Random journal excerpts masquerading as a Blog entry:
Tuesday Sep. 4 - Finished the Bertrand Russell book last night, started the Merleau-Ponty book “Phenomenology of Perception” today. Much denser than Russell but so far fairly rewarding (still in the preface….hahahaha). This morning had German class, my skills are still coming back well. I am pleased about that. Went to an Italian place for lunch…there are absolutely LOADS of Italian places here. I had a pizza with bacon and corn on it. Not great cuisine but still pretty tasty. After that headed to the outreach center (LDS institute) and attended our “experiencing Vienna” class and the german conversation class. I’m not sure I’ll continue in the German convo class as I don’t really want to have a certain number of required hours of German to achieve a particular grade. Seems a bit oppressive. On the other hand, I do need the German practice and this would be a good way to make sure I do it, but hey, I am here partially to have a stress-free good time, right? Hmmmm…..
Dinner consisted of a fruit-yogurt drink and some bread with Liverwurst. Not bad fare for a few euros. We went to the Opera to get in line for the Barber of Seville but it wasn’t taking people for the standing room tonight. Private performance or some such nonsense. So we tried to find a plan “B”. I found one, and a darn good one if I may be so bold. We got lost a bit but finally found the concert house where we attended a performance of the Weiner Kammerphilharmonker. It was simply incredible. They performed a Mozart piece, a Mendelssohn piece and finished it off with Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7. Beethoven is amazing. He plays with emotions more than any other composer I’ve ever heard. I loved it. Got ahold of a schedule for the concert and some people that want to go fairly often so I’ll probably try to take advantage of that and continue to expand my knowledge of classical music.
We arrived in Bratislava at about 10:30 and I tried to feel out a decent group to visit the city with. I wound up with Andrew and some girls (with a 7 to 1 ration of girls to guys, we're always outnumbered). The group went to the Primate’s palace, which has nothing to do with monkeys or apes, and then split off for individual activities for 6 hours. Did I mention that it had been raining lightly all day? Well, once we split off, it started to get REAL nasty. Wind, rain, cold, the whole shebang. First stop was lunch, as we were all famished. We went to a Spanish (In Slovakia?) restaurant and I had rabbit. It was a total rip-off. The food wasn’t bad, but it cost waaaay more than advertised and wasn’t quite worth it. We visited a castle on the hill that was actually quite a letdown, as we really didn’t see anything of note except an 85-meter deep well.
We went into St. Martin’s church, where most of the big names in Hapsburg history were crowned and saw a few cool things in there. There was an area dug up with glass over it in which there were skeletons in the ground and a crypt with coffins and the like. Definitely worth the 25 crowns (roughly 1 dollar). We continued to slog through the rain, stopping in a lovely old orthodox church to dry off. The church was just starting a mass so we stayed and watched/listened for a while. It was very cool to see the mass in Slovakian and hear their sermon, service and prayers. One of the most enjoyable parts of the day.
Finally we wandered around, found a grocery store to use the last of our crowns (dinner was about 1/10th the price of lunch. Ouch.) and finally found a street car to take us back to the train station. At this point we were freezing, wet and exhausted. I crashed on the train, sleeping all the way back. Then it was merely a matter of David and I taking our usual 45-minute journey home, walking through the rain a bit and finally getting back to our nice little German house. Long day but well worth the effort!
Bratislava was cool. Much rougher than Vienna...lots of graffiti and a bit more run down. It was interesting but I think the next few trips (Salzburg, Budapest, Italy) will be much longer and more eventful.Today: Raining all day, very dreary. I am pretty much hanging out doing homework, reading philosophy books and using the internet at AAIE. I have history class at 2:00 and then perhaps the opera or something else amusing. I'll get some pictures up on here at some point...
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