Vienna!

I just got into Vienna this evening, and now I finally have internet access. :) It looks like my roommate is still on the semester break. My Wohnheim isn't incredibly fancy, but it's a bit more cozy than Josenturm (where I stayed in S.H.).



I went out to get some dinner and I thought a Doenner Kebab would be a nice quick meal, then I saw that this restaurant was charging 9,8 euros for one. The average price in Schwaebisch Hall was 3,4 euros. I have no idea why that is; I doubt that that's how they're priced throughout Vienna. I ended up getting a pasta dish for 7 euros instead.

Now I'm back in my room. I watched some Grey's Anatomy and Spongebob Squarepants (auf Deutsch, so it's educational) and the news. There's something very comforting about watching TV in a foreign country. For all but one year of my time at Augsburg, I have not had a TV in my room, and it's not something I need to have, but I think the familiarity of sitting passively and being entertained is kind of nice.

It's a little too late to explore the city, but during our orientation tomorrow, I will be a be able to see more. These are pictures of the Danau (Danube) Canal in my neighborhood.

Nürnberg

I think I'm starting to forget how to properly speak and write in English, so I apologize to my Writing Lab colleuges about the countless punctuation and spelling mistakes I'm going to make. I've speant too much time learning German and speaking English with Brazilians. The comma rules are also quite different in German, so I'm trying to learn them. This mixed-up keyboard isn't much help either; the z and y are switched (I think I have a typo in a earlier post that proves it...), the puntuation marks are all over the place, and it took me about thirty minutes to figure out just how to type the @ and € signs.

Anzwazs... :) The Goethe Institut had an excursion to Nürnberg (I think it's Nuremberg auf Englisch) on Saturday. Nürnberg has a lot of churches, shopping, and cold weather. Nürnburg was one of the centers of Nazi organization and propaganda rallies during the Third Reich, so the main Nazi documentation center is located in a Colluseumesque building Hitler had built. (The infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will begins with a Nürnberg rally.) Our tour guide said it would take about half a day to go through the documentation center, so we only drove around it on our way back.

These days, there are still a few idiots-with-a-cause who think Nazi ideas would benefit Germany, but whenever they rally, entire towns come out and protest against them. I met someone who saw a small Nazi demonstration in München, but the police had to surround them because the accumulating pile of rotten fruit and garbage that had been thrown at the neo-Nazis was getting pretty big.

Some friends and I broke off from the Nürnberg tour group, which we were told we could do, because our tour guide was pretty long-winded, to say the least, and we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to see any of the city if we kept standing in the cold waiting for our guide to finish explaining the difference between German citizens and the German people. We walked around the citz, explored a couple (very old--this is Europe) churches, climbed up to Kaiser's Fortress, saw the Albrecht Dürer house, had authentic Italian pizza, and attempted to go to a WWII "art bunker" which was closed on Saturdays.

No wind will go uncollected...


The Operahouse in Nürnberg:


This photo is a little hard to see, but it's a long walkway with pilars in front of the German National Museum.


One of the many pilars with a statement in German and several other languages about human rights.


Elisabethkirche (kirche=church):


Really-Busy-Statue-Next-to-a-Tower Parts I-IV:

Note the skeleton choking another skeleton...Perhaps an excercise in futility.








Nürnberg street attractions:

A street!


At least the potatoes will smile at you on the street.


Imagine this street with eight times the people as in this photo, and then you'll know how busy it is in the afternoon. If I would have pulled out the camera then, I could have been trampeled.


A river... I read that the the Main/Danube/Rhine Canal is near Nürnberg (in Regenberg), but I'm not sure which river this is:





The Schönen Brünnen--The Lovely Well


Lorenzkirche:


an illegal Lorenzkirche picture I took before I found out photographieren was verboten:


Albrecht Dürer...in statue form:


This is probably not the German idea of the Easter Bunny:


Kaizer's Imperial Castle:

Mehr Schwäbisch Hall Fotos :)

a small (by German standards) breakfast in the Goethe Institut Mensa:




the street I live on:


the Saturday market:







people at a cafe on the Marktplatz


St. Michaelskirche and a fountain:


This saintly figure can kill demons with his eyes closed:


a food cart on the hill:


I forgot who this is supposed to be, but it's pretty much my favorite statue ever:


shoppers on one of Schwäbisch Hall's main streets:


a memorial in the cobblestones of the Marktplatz where Nazis burned Jewish books and furniture:


The River Kocher:






Josenturm (my Wohnheim)
My room is right behind this tower; there's a picture of it in my first Schwäbisch Hall post:


My Schlafzimmer:






I can organize a closet:

More Schwäbisch Hall Pictures

Schwaebisch Hall on a cloudy day, which, from what I've heard is the typical weather situation in this part of Europe in February...


Enten lieben Schwäbisch Hall.







Apparently, the people of this town bury their frogs. (Froschgraben literally means "frog graves." I'm probably missing something here.)


This is a cool piece in front of a government office. I think it shows how the artist (and the people willing to put it here) feel about government and burreaucracy... It's a bunch of people trzing to get a cow and a goat up the stairs.





I really want to post all of my photos, but each one takes about two minutes to load, and it's about seven minutes to load five at once, so this will be a very gradual process. I'm not supposed to use the Mediotheke for personal e-mails, but it's the only place I can get internet AND use a USB drive for free...and I like to think of my blogging as an educational activity. :) I don't know how the Mediothekemeisterin feels about that....

Anyways, I'm going to head home. Hope everthing is well (if not at least interesting with the elections) in America.