Trust in the Lord

I just received an amazing email from my little brother Jacob. He doesn’t seem to be so little any more. He is definitely growing up, and that excites me, yet that also means that he is no longer the little rascal he once was. I know that there are many great memories ahead, and that excites me! My sister Ellen is also growing up. It seems that as I came here to Vienna in the summer of 2009, everyone back in the states are really growing up. That is a bittersweet moment, because when I get back, I will be a little older too! This is the biggest step I have made in my life thus far, and wow, there is no turning back to childhood anymore. When I get back to the states, I will no longer officially be a teenager, which means new responsibilities, and new opportunities to grow.

A few thoughts on the past few weekends. Grandpa was in the hospital during Grandma Ellen’s 80th birthday. The next weekend, the father of Sharon Ready, (a good friend from my stake back home) suddenly past away. He was the rock of their family, and there are still a few young children at home with a mother who is ill. The emotions of the death of a loved one came flowing back. Death is a struggle to work through, but I am so grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ and the knowledge of eternal families. One of my roommates from BYU last year went into the hospital because of hypothermia. The next weekend, Russell went on an adventure to walk from the Provo Temple to the Salt Lake Temple. On the way, he got dehydrated and had heat stroke, and ended up in the hospital after a few seizures. This past week, I found out that my three-week-old cousin Clarissa is struggling for life. After a few surgeries, she is doing better, but is on 24-hour watch in the hospital. We still don’t know how long she will make it. I also found out that one of my best friends will be married at the end of this year.

What a roller-coaster life! Life is so fragile, and I am so grateful for the knowledge that “all flesh is in His Hands.” So many times in the past month has the Lord given me a test. It is by no means been an easy ride, especially being across the world from all of my family when this is all going on. However, He never said that it would be easy. He never said, ‘Hillary, when you get to Austria, the language will just suddenly be in your head. Time is going to stop on the other side of the world, and everything will work out perfectly!” He has said however, “Trust in the Lord with all thy might, and lean not unto thine own understanding.” The Lord has really been teaching me that I need to truly put my trust in Him. He does know all things. He does have a plan for each of us. He does know which experiences we need to have in order to strengthen us individually. Life is not meant to be easy. Life is a test. It is a gift from God to be tested. “And if men come into me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” (Ether 12:27)

More adventures!!

Thursday, July 16
Schloss Belvedere
So on Thursday in our art history class, we went to the belvedere museum, which has famous paintings by Gustav Klimt. He is a modernist, and several of his works are really famous. His most famous, The Kiss, was in this museum, and it was amazing to see the original! I remember my high school freshman English teacher had a poster of it in her room, and I remember her talking about it one day in class. It blew my mind that I was actually there with original pieces of art! I have now been in several art museums, and I really enjoy looking at the different styles, and the talent of these artists just amazes me. I often wonder what is going on inside an artists head as he is painting a work. I now feel very cultured in the art world. ☺

Friday July, 17
Medieval Day in Vienna!
It was not an official holiday, but it was Kari’s birthday and she wanted to walk around Vienna traditional renaissance style, so she and Heather wore their Dirndls that they bought here in Vienna, and I wore puffy sleeves with a dress that I have, and we walked around the city! We ate yummy traditional Austrian food, and we even got asked twice if people could take a picture with Heather and Kari. I hope this doesn’t ruin your fantasy, but Austrians don’t usually wear Dirndls every day. It was a blast, and Kari really enjoyed her fairy tale birthday! We ended it off watching Kate and Leopold, I personally thought it was cheesy, but it was the perfect film to go with the events of the day! (Hugh Jackman is Leopold, a duke in the 19th century that comes through a time machine and turns up in New York in the 21st century… kind how we felt all day) I had a blast watching people pull out their cameras and quickly take pictures of us trying to not let us notice them. We had lots of laughs!!

Saturday, July 18
Graz, Austria
Friday night at about 23:30 pm, Heather and I decided that we wanted to use a day on our Eurail passes and take a 2 ½ hour train ride south to the city of Graz. I had no idea what was there, but Heather said that it had a lot of cool medieval buildings, and things to see, so we jumped on a train at Wien Südbahnhof this morning at 9am and arrived in Gray about 12pm. The only problem was that it was pouring, and that is an understatement!!!! It was like we were at a water park and the huge bucket above the kid slide was pouring over the city of Graz. So, unprepared as we were, we each bought an umbrella, and ran to a Strassenbahn. We had no agenda whatsoever, so we would jump out and walk for a little bit, getting soaked in the process, then we would jump back on the bahn and ride some more. We found a cool-looking walkway that led to an elevator that takes you up to the top of the palace that has been in existence since the 12th century (I think). It had a great view of the city, but I am sure it would have been really great if it weren’t for all the rain. We were soaked, and ready to go home, so we jumped back on the train at 2:30pm and came back to Vienna! We found out that it had been raining here all day too. Too bad we didn’t check the weather before we left. Oh well, it was still a fun adventure!!

MOVING DAY!!!

Saturday was an adventurous day!! My host ‘mom’ will be getting married in a week and a half, and she is moving to the Netherlands, so she has been packing up nine years worth of stuff pretty much the entire time I have been here, and Saturday was MOVING DAY! Her fiancé drove the moving truck form Holland here, and all day Saturday with tons of help from people in our BYU group, and from the missionaries, and we carried tons of boxes down two flights of stairs for 5 hours. By the end of that time, the moving truck was pretty much stuffed to the max; however, there was still tons of stuff throughout the house. So poor Alex hardly has slept in the past week, even after the moving truck left early Sunday morning, and she has spent every moment trying to get the house cleaned up and cleared out. She did it!!! Her flight to Holland left today at 6p.m. and she and her two kids, Marie-Louise (9) and Isaac (6) will be in Holland until she is married on July 22nd, and then she will come back to Vienna with her whole family, (husband and his one-year-old son, Alias, whose mom died over a year ago) and on July 25th there will be a reception here in Vienna. Then, she will go back to Holland and start her new life with three children, and her husband Eric!
So, the house is basically empty, except for our room, which now only has mattresses, a closet and a desk, and the kitchen stuff is still here. Danny and Shelly are also still here, so Anne and I are not completely alone. It will be a quiet next few weeks here, and that will be interesting, because this apartment has always been full of people, ever since I got here, friends have been coming and going. Alex’s sister will still be here until Saturday, and then she will fly to Holland for the wedding.

I ended up writing more than I expected to at first, but I am glad that I wrote all that because there is lots going on in the life of Hillary, and it is fun to write it all down and be able to reflect on the past week and see that I really have done a ton! I love being here in Vienna, and I know that I will be sad when the time comes that I have to leave this place. However, I also miss my family a ton so I am also really excited for that day when I get back on the airplane and fly back home to the USA! It is hard to describe this experience that I am having here. I love it, and most importantly, I have learned so many lessons that I will carry with me throughout the rest of my life! I have so much still to learn, but right now at this point, I am happy to be where I am, and to be learning new things every day!

P.S. This picture was taken quite a few weeks ago, but it is a good portion of our group so I wanted to post it. :)

Czech Republic

I was in the Czech Republic on Friday!!! Heather, McKay, and I took the first train at 6 a.m. Friday morning, which was about four and a half hours, and we basically just ran around the city for seven hours, and saw some cool looking buildings an dchurches, then Heather and I got back on the train at 6 p.m. and came back to Vienna! It was pretty crazy because the Czech language is COMPLETELY different than German, or English, or even Spanish! So we had an adventure trying to figure out what we were reading! It was pretty neat though, because the Czech Republic is next to two German speaking countries, there were also tons of things written in German, so I felt like my German was helpful!
We climbed a ton of stairs to get up to the Czech Palace, which I think is the largest palace in Europe, and when we got to the top, there was a gorgeous view of the city of Prague. It was beautiful!!! Sorry, but pictures will never do it justice, you should just go there to experience it!! It was fun running around the city for a few hours, and although I did not see the inside of a lot of places, I think we still saw a ton of really neat buildings!

I've been in Vienna for 2 months!!

So it had been a while since I have written some thoughts down on this blog. First here are some highlights in the life of Hillary this past week…
• We started our Art History class, with Professor Katie Isaac. Our architecture class is over with Prof. McFarland, and for the month of July a BYU professor and her family have flown out to teach us Art History. I have never taken an Art History class before so I am excited about it. So far, we have had three lectures in her apartment, with a slide show of art pieces and she talked about the history of them, then on Thursday we went to the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum, where the original paintings actually are!!! It was pretty neat to see the actual works, and I must say it is so much more awesome to have a class where we are looking at actual paintings, way better than sitting in a classroom everyday!!! I am going to miss this! Nothing can top this!
• One day in our art class, there was a really loud, intense thunderstorm!! The weather has been pretty nice, well it would be nice in the morning and then rain really hard for a little while, then it would clear up and be sunny again! It is really niche though, and I love the rain!
• I really enjoy getting on a random Strassenbahn (streetcar) and just riding and looking around the city. The other day I went almost to the end of track, and I saw part of the city I have not seen yet. It is just a fun time to see what is outside and surrounding the city.
• As far as the language goes, I LOVE the German language even more every day!!!! I feel like I have really taken a turn, and I speak it way more often and I am gaining confidence with the language. I am definitely not fluent, and it is still hard for me to pronounce my ‘r’ (in the back of my throat), but it has gotten much better! I am so grateful that I will be living in the German house when I get back because I think I would go crazy if I couldn’t speak it with someone everyday! I also have been reading some out of Das Buch Mormon, which is also another great way to increase my vocabulary.
• I also love my ward! This past Sunday, the 12th of July, I realized that we only have three more Sundays in our ward, then we will be traveling around for two weeks, and then the program will be over! Wow time is flying by so fast! The people in our ward are so kind, and it is so awesome to hear the gospel auf Deutsch! It is so beautiful! The missionaries are also really awesome! The sisters both gave talks in church on Sunday, and one has only been out for almost three months, and she just opens her mouth, and even though her German is not perfect, she just does an amazing job, and she is such an example to me. I need to just open my mouth an help those around me!!!!
• A couple cool little incidences… one day I was eating pizza by myself, and I was just leaning against a fence in the middle of the city, and a man came up to me and asked if there was a pizzaria near by, and my response just flowed form my mouth. It was of course all in German, and he could understand me, and I was so excited!!! And today, I had walked out of the U-bahn station, and a lady came up to me asking for directions, and although I couldn’t understand every word, I was able to help her all auf Deutsch!!! It is so exciting too to know that I have been here long enough in this city to know my way around! And about the first month I was here, when I would order something, it would be really broken German, and I was very hesitant, but it has since gotten so much better!! I am so grateful for that!!
• We also have really great German teachers this term! One of the teachers is the same as last term, and he is still great, but our second teacher is really great! He said the first day of class that we will learn in his class, and that we will have better German by the end of the five weeks that we will be with him. I was very impressed, and excited because he has a great plan for the course of our class, and he has been really helpful with different strategies of teaching to help us improve. We have already written two papers in German for his class. I know I will continue to learn in these next three weeks!!

It's a Small World After All...

Sunday July 5th
So earlier I said that it really is a small world, and every day it just keeps getting smaller!! Today, Sunday, I was at church sitting in Sunday school, and at the front of the room is a window, and all of a sudden there were people walking across, a big group of teenager age boys and girls in Sunday clothing, and they looked like they could be from America. So, one girl walked past, and I thought to myself, that looks like a girl that I know… So I slipped out of class and walked out the back door to find a group of about thirty high school-age students and I walked up to the girl that I thought I know and said her name “Jenica”. Sure enough it was her! She was my next door neighbor in the Elms this past year at BYU. I asked them why they were staying in Vienna, and she told me that she was a chaperone with her sister’s high school choir. They are from Mesa, Arizona and have been traveling around Austria for ten days performing and they are going home tomorrow morning. They were at our church building to sing a song in sacrament meeting. WOW!! The Lord is amazing!! How did he do that?
It gets even better because that night they had a performance in the Votiv’s Kirche, so a few friends and I went to watch it, and as we sat down, I saw another face that looked familiar, but this time she was in the audience. But I wasn’t completely sure, so I waited until after the performance, and sure enough, it was another girl that I know from BYU. Her name is Morgan, and it turns out that her sister is in the same choir, and she had just come with her mom to meet up with her sister, and she was leaving in the morning for London, so I got to see her right before she left. Morgan lived in the apartment that I lived in last summer in the Elms. She lived there in the spring, but I cam a few days early and met her, and so I met her through my roommates of my summer ward, who had been her roommates in the spring. (I hope this makes some sense, and if not, sorry, it was just a great experience for me!!)

The Fourth of July!!

Happy Independence Day!!

To celebrate today, our Professor took us to lunch at Schweizenhaus, a Czech restaurant in the middle of the Vienna Prater Amusement Park. The park reminded me of California Adventure, Knott’s Berry Farm, and a carnival all in one, except I felt a little more nervous about the security of the rides here in Vienna. We went on one ride, and it was fun! At one point during the ride, I closed my eyes, and just tried to take in the entire experience so far here in Vienna. It was amazing in those few seconds that I had my eyes closed. The language, the culture, the tears, the sounds, the whole experience flashed before my eyes as I felt the wind hitting my face. I am so grateful to be here in Vienna. I never imagined myself living here for three months, and I didn’t have any clue what it would be like, but I am so glad that I am here. It is really an broadening experience!
After the fun ride, Professor McFarland took us on a bicycle ride through the park. They turned out to actually be four-person buggies, and each person had pedals. It was an enjoyable ride, with beautiful green trees on each side of us.
So, the weather was hot enough to go swimming, so a group of us headed to the Donau River after the bike ride. I wore my swimsuit but had no intentions of actually jumping in the river, because I am not a big fan of seeing fish as I swim. However, one of the girls decided that she wanted to swim across the river to the other side and back, so she and two guys jumped in and started swimming. I thought to myself, ‘that’s cool, but there’s no way I would do that.’ But, then another girl said ‘I can do this!’ and then she jumped in and started swimming. At this point, there were still three other girls on the dock, two definitely wouldn’t do it, but I started to think, ‘hey I could totally do this’ so I jumped in and another girl jumped in with me. The water was so cold that I just started swimming really fast, to get my body heated up, and finally my body was used to it, but I couldn’t believe that I was actually in the water so I just kept swimming and swimming. About half way out, my body started getting tired, so I laid on my back and did a back stroke for a little while. Finally, I was across!!! I was so amazed that I made it all the way to the other side!! I had no idea that I could actually do that! One of the girls decided to swim back again to the other side, but the rest of us had no intentions of doing so, and randomly we saw a girl from our BYU group who was just walking along the river with a friend, (It truly is a small world!!!!!) so we used her phone to call the girls who were still on the dock and asked them to meet us at the bridge and bring our stuff. So we walked along one side of the river bare-foot and only in our swimsuits, and met up with the girls who carried our towels and shoes for us along the other side of the river. I was so excited that I actually swam across the river!! It was a fun Austrian Fourth of July celebration!!!