Goodbye to Vienna, hello Nashville!

During the last couple of weeks in Vienna the Christmas markets were open and the streets were decorated with Christmas lights. I had the chance to go to several, thankfully, before my accident. We just had a couple days left in Vienna after we got back from our community trip to Zell am See, in the Alps. Since I was on crutches I didn’t have to go to school. My professors brought my finals to me because I would have to climb three flights of stairs to get into the institute. I was a little bored and sad the last couple of days. There was so much that I wanted to do and see but because of my leg and how hard it was for me to get around the city. I went out one day to eat at Vapiano’s, an Italian restaurant, and one day I went to get grocery since I couldn’t leave the hotel room. I just studied and kept my leg elevated most of the day. I had to ice my knee periodically and give myself shots of the blood thinner. I watched movies and got my things ready to be packed. But since I couldn’t walk or do much lifting my friend Jordan came to my room and packed all four of my bags. The last night in Vienna, I stayed in the Horton’s room most of the time. The girls and I spent a couple hours with everyone else. We had to get up early the next morning, so we didn’t stay up too late.

The flying going home went fast than the flights going to Vienna. Being in the full leg brace was very tricky but the help given by the airplane company was such a great help, I don’t know what I would have done without it. Also just having the help of my fellow Vienners, was amazing.

Once we were in Nashville, all the students waited for me to get off the plane before they took off running towards their parents. Since I was in the wheel chair I couldn’t run with everyone else. The man pushing me didn’t seem to get the importance of this moment in my life. I was telling him to hurry and to run but I guess he didn’t want me to get to my mom as fast as I did! I could hear the screams and shouts of my friends while I was being slowly rolled towards the doors. A couple minutes after everyone got to their parents, I arrived. I was crying with happiness and excitement. I had missed my family so much and now I was finally hugging my poppy and my mom with all I could.

My skiing Adventure.

While in Zell am See, a group of us wanted to go skiing. Who doesn’t want to go skiing in the Alps? We were all up and getting ready. I was trying to find out as much info as I could about skiing before I got up on the top of a mountain. I had never skied before and was a little nervous. We had to walk to a bus stop from our bed and breakfast and ride up into the mountains. When we got to the ski resort we had to buy a ticket to go up the mountain and then all the equipment needed. We rode up the mountain and I remember being so unbelievably excited. I had always wanted to ski and now I was finally going in the Alps at that! It took us a while to get all of our gear and get up to the top of the mountain. I think I probably spent two hundred dollars on all the equipment. Once I was at the top of the mountain but lessons started. The girls who were more experienced were helping those who weren’t. I also had met a man while I was practicing outside one of the ski shops, he was an export. He was in the US military and was stationed in Germany. I quickly learned how to stop and how to turn. After about ten minutes I decided that I needed to adjust one of my ski boots. When I got up I realized that I was alone. With so many people trying to ski with each other it was easy to just assume someone else was skiing with the rookie. At this point I was falling a lot. I thought I was doing well until I almost flew off a cliff. Apparently in the Alps the skiers are so experienced that they don’t need a wide runaway or guard rails by huge deadly cliffs. After I recovered from my near death moment in my day, I turned to start skiing again. As I was skiing across the mountain, perpendicular to the angle of the mountain my left ski hit mogul. My ski went back to the left up the mountain and my body weight with my knee kept going the other way. I heard a snap and began to fall to the ground. With my leg twisted behind me I started to figure out what exactly happened. I was laying face down in the snow crying from the pain. Two Czech women stopped and asked if I need help, at this point I was begging for my ski to be taken off so I could straighten my leg. I pulled my knee up to my chest and continued lay still in the snow. The women waited with me for about ten minutes until two ski instructors skied by and stopped. The instructors stopped and asked what happened. I told them that I heard my knee snap and that I couldn’t continue to ski. After calling the snowmobile and waiting another ten minutes for the man to arrive. I decided I didn’t want to lay on the big yellow boat thing he was pulling behind him so, I climbed up on the snowmobile with help from one of the instructors. We drove down the mountain. At this point the girls realized that I was missing, some of them were going to go back up the mountain to look for me. We drove right up to everyone because they were standing near the first aid building. When everyone first saw me they laughed because they just assumed that I had just given up on skiing. I was even laughing until I got close, it was similar to the moment when you hurt but you don’t cry until you get to your mother. I started crying and immediately everyone freaked out. As I was sitting in the medical office I realized that the weight of the boot was pulling on my knee. The knee itself felt like it was hanging by a string that was going to pop any moment. After calling my mother and deciding I need to go to a hospital, I was placed in a wheelchair and pushed to the lift down the mountain. The wheelchair was bright orange so I was getting plenty of attention. Once down the mountain I decided I didn’t want to take an ambulance to the hospital because I knew it would cost a ton of money. I rode the city bus back down the mountain and then walked a mile or so back to the hotel. We called a cab and got a ride to the hospital. Within three minutes of being in the hospital and signed in, I was back in the emergency room getting a x-ray. After they knew my bones were okay they started jerking at my knee. The doctor twisted, pulled, and bent my knee. Then he told Melissa Swan, in German of course, that it was my ACL. He gave my some shots of Lovenox 40 mg to inject into my left thigh to prevent blood clots and a full leg splint. After leaving the hospital, I took the cab back to the bed and breakfast. Everyone was eating dinner and socializing when I got back. Of course I had to tell my story over and over but after a while the buzz died down.

Last Weekend: Zell am See

After thanksgiving we had one last weekend together before our finals and our flight home to Nashville. We had all decided early in the trip that we wanted to go together the last weekend. In the beginning we had wanted to go to Switzerland and go skiing. Knowing how expensive it was going to be and the fact that we couldn’t find a house where we could all stay together, we decided to stay in Austria. We went towards Salzburg and then got on another train towards Zell am See. It was a tiny town in the mountains. The first day we all just hung out in the different suites we had in the bed and breakfast. Other than walking to the grocery store to get food, we didn’t do much more than sit around and talk and play games. The teachers and sponsors made us dinner both nights and we all sat together in one tiny room. It was our last weekend together as a family, so we wanted to make the best of it.

Thanksgiving in Vienna

It was my first time being away from home for three months at a time. Not to mention being away on thanksgiving. I felt like I had grown a little from just being away on my own without my family but at the same time I felt like I was a kid again when I wanted to be home for thanksgiving. The president of Lipscomb came to observe our study aboard program. He was spending is thanksgiving break with us and he made plans for us to all go out to eat for a turkey meal. He took us to an “American” restaurant on the Tuesday before thanksgiving. It was similar to a thanksgiving feast but it was the classical American meal. We had mashed sweet potatoes and green peas with actually cranberries instead of sauce. The turkey was good but I missed my mom’s pumpkin pie. On Thursday, with President Lowry gone we were all fending for ourselves. A group of us decided to go to our favorite restaurant in Vienna, which was a tiny Thai place with the spiciest pad thai I have ever had. Instead of turkey I had chicken, instead of dressing I had thai noodles, instead of green beans I had onion sprouts, and instead of cranberries I had peanuts. After dinner we walked past a McDonalds and decided that a Mcflurry could replace our pumpkin pea for the night. We were together, which I learned, is all that matters. My Vienna family and I had our own type of Thanksgiving.

Backstreet Boys

As a group we were fun. We were like brothers and sisters. Every day when we were together as group, trying to keep us quiet and calm was definitely a challenge. One day before classes started Andy Pickle announced that the backstreet boys were coming to Bratislava in a couple weeks. We decided as a group that as Americans we had a duty to our culture to go support our beloved boy bands. We all got together and bought tickets as a group. There were about twenty of us who felt called to go. We all went out to eat at one of our favorite places by our hotel and caught a train out of the city. Once again we were Bratislava bound. I feel like anytime we go anywhere we go through Bratislava. I liked that the flights out of Bratislava were very cheap but I didn’t care for Bratislava itself. I felt like I was in a very scary country’s ghetto. It was kind of creepy and dirty feeling, but we all got over that for our childhood’s sake. I personally hadn’t seen them perform and I was very excited to see them. I had gotten a lot older and so had they. Brian, who of the four backstreet boys who put on the concert, brought his son out onto the stage because it was his birthday. They didn’t have anyone opening up for them so their show was pretty long. They sang and danced their hearts out for about two hours. They played a mixture of mostly old songs with just a couple new ones mixed in at the end. It was so funny to me that we were in some random country in Europe and we were in a tiny gym watching the backstreet boys. I know that ten years ago their concert would have been sold out and in the biggest possible arena. I had so much fun that night. We all jumped around, danced and sang to songs we had known since we were little children.

Italy, again?? Why not!

We had gone as I group to Italy, all 30 plus of us, but there were places that some of us still wanted to see. We wanted to go to Venice and Cinque Terre. That trip was going to include a lot of traveling. We took a train early in the morning to Cinque Terre. Come to find out that the name of the area meant the five cities. There on the Mediterranean coast of Italy where the mountains met the water, there are five little towns. The towns are separated by the mountains and the only way to get from one to another is either hiking the mountain or by train. As a group we decided to make enough time in our day to hike between two of the cities. It was a hot and sweaty two hour hike. But at the end was a beautiful beach with a little Italian restaurant waiting for us. We were by this time almost starved to death and quite dehydrated.

After eating we spent a couple hours acting like tourists and searching through the city looking for things to buy and then hung out on the beach. We walked to the train station where we almost missed the train. As we were running up to the platform my friend Jordan tripped and fell down the flight of stairs that we were racing up. She managed to save her ice cream and also to make it in time for the train. We arrived in the train station in Venice where a bus was waiting to take out of the city a bit to our hotel. Come to find out, the place was beautiful, even better than our hotel in Vienna. And we paid them the next morning to take us back into the city.

We spent the first part of our second day in Italy on one of Venice’s island. The island that we went to was where the hand blown glass that Venice is so famous for is made. I bought a plate and a vase for myself and my sister in law. At the glass blown museum they also had a glass blowing demonstration. The glass was absolutely beautiful and was made in less than a couple minutes with complete easy. I was so crazy about the talent and practice it must have taken to blow glass. Later that day the girls and I paid to go on a gondola ride with a man wearing a strapped shirt and a funny hat. It was expensive but since we all split the money it wasn’t too bad.

I had known that we were sacrificing time in each place by going to both places but I loved our weekend. Later that time after eating and spending the day in Venice it was time for us to leave and get on a night train and head back to Vienna. Every time we would leave some where I would miss it but I would always love to see Vienna again. It really became like home by the end of the trip.

Barcelona

We left Vienna Thursday after class. Rachel, Jordan, Andy, Kirk and I took a train to Bratislava. We were catching a plane to Barcelona. We spent the first night walking around the city, eating, and looking for good shopping places. Our hostel was in the center of the active part of the city. We stayed in a creepy, dirty place. I personally found a bug in the shower and under my covers in my bed. It was the scariest moment of the trip, and after Andy checked my bed for bugs for the third time I decided to sleep there anyway. The next morning, we got up and went to the Dunkin Doughnuts across the street. We decided Spain and America have one major thing in common. We both can’t survive without doughnuts. Thus we decided to start every morning in Barcelona with coffee and a chocolate cake doughnut. It was a good weekend.

We had heard from some of the girls that went to Barcelona over fall break that the bike tours were cheap and fun! So we decided that those were two great reasons that couldn’t be ignored. Our tour guide was Austrian and she had moved to Barcelona with her boyfriend. He was from Africa and was a singer. She took us all over the city. But I do want to say before I get start describing everything beautiful that I saw; that the phrase “it’s like riding a bike, you never forget” is very misleading. I had not ridden a bike since I was pretty young and I didn’t just hop on that huge bike without problems. Turning, stopping and not running into cars and buses were just the beginning of my struggles. If you add in getting started on the bike, the super crowded streets and trying to catch up to my tour guide you can image the difficulty that I had. Not to mention at all, the bruises on my back side for about a week. Thankfully halfway through the tour she stopped at the beach so we could have a break. I didn’t want to sit down at all. We all took silly pictures on the beach and had a coke break. Later we rode by Barcelona’s zoo, park, and where they had the world fair years previous. There were vendors and shops out on the street everywhere we rode. I got several of my gifts here in Barcelona.

At night we went shopping and out to eat. We walked along the big boardwalk and watched the performers and saw huge sand creations that people had made hoping for money. I saw a mermaid, the Simpsons and Santa Claus all made out of sand. It was fun to also walk around and talk to the people of Barcelona.

Sunday when we got out we only had a couple of hours in Barcelona before we had to catch a bus out of the city to the airport. So of course we started our day the way every day should be started, I believe I had a cinnamon and apple doughnut with a large water bottle. I was very sad to leave Barcelona; I had never had an American Indian shop, the beach and a Dunkin Doughnut right beside my hostel before. I didn’t even mention the beautifully warm weather or the fact that the whole city shuts down for a two hour nap time in the afternoon. I believe that the nap rule was in place because they all knew how much naps mean to me. I truly loved Barcelona.

Germany

The next weekend trip was to Germany. The first stop was Salzburg, Austria. Some of the girls and I wanted to go to the Sound of Music Tour. It was a three or four hour tour. After the tour we were going to catch a train to Munich, Germany.

The reason I had picked Germany that weekend right after the Fall Break was because there was so much I wanted to see. I wanted to see the Sound of Music Tour and I knew that if I took a trip longer away that weekend, that it wouldn’t be possible to do both. I also wanted to have a chance to go to tour a concentration camp, because I felt like it was a great opportunity and it was a big part of the history and culture experience. I choose Munich because Dachau was only an hour out of the city, Neuschwanstein castle was a couple hours away, and I could also squeeze in the Sound of Music Tour. As a result I didn’t get a chance to spend too much time in Munich itself. I personally did not care for Munich at all from what I saw. The city seems unsafe and dirty, where I was staying at least. In all the cities I had already seen, if I didn’t absolutely love it I could still find things that I liked or thought was pretty. Munich was a different experience though. The first night in Munich, Friday, after the Sound of Music Tour, the girls and I went to the subway to see where we could go to find something to do for the entertainment of the night. As we were talking about our oppositions, a man walked up and asked if we were Americans. Apparently, he and his friends were in the military and had come to Munich for a hockey game. I asked what game was so important. They told us that the US team was here playing Germany’s team. After the men walked away, we talked about grabbing food and going. We decided that we could at least check it out. The subway was packed. I was like everyone in Munich new a bug game was about to start but us. When we got to the stadium I went up and asked about tickets. They were only 20 euros for student tickets. We flashed our student traveler ids and were in. the game wasn’t packed but I had horrible seats. After about ten minutes we realized that seats right behind the US team were open. During a break, so it was obvious, we snuck down to the closest seats that we could see. The US team won, but the game was very close. They went into overtime and also into a sudden shot out. We went nuts when our country won and the national anthem started playing with our flag being dropped down above the ice. It was beautiful.

The next day we got up early to eat and head out to Dachau. We bought another subway pass and were on our way. Dachau was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis. They used it as a model for the others. I learned at it was a work camp while some others were used for just killing. The Nazis were killed the prisoners in Dachau also, but only for certain reasons. If prisoners could no longer work or obey, the rest died from starvation, malnutrition, and diseases. I could not make myself take photos. It was sickening just to be there. They had tons of information and I had paid for a head set that told me info while I walked the camp. It was about 20 degrees out and I could just imagine how the prisoners must have frozen without proper clothes and shelter. The camp was set up to show you the housing, work places and torturing. The camp was probably the saddest thing I saw during the whole three months.

The last day in Munich we took a train out into the country and went to see the Neuschwanstein castle and the beautiful mountains around it. We spent the whole entire day there. We hiked up to the mountain and took a tour. Later that night we ate at a little shop on the side of the mountain. The next morning we caught a train but to Vienna. It was a five hour train ride and we all had a German test the next day. We had a way for pushing off studying till the every end of the weekend. We all managed to always learn almost all of the 200 hundred words.

Dublin- Fall Break

Finally we had come to the last part of our almost two week trip. We had lived out of one backpack and reworn dirty clothes for a little too long. We flew out of Edinburgh and into Dublin. We stayed right down in the middle of the city. The streets surrounding our hostel were clean and safe but they were busy during all hours of the night and day. The area we were staying in was pretty touristy and had tons of shops and stores. I found that the people of Ireland were very very welcoming and nice. The first full day in Dublin half of the group (of nine girls) decided we wanted to take some kind of tour. We started asking around and found out about the viking tours. The tours were taken from different kind of perspective. The vikings lived among the celts but did not care for them at all. They had alot of their own seperate history and cultural things in Dublin. The tour was taking while in a big bus type vechical. What was neat about the vechical was that it was from World War One and was a special vechical that could go both on land and water. We took a tour around the city wearing viking helmets and growling at civilians but then later on the tour we drove into the water and began our waterway tour. I really enjoyed learning the history of the viking from their point of view and also with sooo much excitement and etertainment.

The next day was Hallloween. The girls and I had packed small items in out backpacks that help s transform into our characters. I was a mouse. I wore ears, a nose, a tail, and a pink bowtie. Some of the other girls were things like a cheerleader, a cat, a witch, a devil, and a princess. We had tried to get a couple little things that was could take that wouldnt take up too much room but also would be alot of fun! I was surprise at how decorated and dressed up the city of Dublin turnout to be. We all went to eat and shop around during the late afternoon and dinner time of the night. Later, We went into the main part of the city and walked the streets looking at everyone elses customs. The girls and I then decided to play a game. The games rules were as follows, get a partner, assign each partner either the opposite or the match to their custom. Then the first person to locate her assignment and take a picture with assignment won! The streets were crowded and we all split up into small groups to find our halloween patches.

The next day was shopping and traveling home to Vienna. Thankfully we flew out of Dublin and straight into Vienna. Every other plane took us to the airport in Slovockia which is about an hour trian ride away. After gettting into Vienna and settling down, the group came together and celebrated our safe travels and the good feeling it was to get back home to Vienna.