Why Austria?

I'm not really sure how it's possible, but it's officially been over a year since I got back from Austria.  I mean, I understand the concept of time and whatnot (I'm not a total nimrod) but I just can't believe it's been a year.  More than a year, actually.  And since I get all reminisce-y around the anniversaries of my trips to Austria, I decided to write about why I love it there.  As far as I can remember, I've not actually written about this so I'm going to now.

None of this would ever have happened were it not for a friend of mine, Megan (or as I liked to call her, Wendy).  She worked at my family's bakery and was a sort of host for a group of Austrian students  that were studying abroad here in Omaha.  She mentioned that she was going bowling with them that night and asked if I wanted to come.  I said sure, and ended up going and having a spectacular time.  So spectacular, in fact, that I ended up hanging out with this group quite a few more times over the next couple weeks until they left.  (I would also like to take the time to say that I absolutely did NOT partake in any illegal activities and didn't drink any alcohol at all because I was not yet 21 and that would be ILLEGAL.  I would never have done that. *cough*)  Aaaaanyway, moving on.

I remember a few things specifically about this time - mostly at first that I had a vague idea where Austria was but I really knew nothing about it.  I remember going home after the first night out bowling and googling the country and reading up on all of this.  And then I remember telling one of my friends about what I'd learned which, apparently, amounted to the fact that Austria looks like a chicken drumstick.  I guess this was mildly offensive as my friend retorted back with, "Well...the United States looks like a steak!", which is totally true.

United Steaks of America.  Bahahahahaha

Please, tell me that Austria doesn't look like a chicken drumstick.  Seriously.

Aside from the various foods that these two countries resemble, the other big way that I was almost immediately impacted was my choice of language at college.  For some reason (probably because I'm really, really weird) I had decided that I was going to study Latin at college.  It was actually a logical choice as I, at the time, wanted to go on to law school and thought having a background in Latin would be beneficial.  And then I met the Austrians and they told me I was being absolutely absurd and that obviously, German was the far better language to study.  I guess I must have been really impressionable because I ended up switching my language at school to German.  My professor ended up being Austrian, which was awesome; and she was my favorite professor in college.  In the end, my not taking Latin worked out as I ended up not going to law school and really having absolutely no use for the language.

After studying German for a semester and doing better in that class than any class I've ever taken (I'm pretty sure I had a 98% for the class), I decided to study abroad in Vienna the summer between freshman and sophomore year.  Of course, that ended up not working out after I had a totally crazy professor that taught everything wrong (and it's not just me exaggerating either! I've told my native speaker friends what he said and basically their reaction is to say that he's a total moron) and also wore really baggy sweaters and glasses that made his eyeballs look 17 times larger than they actually were so that he looked like an overgrown Dobby.  Totally not kidding.

He looked exactly like this except with smaller ears, glasses, and pants.

Since my second semester German professor kind of destroyed my enthusiasm for Truman's German program (and also, as it turns out, I needed money to make it through the next year of school) I ended up staying in America and working all summer - still one of the biggest regrets I have.  (If you are in college and thinking about studying abroad, FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.  You won't regret it.)

Eventually, after two and a half more years of college and getting my degree, I had the time during what would have been my last semester to kill before I got married.  As I was pretty much just hanging out in Kirksville, working, and doing more than my fair share of drinking (this time legally, thankyouverymuch) I had a discussion with my darling husband (who at this point was my darling fiancé) the fall before I went and told him that I wanted to visit Austria and I didn't know when I'd have this opportunity again and that it was really, really important to me.  As much as he really didn't like the idea of me travelling to a foreign country alone to see a bunch of people he'd never met, he conceded when he saw how important it was to me.

Aside from the fact that I was desperately thirsty when I landed and they apparently don't believe in water fountains in Austria, I was pretty much convinced as soon as we left the airport and got into the city that I was born on the wrong continent.  Maybe it's just me, but Vienna is spectacular.  I was there for five days, got the stomach flu, spent two and a half hours walking from the place I was staying to the city center when it should have taken me fifteen minutes, got lost on the subway and ended up taking six flights of stairs in one station not realizing that there was an elevator for a reason, and was there for the coldest part of the year and I wouldn't trade that trip for anything.  There's obviously something to be said for the fact that I was visiting people I hadn't seen in 4 years and their company was fantastic, but the city itself is magical.  I stood in a room that both Napoleon and Mozart had been in - which is in the palace where Maria Antonia, or Marie Antoinette as she's more commonly known, grew up.  I ate at a cafe Freud and many of his contemporaries frequented.  I stood on the Heldenplatz, which is where Hitler announced he was taking over Austria and then, fifty years later, Pope John Paul II gave a speech about peace.  It's kind of unreal to think about.  Obviously all of Europe has an incredible history, but Austria's history is especially fascinating to me.  It doesn't hurt that the city is beautiful - even in the dead of winter.

I'm probably the pickiest eater of all time, especially given that I'm 24 (there are two year olds who are more adventurous eaters than I am), and I have yet to find fault with the food there.  One of the things that I love about the food in Austria (but that applies to Europe as a whole) is that there are strict regulations about what you can put in food as far as food colorings and preservatives.  One of my favorite examples is that they actually have to make Oreos differently for Europe than they do for America because the processed crap that they load the Oreos with here won't meet the standards that EU has in place.  Everything there is much, much healthier than what we eat here.  Also, much more delicious.  Even my personal favorite thing that I've eaten there (and probably just ever, only excluding V. Mertz's pepper steak), Käsekrainer.  It's basically a giant hotdog (but better, because it's Austrian) filled with bits of cheese that melt when you cook it so that when you bite into it, the cheese melts into your mouth and there are approximately NO WORDS for how delicious it is.  We have something vaguely similar in America, I think, but it doesn't hold a candle to the deliciousness of the Käsekrainer.  Aaaand I am officially the only person in the world who would go from writing about being impressed by the incredible history of a country to writing about why their hotdogs are so much better than America's.  Yikes.

Maybe I'm crazy, but when I'm in Austria I never want to leave and when I leave I only want to think about when I get to go back.  For as much as I've written, there really are no words to describe how I feel about Vienna, and by association, the rest of the country.  It's a country like none other and if you ever get a chance to visit, absolutely go. :)