'Wirklich?'

Well I’ve certainly had some interesting adventures back in Vienna this week. While confusion has been the norm, it has also been a lot of fun trying some new things. But before I get into the major events of the week, I just wanted to catch everyone up on a few dot points that haven’t made it into earlier blogs.

• Level 3 German was too easy for me and I am now in level 4 out of 5 levels
• I’ve been meeting with my tandem learning partner Roland for 2 hours once a week and I feel like we are learning a lot together
• I played my first game of handball but unfortunately was unable to play again because the class was full. It was a lot of fun and I would basically describe it as violent netball.
• To get to one of my classes at uni I have to take a lift where I have the following options of floors: 1/1 2/1 3/1 4/1 E/1 U/1 1/ 4 2/4 3/ 4 4/4 E/4 U/4; E is the ground floor, U is the basement and 1 or 4 indicates which side of the lift will open
• I did my first presentation in a uni class here and was shocked to discover that students are very critical of each others' presentations and openly inform the class of why your presentation sucked. I felt like the class room was a hostile environment. I have since discovered that university is free here, anyone can get a degree, so in order to distinguish good students from poor students classes are very competitive.

So the first interesting situation that I wanted to tell you about this week occurred when Steph (US) and I decided to try out the pub located next to the dorm. We made the long trek of 2 metres and discovered that the pub has a great atmosphere. There was live music in the form of one guy playing a piano and singing old school songs and lots of places to sit and just talk. The first bizarre situation was when I ordered ‘Wodka mit Cola’ and was literally bought a shot of vodka and a glass of coke. It was pretty funny, but we could not figure out if they always bring it like that or if I they had misunderstood my attempt to order in German. Secondly, a lady came up to us with a camera and asked us to take our photo. Well in reality, the only word I heard was ‘webpage’ but it was pretty clear what she wanted. So we smiled and let her take a couple photos. This is normal in Vienna. At the bars and clubs photographers take lots of photos and they then put them up on their website to promote their business and for guests to see. However, we soon discovered that the lady that had taken our photo did not work for this pub. She was just another customer! We started wondering exactly what kind of webpage our picture would appear on. Finally, our night was made complete when a woman dressed as a man and a man with fake plastic ears and a cape walked in. We did not understand why they were dressed up or what they were supposed to be. However, they came in and did Karaoke with the one man band. They attempted to sing ‘I will survive.’ That song with the line that everybody knows, ‘so now you’re back from out of space, I just came in to find you here with that sad look upon your face…’ This was absolutely hilarious because their English was terrible so it sounded more like ‘you’re….space….with….face’. They could not form an entire sentence singing.

This weekend I also went to watch my first ever live soccer match – Vienna vs Salzburg. This was a great outing because one of the exchange students had organised it on Facebook so that there were 15 exchange students who all went and sat together. The day started out calm and sunny and I was extremely amused to see some Scandinavian girls wearing sunglasses when the temperature did not even reach 10 degrees that day! Unfortunately the weather turned unbelievably quickly so that we were freezing cold while watching the game. It was a great atmosphere with constant chanting from supporters of both teams; unfortunately we did not understand them to join in. However, I found the actual sport quite boring. I watched 90 mins of soccer to see only two goals scored and there was no winner. It was a very empty feeling to walk away from an uneventful draw. For now, I’m sticking to AFL.

Finally, today’s adventure was attempting to find the Australian Embassy. Basically from conversations with different people I became unsure as to whether the visa I have entitles me to travel freely in Europe. Therefore, today Sarah (Canada) and I went to the Austrian Department of International Affairs in an attempt to find out. However, the lady there did not speak English, did not listen to us and failed to answer our questions. We did manage to at least extract a phone number of another Austrian department. I rang them and once again the person that answered did not speak English so I attempted to explain the situation in German. I got my point across and this lady told me that the visa I had does not allow me to leave the country at all and that you cannot get the correct visa in Austria. She was very rude. So this information was extremely stressful to receive considering how much travelling I have already planned and paid for. We had reached a dead end on the Austrian side of things and the Canadian embassy had already stated that they do not advise on visas of other countries, so our only hope was the Australian embassy.

I rang the Australian embassy and spoke to Wolfgang who was kind enough to invite us to the embassy even though we did not have an appointment. However, as I was getting the address my phone battery died. All we knew was that it was somewhere near Karlsplatz. So we took the train there and started looking around. We spotted 2 policemen and decided that we should ask them. So I went up to one and asked, ‘Entschuldigung, wissen Sie wo die Australischen Botschaft ist’ or ‘excuse me, do you know where the Australian embassy is?’ The policemen replied ‘Ja’ to which I responded, ‘WIRKLICH?!’ or ‘REALLY?!’ complete with a range of over animated facial expressions showing shock, confusion and disbelief. I was convinced that the embassy would be tiny and no one would know where it was. Yet somehow this policeman not only knew but gave us perfect directions. At the embassy I was amazed to discover that no Australians worked there. Nevertheless, Wolfgang was extremely friendly and helpful. He used his contacts at the department we had visited that morning to find out the information we needed. So after all of the stress and hassle it turned out that our visas were fine anyway.

This post is dedicated to you Wolfgang!