in one-piece swimming suits stuck out like a sore thumb. Luckily, there weren’t very many completely undressed people, so I was not scarred too badly today. ☺ I was able to finally get some sun, and hopefully by the time I come back to the states, I will not be as super white as I was when I left. Oh, and today I ate my first frankfurter with mustard in bread similar to a hot dog. Es schmeckt gut!

Yummy Dessert!!

• To celebrate mom’s birthday, our professor took us to a really old restaurant called Griechenbeisl that has been owned by somebody and in operation since the 1400s! Mozart, Strauss, and all the composers and musicians have probably eaten at this place, and maybe have even been in the very same room that we were in!!! We all ordered tasty desserts, and passed them around the table to all try the different kinds. I got crepes with an apricot yummy filling. Dad, I thought of you as I ate it, you almost could be hired as a crepe cook. The lemon crepes you made just before I left, almost could compare! ☺

Stephansdom

Sorry that some are crooked... i don't know how to rotate them! And my camera died soon after this moment so I don't have any more right now...

Dead bones, dead bones, DEAD bones…
• The most interesting thing I saw yesterday was seeing the thousands of bones under the church where the people used to be buried. One room is called the bone room, where the “common folk” were buried, and when the room became full of bodies, people were ordered to go inside and clean the bones and stack them on top of each other in order to make room for more people to be buried there. It was fascinating. I didn’t really know what to think when I saw 9,000 dead people’s bones all stacked up in a small room under a church. And these bones have been there since the 15th century!! WOW!!!

Zum Geburtstag viel glück Mama!

Today was a very eventful day!
We made it to the Austro-American Institute of Education/AAIE (where we have German class every day) by 9 am so we could use the internet because we don’t have it at our apartment. However, we forgot our passports at home and today we needed them because we were going to register at residents with the citizens of Vienna after class. So, Luckily we don’t live very far from school, so Anne and I quickly dropped our backpacks off in our classroom and ran back to the Strassenbahn station to get back to our apartment. With a little bit of running and hassle, we made it back to the institute at about 9:58 am, just in time for class!!
• After class, and registration, we had our Architecture class. Today was a really awesome class because we went inside Stephansdom, a gothic style cathedral, which is one of the oldest churches in Vienna. In contrast to the Romanesque style, where buildings were built with thick walls for protection, the gothic architects instead wanted to build as high to God as they could, and as my professor put it, take stone away from the thick walls, and use that stone to decorate and built high. In the pictures, you can see how ornate the inside of this cathedral is.

Day 2...

*The painting is from 1407!!!!

*I ate pistachio and chocolate (I haven't had chocolate ice cream for over two year!!!)

*The church that is kinda crooked (because of my great picture taking skills lol) is the oldest church in Vienna! It was built about 1000 AD!

*The other pictures are of the Hofburg, and looking out from the Hofburg. This spot is where Christianity stopped and the Muslim religion began (medieval times).

*My first Gelato in Wien!!!! Es schmeckt sehr gut!

First FHE!!

Last night we also had FHE at the LDS institute!! It is such a great place to be, it feels like home! At 18:00 (6pm) they have dinner for us for only 1 euro 50 cent and then at 7pm they have a lesson (naturlich auf deutsch). After the lesson, we played a game similar to Pictionary, and it was fun because the words were in english and german. All of the students that live here in Vienna speak english so it is easy to speak with them, although I should be speaking more german. After the games, they always have dessert for us and then time to hang out. I started talking to one of the girls who is investigating the church, (we were speaking in english)... then she started talking to a girl in our byu group who speaks german really well, she lived in germany for 5 years. They were speaking really fast, but I think I understood pretty much all that they were saying. I tried to speak a little bit with them, but it is embarrassing because I know that i do not speak correctly... However, I know that as I speak more, I will get better!!

At the LDS institute, we also can go on Wednesdays for dinner for 1 euro 50 cent and Institute, and on Fridays free food and games/movies/FUN!!! The elderly missionaries there are very welcoming and inviting and so are the students there. I asked the elder about Johannes Handler (russell's companion) and he said that he comes all the time, so I will probably be meeting him soon! Cool!!!

Ok, off to do homework tonight!!! Tschüss!!

First day of Spring classes!

So yesterday was the first day of German class with two very German professors. They are both from Österreich (Austria). We have class for two hours and at the end of the first hour the teachers switch teaching. They both teach nur auf deutsch (only in german) and I can understand almost all that they are saying, but my speaking is still not super great. It is getting better here very day because I am beginning to find my way around better. This week in our german class we arestudying minorities in europe, and we are reading small articles auf deutsch!! It is so great to be here with so much german!!! And, I just love walking around the city listening to the german everywhere!!
After our german class, we have an hour break for lunch and then our two hour architecture class with Professor McFarland. It is the greatest class, because we do not sit in the classroom, but we go out and see the buildings that are hundreds of years old!! Yesterday, we went to the Hofburg (the palace of Vienna) and we also went to Judenplatz, which was the small area in the city where the Jews were forced to live in the middle ages. In the 1400s, all of the Jews were locked inside the "ghetto" (where they lived) and they were all burned. I think it said that 65,000 Jews were killed then... wow! So much persecution for the jews all the time. Last night we had to write a paper about one of the things that we discussed during the Medieval times, and I wrote about the Jewish synagogue. Only the foundation of the synagogue remains.
I think our architecture class will be really amazing!!! Our professor knows so much about Wien! He has a mental map in his head of the city, and he knows so much about the history!!

First Pictures!!

I am still trying to figure this out...
The first picture is my roommate and I when we first made it to our room. I was really tired the first couple days so didn't take many photos.
The second picture is the Hofburg, the seat of Austrian power for six centuries!
Next is me on my bed in my new room for the summer!!
The last is my roommate and I on the Strassenbahn this morning on our way here to the Institute where we will have class in 45 minutes! Yippee!!

on the way to the airport...and the flights...

Here is my mom and I in the car on the way to the airport. My dad was driving.... I thought i was going to miss my flight because we were supposed to leave the house by 4, but we left at 4:30 am. My flight left at 6:25, but i made it through security with an hour to spare. I slept for the first couple of hours, then was awake and wrote some goals in my journal. About halfway through the flight, I thought I would never get off the plane, it was taking forever, and i thought to myself, how am I ever going to survive a 9 hour flight???? Soon after I had those thoughts, we were landing in New York, so I said, I can do this!!! It was really exciting to be in New York because I have never been there before, but I did not see much; it was very cloudy :( oh well, i guess i ill have to come back!
When I finally found the international terminal, boy was it full of people everywhere!!! And they all were speaking different languages. I already felt like I was in a different country, and initiated Hillary-security-mode!! I was constantly looking behind me to make sure that no one one was going to take anything from my backpack, or try to approach me... Luckily I made it through security pretty quickly, and I finally found a place to sit down and call my parents for the last few times. I had a 4 hour layover, but didn't do much during that time.
...About the Flight...
It turned out only to be 7 hours and 45 minutes which made me a bit happier, but still a long time! I also knew that I needed to sleep a lot, because when I arrived in Wien it was 9:15 am, and I would have a huge day ahead of me!!! It was really great on the plane because I had a window seat, no one one next to me, and the guy I sat by was not a creeper! In fact, he was really nice and we talked a bit throughout the flight. He is from Albania, but goes to school in New York, so he speaks perfect english. That was a first relief. I tried to sleep as much as I could, but only ended up getting about 3 hours, or maybe 4? It was also cloudy the entire flight so I couldn't see much out the window, oh, and for most of the flight it was also dark, and nothing to see since it was all the Atlantic ocean :). When we had about 2 hours left, we flew over Ireland, so I took a picture of the clouds over Ireland for my former roommate Beka, because she will be going on study abroad to the British Isles starting in Ireland. I think I also snapped a photo of the clouds over Germany :) and a couple of the green that I saw as we were descending to Vienna. It is soo green! Just like the pictures I have seen, and there is so much history here!! I am so excited to learn all about it!
On Saturday, my roommate and I walked around the city and went inside two churches (Kirche) St. Michael's Kirche and St. Peter's Kirche. ABSOLUTELY STUNNING!!!!!! WOW!! I am sure we will go inside again during the course of the spring and summer semesters.
I post more pictures as I take more and see more. Bis dann!

ICH BIN IN WIEN!

Thursday, May 15th,
Halo!! I have made it to Vienna, Austria! After 18 hours of travel, including the layover I made it here at 9 this morning which is midnight back home. I was definitely feeling the jetlag all day. I kind of felt like I was a crazy person. I was finally able to take a nap for an hour at about 6 pm, and I will definitely have a great night of sleep. Now, about the day… we had orientation this morning at the school that we will be going to all summer, and they told us a little about our host families, and about the German courses we will be taking. My hostess has two young children, Isaac (6) and Maria Louise (9) and a small dog (don’t know his name yet). She goes by Alex. I haven’t spoken with her very much yet because she was not here when we arrived to our apartment. I will get to that in a minute though. After orientation, we were taken to a little market with lots of different little places to eat lunch. It was then that I realized that I am really here in Vienna, surrounded by thousands of German speakers, and I better catch on fast. Otherwise, I am going to stick out like a crazy American!! Lol. It is so great to hear the language, and I get excited when I can understand what they are saying, but I still have to work on opening my mouth. The problem is that most of the people speak English, so if I talk to them in broken German, they recognize that I am a tourist and they will respond in English. Hopefully, soon I will not be so easily recognized as a tourist and will be able to speak with more confidence. This brings me back to our host family. A friend of mine was here in Wien in the fall, and she told me that Alex is super nice and a really great person. When I arrived, I learned that she speaks English perfectly, so when my roommate and I talked to her, we both tried to speak in German, and she would sometimes respond in English. Hopefully, we will be able to let her know that we don’t want to speak in English unless it is something that we absolutely do not understand. We will be having lunch together after church on Sunday (she is a member by the way which is so awesome) and we will then talk about rules of the house, and other things that we must go over. For now, this is all that I can write because my computer will soon die and I do not have a European converter yet, so I’ve got to get that taken care of. I do need to say though that it is BEAUTIFUL HERE!!! Oh my goodness, it is so green!! I know that I am going to have an amazing experience. I have so much to learn!! Bis spater

In New York waiting to leave the country!

Wednesday May 14, 2009
I am currently sitting in the John F Kennedy International airport in New York. I will post this sometime when I arrive in Vienna. I had a 4 hour and 47 minute flight that left this morning early from home, and now I have a few hours to sit in the airport and watch people as I wait for my flight to take off. As I was downstairs going through security, several international people from all over the world surrounded me. I began to feel anxious, and became worried that my belongings could be stolen at anytime. However, I did not allow the nerves to take over and I made it through quickly and safely. Now here I sit and wait and anticipate that the nerves will rise again once I arrive to customs. This morning, getting on my flight was also very hectic, but that was more because of a lack of sleep. I don’t think I really could make it through an entire day on three hours of sleep. Thank goodness I was able to sleep while I was on the plane coming here. I also will have to sleep on the way to Austria because when I arrive there after a 9 hour flight, it will be 9 am Friday.

I am currently sitting at the gate for Turkish Airlines, and last night I talked to a friend who was in Vienna Fall of 2008. She said that in Vienna, there are a lot of people from Turkey, Pakistan, and places in Africa. It will definitely be an amazing experience to learn about so many different cultures while I am abroad. One other quick thing, I was walking behind a couple, and besides the European look, I think I heard them speaking Italian, which got me really excited to travel to Italy while I am in Europe as well. It will definitely be a life changing adventure!!

Almost on the way to Europe!!

I will be leaving soon to Austria!!! I am really excited to be abroad and to have the experience of a lifetime!! It will definitely be an adventure as I make my way on a 14 hour flight, with a 4 hour layover in the middle. Well a 5 hour stretch then a 9 hour stretch, I will definitely be getting up every few hours to stretch my legs, and hopefully I will be able to sleep on the way there because when I get there, it's game time!!! And although it will be the middle of the night here, it will be morning there! Bis dann!!