free fallin'

I've been getting more and more acquainted with the city, and it's absolutely beautiful. I think it's safe to say I'm going to be completely broke by the time this semester is over, but hopefully Smashburger will take me back ;] haha.

We had a traditional Austrian dinner on Thursday night at Brandauer's Bierbogen and of course I had schnitzel and loved it, a lot of people had ribs because apparently that's also a very popular/common dish here - go figure. It's also one of the few dishes where it's completely acceptable to get a to go "box". Here they're not boxes, they just wrap your food in tin foil and you carry it home. I was a little surprised when that first happened but hey, when in Vienna...

We woke up early to go to Schonbrunn, the former summer residence of the imperial family. It was massive, absolutely beautiful. It made me wish I really had married a prince like I planned to do when I was 5. The family had a zoo in their "backyard", which is still open and there's pandas there, but we didn't go.

The exchange students are still all new and we tend to travel in a pack of about 30, and went to PraterDome on Friday night, an amazingly large club. People started to leave around 2 but when I went back upstairs to find the rest of the group, I got lost and was walking around through different rooms and hallways and bars for a solid 10 minutes before I decided it was a lost cause and I ended up going home too, probably a good thing. I kept it classy and fell asleep on the subway and woke up to a completely empty car sitting still at the end of the route, that was a surprise. Thankfully I was only three stops away and the subway runs all night on the weekends, so I just hopped on the other one and made it home. :] Success! The nightlife here is great though, a lot of dancing that I'm actually starting to enjoy, strangely enough.

Most of us spent today walking around Vienna, seeing the city center. We went about halfway up one of the towers of St. Stephan's Cathedral, 343 stairs to be exact. The view was amazing, but I feel really bad for whoever had to walk up those stairs on a regular basis.

I also got my school schedule and it's rather strange. I'm taking five courses here which is technically half a semester here, so I have a lot of free time, beautiful! Not all classes last all semester, there are some that only last a few weeks. I plan on heading to Spain for the first week of March because I have a week of no classes, and then going to Czech to visit my grandparents. Lots of traveling :]

I think coming here was one of the best decisions I could've made. I'm so thankful that I'm here with the people I'm here with. Everyone is so open and willing to try new things, I love it. I'm sure it will dissolve into smaller groups as the semester goes on, but we're all growing close extremely fast and I think that bond will last all semester.

My roommate just made me pasta, and it smells delicious. Dinnaaaa time, ciao!

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost