The Austrian folk dance was probably the highlight of my week. It was another experience provided by Frau Thiel that made Elissa and I feel like we had been put in a time machine instead of a study abroad program. I am quite certain now that we are living in Austria during the Great Depression instead of the 21st century. We have learned what life is like on a farm, even though we live within the city, next to a mall even.

My birthday was last Sunday but since so many people were traveling or writing papers I did not celebrate. I went to lunch with a few girls but there was no proper 21st b-day celebration. Actually Frau Thiel and Elissa both were gone and I was at the house by myself. If you must know what I did for the entire day I will tell you: I watched Grey’s Anatomy. I watched it for hours and hours. I watched season one, part of two, and all of season three I have not seen yet. I am not addicted to the show like some girls here, but it was available and I have nothing else to do. It was a kind of reintroduction to American culture after being tv deprived all semester. It probably was not the best decision because it is emotionally draining and left me a bit depressed.

To be honest the depressed state I hit after my birthday was not induced by Grey’s Anatomy alone. The fact that I am leaving has hit me and I am terribly sad about it. Soon I will leave the 30 people that have been my entire life for the last three months. No longer will I get to grumble with Elissa about Frau Thiel and her crazy meals and even crazier comments. I won’t get to explore new cities with the awesome girls from Ouachita Baptist and bask in the southern accents that I miss from home. My drinking buddy Andy will no longer be around to encourage or help me do the things I really can’t do on my own. Elias, Jeff, Colin, and Noah won’t be part of my life constantly making me think they are slightly deranged or even on drugs. What will happen when I don’t have Alisha and Sam around to shop with and eat lunch with? And can I really do without the Wittenberg girls? Those chicas are the craziest and the best for any occasion. Adam won’t be around anymore to be my kindred spirit always ready with a joke, a laugh, or my stolen thought. And how am I going to survive without Kenny to talk about the dumbest and the smartest things I have ever heard? I am going to miss these people like none other. I love everyone at home so much and I cannot wait to see you, but it is bittersweet to think that I will never see any of these friends again.

I am so very excited to come home and leave Frau Thiel’s European Finishing School for American Girls. I can’t wait to be in Memphis and to do the things and see the places I didn’t know I loved till I left. And I absolutely cannot wait to see all of you! I will be home late on the 5th then on the 6th I will be at church, assuming I can wake myself up. =) On the 7th I am going to come to Union, so if you read this… be ready because I want to see everyone! I will probably stay in Jackson for at least two days. Who is excited besides me?

Also, if anyone is a slacker like me and doesn’t have huge commitments this summer, would anyone like to go on a road trip? Currently my only plans are taking online classes from UofM so I am completely mobile and would really like to visit an amazing friend in Oregon. Since this is such a long journey it would be awesome to have one or two friends come. Anyone interested? (I forget whom all this email goes to… so if you are someone like, oh I don’t know, my mom… you aren’t invited. Haha jk mom!) Seriously though, I will be going at some point in the schedule so I am flexible if anyone would like to join me. I am super fun to travel with! [End pitch.]

Tuesday I will be taking my last excursion to the ice caves. It will be the first day they are open so I am lucky to get the day off from school. Hurray for national holidays!

I hope everyone is well and not breaking under the pressure of jobs and the end of the semester. Speaking of jobs… if anyone knows of one that I can have… let me know that too. I am so needy in this email. Geez. I will end it now before I think of something else to ask for.

Much love.

Budapest was a nice city, but not one of my favorites. Perhaps if I had gone there in the beginning I would have loved it but with all the traveling I have done this semester I am now selective about which cities I enjoy the most.

I am still working on getting my pictures online. It is easy to get on facebook but webshots has not been working for me so I will have to find another website. I will send a couple pics with this so you can enjoy! There is one from Venice and one from Ferrara and then a bunch from Paris over spring break. =)

Let me tell you about the second half of my spring break last week. Ferrara was an amazing little place to stop at during the break. I am so glad I got to see Riannon after so many years. Hurray high school friends! Also, the city gave me a good feel for the Italian lifestyle, complete with a nap during the middle of the day. If only Austrians and Americans participated in this smart cultural tradition life would be grand. In Ferrara I spent the day walking around the city and then went to a jazz club with Riannon and some of her American friends. The music was not the best but it was enjoyable and I love the building the club was in… it was one of the circular buildings that was part of the medieval wall that still surrounds Ferrara. The city has transformed the wall into a walking/biking path so that you can walk on top of the wall around the entire city.

After Ferrara I met up with Jenny and Rebekah (Salzburg College people) in Venice. I arrived first and got extremely lost on the mainland which led me to walk for about two hours before finding my hostel. I wouldn’t have been lost if it had not been raining because I would have easily seen the road I needed from the bus… but you can’t control the weather. Venice was also very fun. It isn’t a city with many sites so mostly you just walk around the skinny streets looking at the canals and houses. We went on a gondola ride with a family from Tunisia to split the cost and it was very fun. Our gondola driver (is that the right term?) didn’t sing to us but he did shout at every other gondola we passed and he also showed us the major sites like Casanova’s house and gave us a bit of history. We also visited the main square where all the pigeons gather. We decided it was the pigeon mecca and only the good pigeons make it there. I fed the pigeons some crackers and they flew around me and landed on my arms… the pictures of that are hilarious. Also a random pigeon landed on my head long after I had stopped trying to attract the pigeons. We couldn’t decide why that happened but it amused us all.

I stayed in Venice for one day because after that it is all the same. I had to go to Basel, Switzerland after that to go to an art museum for my History of Modern Art term paper. I was not excited to be in Switzerland for several reasons. The people are snobby, the weather was frightfully cold (it snowed!!), and that city of Basel is not beautiful at all. I was not excited to be there but the museum had a great student rate and it was a very good museum. I really enjoyed a lot of the art there and I did get my “research” done so it was a good stop.

Then… I went to Paris! One of the days I was there was freezing cold and rainy but the other two were amazing so overall it was beautiful. We saw all the major sites… Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, etc. You can check those pictures out when I get them online. But for now I need to get offline and go do some school work. Just a little bit. Not too much. But enough that I won’t have as much work next week when Alison comes to visit me. =)

For my pictures I will be putting them on Webshots if you don’t look at them on facebook. I will slowly be adding them all to that site over the next week or two.

Have a great week everyone!

Milan: We started with two days in Milan, which to be honest was not my decision. I am not a fashionista and I know of nothing in Milan besides Da Vinci’s Last Supper and we did not even see that. By the end of the second day in Milan we were bored, but we did a lot of people watching which is amazingly fun there. Milan also has a beautiful church and a crazy cemetary that has really outlandish tombstones and looks like a little city in parts of it. I liked Milan.. good pizza and fun people to be there with, but I will not be going back.

Rome: Rome is one of my favorite cities even though we got lost when we first arrived. At 3 am we arrived and wandered until Adam asked a group of prostitutes where our hostel was and they lied to us so we walked around even more. We finally found the hostel which was nice except for a creepy guy that walked people in and out of there rooms. We spent two days there and it was just enough time to see all the major sites that we wanted to see. We started off with the Colosseum and then the Forum. We explored gardens and ruins the first day and walked through most of the old center of the city. Everything is really close together so not a lot of time is wasted walking to various sites. On the second day we did the most amazing thing ever. We saw the Pope!! We went to the Wed morning service and stood in a huge group of people until the pope came out at 10:30 and the service began. The best part was we stood next to the little road where the Pope drives through the crowd before the service. I was within five feet of Benedicto while little Polish children chanted Ben-i-dict-o and people squished closer to get pictures. After the Pope Experience we toured St. Peters and it was amazing to see the place I had studied about in Church History. Even if I am not a Catholic, the Church’s past is my past too, in a way. We spent the rest of the day wandering through the city and saw a castle and the bridges and other things.

Athens: We spent three days in athens. We walked through most of the city and explored the Acropolis and other ancient ruins. We did a small archeological dig (fake since none of us have training, but real in the sense that we were on the ancient Agorra) and I snatched a few pieces of building material before we realized we were in a roped off part and ran away. I went shopping in Greece too, it was the first place I bought things… I have a shirt that has my name in Greek… you want one too, I know. We also met a man named Nikolas who told us why Greeks all say God Bless America and that Greeks love Americans. He kept grabbing my cheeks and being silly but he gave us a lucky Greek penny and formed the basis for my US/Euro paper so I am happy about it. We ate Greek food in Athens… gyros for almost every meal that were cheap and delicious. The food there will be missed.

Aegina: a Greek island that we visited for a day and a night. It was beautiful, you definitely must look at the pictures when I put them online next week. On the island we rented mopeds and drove around the entire island a few times, exploring the beaches and ruins and mountaintops. Riding mopeds is only appropriate for places like this and coastal towns (which of course is all an island is), but where they are appropriate they are soo much fun! I think that I will upgrade to motorcycles when I get home. =) On the island we were the only people in our hostel and one of the few tourists on the island. It was low season so no one was there and the shops and restaurants did not open until afternoon if they opened at all. The atmosphere was very laidback, but perfect for relaxation after busy and crowded Rome.

I am now in Ferrara, Italy, with a my friend Riannon who I have not seen in years. After this I will head to Venice and then to Switzerland and Paris. My two weeks will end and the travelling Maria will head back to dreary Salzburg to learn German and finish her semester up. I am excited to return to Salzburg so I can digest this experience and to look at and edit my pictures (of course I looove doing that). In two weeks my friend Alison should come visit me and we will explore beautiful Salzburg further. Can’t wait for that either! I hope everyone had a great St. Patrick’s day and has a wonderful new week.

Much love.

I was very happy to be there for Cynthia and Brian’s big day. It was a wonderful ceremony and reception. A beautiful wedding, with enough funny parts to relieve all the tension and enough romantic parts to remind everyone what the celebration was about. I am so happy so many of Cynthia’s family were able to come from California. If you were there you might have noticed me holding on to Lauren and shaking. After ten minutes of standing in my heels, my legs were hurting and shaking. I was still paying attention to everything going on and thought it was lovely, but then I started to feel like I was going to faint. Blackness started to creep into my vision and I seriously almost passed out. I did not want to fall down, or even sit down, or do anything that would distract from Cynthia and Brian. I guess some people noticed I was shaking and holding on to Lauren, so I just wanted to say why. I feel very bad that I did that, even though I had no control over it. =( That was the only problem with the wedding, but thankfully it was only my problem and not theirs. I am sooo happy for those two!

The weekend before that I went to Munich for one day and stayed in Salzburg for the rest of the weekend. My time in Munich was spent at museums of Modern Art looking at German expressionist paintings and laughing at the guard who was listening to a Munich football game. The Munich art field trip was useful for my class but not very exciting to talk about. Munchen (Munich) is a nice city, and I especially love the airport. Everything there is orderly and labeled and you can easily find your way through the airport. If you get confused or have a question you can ask because everyone speaks German and English. I looove Munich’s airport. I tell you this so I can compare my experience there (flawless) with my experience in Atlanta. Atlanta’s airport on a scale from one to ten would be about a 3.5. While I was there someone stopped me as I was about to go through passport control and asked me where my luggage was, as if I had forgotten to pick it up from baggage claim. After I made it through passport control we were herded, literally herded, through to security. The airport employees were yelling at people telling them which direction to go. I found this extremely ridiculous, especially since we were in the international terminal and yelling English at people is not helpful. Sign with English are easily understood but screaming airport employees are not. The Italian couple behind me seemed just as confused by the yelling and also by the fact that you have to take your shoes of during security. As of today, I have only had to do this in US airports.

I don’t remember if I emailed everyone about Florence. I know I have tried several times but I don’t know if it ever worked… My time in Florence was one of my favorite experiences in Europe so far. I went on a weekend trip with the “Southern Girls” from Ouachita Baptist University. Everyone calls them the “Southern Girls” and I, the only other Southerner in the school, am not included in that and I am ok with that. We took an overnight train to Florence during Carnivale weekend. It was an interesting time to go to the city. Tons of people were there because there is no better place to be for Carnivale than in Italy. Lots of Asian tourists, some of whom took pictures of us and then with us when we asked whz they were taking pictures of us.

We went to a Carnivale celebration on Sunday that was part parade, part concert. The parade was an international parade and every country represented had a float decorated in the country’s colors. After each float went through the city streets they ended on a stage and did some type of performance. Most groups sang songs but the Filipino group did a hip-hop dance to a song from the Disney movie “High School Musical” (which is really popular here… at least in Italy). A Chinese dragon weaved through the crowd while people dressed as Austrian nobility marched through the square and a Swedish float advertised an ABBA musical. Kids in the crowd were all dressed up as princesses and cowboys and pirates, etc. They had bags of confetti they threw on the ground and at people in the crowd. I ended up in a tiny confetti war with a Disney princess while her mom watched and laughed.

We wanted to rent mopeds to ride around the city but settled for bicycles after the people at the shop said it would be safer. We spent hours riding around the city taking pictures and getting lost. It was the best way to explore the city. I hope that I will get the chance to rent a bike in another city. We went through the city and stopped to eat pizza and repeatedly to get gelato. Who doesn’t love gelato? Bikes also came in handy when Italian boys kept talking to us and following us… we could make a quick getaway. I can’t have too much attention; it will go to my head. =)

Well, I think I am all caught up on my adventures. I want to send a lot of pictures, but that never seems to work. If you don’t look at Facebook I will try this week to put all the pictures on a website for photos. I will send you the link in the next email.

After this week of midterm exams (sadness!) I am headed off for my two week spring break. My plan so far is to travel with two people, Adam and Alisha, for the first week. We are going to Brussels, Belgium; Milan, Italy; Rome, Italy; and Athens, Greece. After that I will be leaving them and traveling by myself for a few days. I will fly back to Milan and then travel by train to Switzerland. My plans are not made for this part of my trip but I might go to Zurich or Geneva. Then I will go to Basel, which is not exciting but I need to go to the art museum there for my art history class. I then will travel to Luxembourg because I have nowhere better to do and it is on my way to Paris, which is my final destination. I will spend 2-3 days in Paris with the Southern Girls and then head back home to Salzburg. Sounds nice, eh?

Well, everyone have a good week. Email me if you get the chance. I would love to read emails for you lovely people on rainy days like this one!

Ich liebe euch (I love yall).