fine art and street art

Today some friends and I visited the Kunsthistorisches museum, or the museum of art history and it was BREATHTAKING. Seriously, I've never seen anything like it. Not even counting the artifacts themselves, just the building alone was awesome.

The displays inside were incredible as well but I'll let the pictures speak for that!

My favorite thing in the whole entire museum.

We all agreed that if we could live anywhere, we would definitely live right inside this museum. I'm only posting my favorite pictures but it took at least two hours to see everything. I can't wait to go back.

While we're on the subject of art, Vienna has a lot of really neat street art (Banksy had one of his first exhibitions here!) and there are actually quite a few places where graffiti is legal. 

One of my favorite pieces so far.

I'm making it my goal to visit all of the famous street art locations while I'm here and maybe even add something myself! I'll be sure to take lots of pictures so stay tuned.

the vienna woods and a walk through kohlmarkt

Yesterday Paige and I walked up a street in our neighborhood to the Vienna woods. The woods are roughly 400 square miles and are a popular place to go jogging, which is nice because of how close it is to our house. They're very scenic and beautiful so I can't wait to see what it looks like there when the snow sticks.

Awesome view from near our house.

Entrance to a walking trail in the Vienna woods.

Later that day we went to church. We decided to step out of our comfort zone a little and go to the German speaking meeting instead of the international one. I didn't understand a word that they were saying, but it was still interesting and I like the idea of immersing myself in as much German as possible.

This morning I had my first classes of the semester. My first class was German, which I can tell is going to be hard. Honestly, I have a feeling I'm going to learn more of the language just from being around people who speak it than from the actual class. The first words I've picked up are "recht" and "links", which mean right and left. The subway always says "ausstieg links" or "ausstieg rechs" to tell you which side to exit from. Hopefully this will come in handy when asking for directions!


After class I walked around the innere stadt ("inner city") and found a street called "kohlmarkt". Apparently it got its name because it used to be a coal market. Now it's a very high end shopping area with gorgeous architecture. I don't think anything there is within my budget (think Tiffany & Co and Gucci) but just the sight of the buildings is enough to make me want to go back there again, especially at night when I heard it's even prettier. 

Kohlmarkt.

Apparently at this classy restaurant, you can have literally any meal you want delivered from anywhere in the world if you order it 24 hours in advance and have a couple thousand dollars to spare.

The Hofburg Palace.

 

Hello from Vienna!

Wow, I'm finally here. It took a total of 24 hours of travel to finally end up at my host family's house and 48 hours of barely sleeping at all (due to the three babies that I swear, didn't stop crying the entire flight over) but I'm glad to be settled in at last.

I'm living with my roommate Paige and host family (host mom?) Geraldine. She's wonderful, and fluent in English which is a relief since I hadn't learned a single word of German when I got here. (Since then I've picked up a couple of words, still not enough to function without relying on Paige to help me out.) Paige and I moved into the 3rd floor attic which we get to ourselves, which is two bedrooms and a bathroom. I would soon find out that we really lucked out after hearing several different stories from girls in my group who share a bathroom with four-six other people. The only thing I don't like about our house is that it's a 45 minute commute to school every morning (for an 8 AM class too!). Luckily there's a bus stop right down the street and then we transfer to the subway so there's almost no walking involved. (which might be a bad thing depending on how good the food ends up being...)

My attic bedroom.

This morning we met at the Austro American Institute of Education (or the AAIE) which is where our classes are going to meet. The building is really old and pretty, I'll have to take a picture next time. We took a short tour of the area around the school where we'll be spending a lot of time. I'm so excited to explore the area more, it kind of reminds me of a smaller, classier version of New York City. It's really neat because it has all the shops you'd see in a mall but the buildings are old and beautiful.

A few blocks of shopping near my school. The roads are closed until 11 every night for shoppers.

A castle! Also right next to my school.

I'm going to do some more exploring tomorrow but I'm still exhausted from all that traveling!