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!