Day One

This is the first official full day at the school! I missed breakfast this morning, because of my phone's alarm clock. The phone hadn't set it's clock to Austria time, so I set the clock for 1 a.m., to get up at 7 a.m. in time for a shower and then breakfast. However, I had difficulty sleeping last night (hashbrowns: jetlagprobs), as did Krista, so about six in the morning, we were both up and tried to figure out my Google voice number thingy. Somehow, during the fixing of that, my phone set the time correctly to Vienna time, but didn't adjust the alarm.

So I was woken up by Krista knocking at the door about half hour before we had to leave, and as a result, missed breakfast. For the tour we went through later that day, I spent most of my time counting down the minutes till lunch.

We took about an hour drive to the monastery of Melk, which was cool. We had Mass in their super Baroque church first thing, and that was nice (no guitars! yay!), but again, my nose was super drippy and distracting. Also, they had a new alter in the middle of the church, which was, well, kinda lame. I mean, they had such an awesome high alter! Why not use it?

Special rooms where royalty would sit during Mass - I wonder what they did for communion?

The architecture was amazing, and then we got a guided tour through a couple parts of the monastery, half of which was through these rooms specially set up for tours. These special rooms were all mainly lit by colored lighting, so they called different rooms "the Green room" and "the Blue room" and basically the lighting was really weird and strange, so that was funky.

Anywho, they did have a lot of cool artifacts, like a really cool expensive Crucifix and a travel breviary; they also had a bunch of sacred vessels on display, which I thought was kinda dumb. Like, I know they're super expensive and ancient and whatnot, but they were made for the Mass, so I just think they should be used for that and not just put on display. It was kinda sad.

This is the view from the monastery into the valley below (the river is the Danube, which is not blue)

The monastery also had a really cool library, but we weren't allowed to take pictures, so you'll have to look it up. We walked through a room called "the Marble Room" because, you guessed it, there was lots of marble! It was a really pretty room, and used by royalty (particularly Empress Maria Theresa) for dining. The room had a cool grating on the floor and some windows so that while everyone was eating, they could hear the musicians playing (below? I blanked out on that part)

Special windows!

Special grating! 

Notice the weird foot sculpture booklet - this was in the tourist shop)

After we finished the tour, we had to wait awhile for the rest of the groups to finish their tour, and then we got a nice lunch (at last!!) at a restaurant connected to the monastery. First we had a really yummy soup with weird little puffy balls in it, then a meal consisting of super tender pork, sauerkraut, and a weird sausage looking thing that Krista and I decided tasted like breaded potatoes smooched together. We're still not sure what it was, but it tasted okay. Then we got a yummy apricot cheesecake (the country around Melk is known for it's huge apricots) and headed back to campus!

Krista and I spent the remaining time we had before dinner and the next two orientation meetings began by cleaning up the room a bit, and walking down to the local grocery store (which our Austrian driver of the previous day called a mall, to the astonishment to a couple girls)

The store is about a five or ten minute walk, which is super nice. I got some cleaning stuff, and also, snacks! Right now I'm eating a super yummy Milka bar. Also, I got a little carton of chocolate milk; the chocolate flavoring was excellent, but the milk itself was rather weak. I plan on making a series of blog posts, ranking all the chocolate milk encounter.

At dinner, Krista and I walked in, got our food, and sat at the only table unoccupied. We started talking about being terrible at talking to people (I'm excusing myself until I'm finished with this drippy nose/cough thing) when a friend of me and Krista walked over with two of her friends, and we finished off the meal with them! It was a bit awkward, but actually pretty nice.
Then we had to rush to the orientation meetings, which last about two and a half hours. The second half of the meeting was mostly about alcohol, which would've been extremely boring for me since I don't share the same excitement as most of the students about finally being able to drink!!!! omg!!!, but the speaker, Mr. Pipp, was super funny.

We just got out of that, and now I'm going to finish that Dickens book, eat more chocolate and go to sleep. Hopefully my head won't get mad at me for trying to sleep at the "wrong" time again tonight.