Still Day 1

Hey everyone! I saw the pic on Facebook of Matt and Kate at prom! Can you post some pics on here for me to see?? They looked great! I love Matt's haircut :)

Well I'm here at my new home for the next 5 weeks! Me and 3 other girls on the trip are staying with this lady and her husband and sons in her apartment in Vienna! It's a third floor apartment down a narrow pedestrian only street. Look it up on Google Earth! The address is Wien 1010, Ledererhof 2/7 and we got lucky because we have the best cook and the best location! We get to walk everywhere instead of having to ride the U-Bahn (thats the metro subway systems here).

So after I left off my last post, one of the other girls from my group showed up, Christina. She's the one from University of the Arts in Philly. The other two girls, Deanna and Jessi, who I'm friends with from JMU, had their plane delayed, and delayed, and delayed again, then canceled. Sooooo that sucks. They are flying out tonight and won't get here until tomorrow. So it's just me and Christina for now. She's very nice though and I think we'll get along great. Anyways, she and I took a shiny white new mercedes cab ride to our house :) When we got here we met Maria, she's very nice but really doesn't speak much english. She knows some but it's broken and hard to understand. We figured out that we need to learn some german fast! So as of now I know, "dunka" (sp?) which means thank you, "nien dunka" is what you say to people trying to sell you stuff on the corner haha it mean no thanks, "das waser bitte" means water please, "bitte" is please obvi, and some more small phrases, like "ya" yes and "nien" no. I spent today really working on my pronunciation and learning how to read german phonetically. I think I'll get the hang of some phrases soon enough.

Anyways back to meeting Maria, haha. She is an amazing cook, so we've heard and today she fixed us a lot of food! Surprisingly a lot. She makes everything with fresh fresh ingredients, like you said Mom! We had fresh bread, organic eggs, cheese, salad, she made us soup which we ate around 10pm haha we also had this thinly sliced sausage that we ate on bread like a sandwich sort of with mustard that came in a toothpaste tube haha. I've been trying everything! I told myself that I will not be picky. When in Rome, right?! But yea, I will definitely be eating a lot healthier here haha. I haven't had processed foods since I left America!

So now I'm just kind of hanging in my room with Christina. They have 3 cats and we just found one asleep on my backpack haha! Tomorrow we are going to St. Stephens, or in german, Stephensplatz (pronounced schtefenzplatz) and we are also going to this place called Bregners I think? They sell the sketchbooks and pens that are apparently the best.

Hope to hear from you soon! I want to hear about Prom and the house and stuff :)

xo Julie