Vienna Waits for You

For about eight years my favorite song has been Vienna by Billy Joel. It's the song that I put on the first mix cd I make for anyone I care about and it's the song that I cherished in my darkest hours. But despite my love for the song, I never really dreamed I would end up here.
I took what I would normally fit into my SUV and trimmed it down to fit in a suitcase and a backpack.
I'm ecstatic but also scared out of my mind since I only know a few people on this trip and barely at that. The person who had been planning to join me on this trip backed out and I know that I would never forgive myself if I did the same. But so far everyone has been really nice and friendly so it's great!
On the flight over it hadn't hit me what was going on. It felt like I was just on a long flight to anywhere and there happened to be some people I knew on the plane. We were all lined up in a strange alphabetical order in the very middle of the plane so sitting down you might not even have known we all were a group. I didn't get any sleep on that first long flight to our connection in Amsterdam. We made it through customs and a second security checkpoint then speed walked through the airport to find our connecting flight at what felt like 1:30 in the morning. We waited to board and saw a beautiful sunrise as we sat there.

We were all pretty antsy to get on the plane to get to our final destination of Vienna. On the flight they spoke Dutch very rapidly and then translated it in English. I used to want to learn Dutch but German will have to do for now. When we got on the plane they served us chicken sandwiches which didn't make any sense to either of the timezones I was currently operating under. It was good and came in a little box with a windmill on it and instructions on how to make your own wheat bread (in English) but my stomach was hurting from the strange dinner I ate on the plane before so I couldn't really enjoy it.
Our group split up with six of us going to one apartment and five of us going to the other. We settled in and then journeyed out with our professor to go (as we later figured out) grocery shopping. It took us five minutes to figure out which water we were buying and then our professor told us which one was what we actually wanted before we bought it. Who knew there was "mild" water?

When we got back to the apartment I crashed like I never had before. I put on pajama shorts and before changing my shirt as I had been planning I fell asleep. After we woke up we went out to dinner with the whole group and were served a variety of things I couldn't pronounce but boiled down to a soup with "small sliced pancakes" which was surprisingly delicious (frittatensuppe), basically a fried dough with pork in it (weiner schnitzel), and an apple strudel with whipped cream (apfelstrudel).
It was all delicious and was a huge relief after eating plane food. Now I have plans to get breakfast at a cafe with the girls in the apartment and then plan the rest of the day.

Auf Wiedersehen!

Yours until the end of the Internet,
Eiggam