Last Wednesday was orientation day which was extremely boring. An Interactive House Meeting involved a tour of campus which explained important stuff that we just need to know I guess. A funny fact about Austria is their recycling/trash system. Instead of having one garbage can for trash and another for recycle, the Austrians have between five and seven “rubbish” cans as they call them: bio-degradable, glass, metal, paper, plastic/packing materials and “problem” trash. So because of this intense recycling system, we now have five trash cans in our room, and I swear everything that I need to dispose of stresses me out because I need to think about what trash can to put it in. And the descriptions are not very straight forward either, for instance bio-degradable includes not only grass, weeds, flowers and food but also cigarette butts and ashes, and coffee filters and tea bags. Glass includes wine or liquor bottles but not porcelain, mirrors, or window glass. Ha you can imagine that this would take some time to get used to! Another thing, bed bugs are a problem. They advise us to wash all our clothes after returning from traveling since hostelling sometimes means bringing all sorts of foreign little creatures back to school. Apparently last year it was a problem... so everyone went back to their rooms a little anxious about sleeping in their beds!

Here is our dorm room.

Thursday and Friday were our first two days of classes. Often if a weekend involves a Monday, those Monday classes switch to Friday. So since Monday we didn’t have class, we did on Friday. I’m taking Philosophy of the Human Person and Foundations of Ethics both with Dr. Harold who has the same game plan for both classes so that makes it a little easier. Dr. Asci teaches Christian Moral Principles and he’s been teaching in Austria for 13 years, and I can definitely tell he’s going to be a good professor! My fourth class is Nursing from Concepts to Practice taught by Fr. Nick. Fr. Nick teaches the class from Steubenville though so we’re taught over telecom – at first it was weird not having the professor there, and dealing with the fact that technology problems could mean class cancellation. :P This class is different than the others also that it’s our only nursing class, but it’s also three hours long twice a week and we’ll be done with the class by November 4. Fr. Nick is hilarious though and three hours goes by so fast! Pressure is on because anything lower than an 80 in a nursing class is a C- which is not an acceptable grade :O

Trip to Melk and Dürnstein

On Tuesday morning we woke up around 7:00, had breakfast in the mensa (cafeteria). At 8:30 the buses left for Melk and at 10:00 we celebrated a Franciscan mass at the Melk monastery cathedral which as you can see, is absolutely amazing!

On all school planned trips, we always begin our day with mass in the church located in the town/city we are visiting – the mass is celebrated in these churches by our own Franciscan friars, our choir, lectors etc. It really is an amazing experience especially because these churches are some of the oldest and most gorgeous churches in the world! At approx 11 o’clock we were given a tour of the Melk monastery. Our tour guide was fantastic! She was 19 years old and a graduate of the high school at Melk monastery, and she definitely knew her stuff. At 12:30pm we ate lunch paid by the university – in other words, we paid for it, but we have the glory of not having to pay the bill at that moment :P At 2:00 we left Melk and headed to Dürnstein. Some history about Dürnstein: there are approx 1,000 inhabitants, it is considered the most romantic town in the lower valley of Austria and the most visited town along the Danube River. It is also known for its grapes and apricots. It is considered the most romantic town because of its many wine shops and location near the beautiful Danube River. King Richard the Lionheart was also held captive here during... ? First we walked to the ruins of the battle fought there – it was a steep walk up the hill but totally worth it!

On the way down, I was with Sarah and my friend Lydia and we just spent a relaxing time walking in town and exploring the shops :) We soon ran into some more friends who had ice cream! Ah! And the best part was it cost a euro a scoop. I was so happy with my ice cream! Note: I’m more than positive, about 60% of that happiness was from the fact it was such a great price ;) Before the buses left at 5:30, most of the students just played around in the river!

After a fantastic week in Ireland, we caught the Dublin city bus to the airport on 8/23 and Sarah and I said goodbye to Andrea till we would meet again in Austria! We caught our 9:10pm flight to London and arrived late. Initially Sarah and I were thinking to stay inside security and pick up our bags from left luggage in the morning before our 7:40 flight, but that decision wasn’t apparently ours to make since we suddenly found ourselves outside security and therefore unable to go back in. We quickly made our way through London’s huge airport in order to get our luggage before they closed at 11 o’clock. It was a pretty long and tiring excursion to British Airways’ check in, we were doing a lot of running and sweating, but we were thankful to avoid running through the airport, during the morning rush before our 7:40 flight. At this point the airport was basically empty and we found a corner with a row of chairs and about five other people sleeping in the airport for the night as well.

We met two nice guys from Detroit, Michigan who were headed back to the States in the morning. We set up camp and actually got about 3 ½ hours of sleep… not bad for sleeping in the airport. We had some trouble falling asleep at first and were a little paranoid about our luggage but at least our most valuable stuff was secure to our bodies. Our American friends were planning to stay awake all night, but we woke up at 5am to them sleeping :P When we arrived in Vienna, we met a huge group of Franciscan students and hopped on our two hour bus to Gaming. I can’t even describe the feeling of getting to the Kartause, this was going to be our home for the next three months. We found our room on the third floor, room 307. We made sure to get to bed at a decent time since tomorrow we were getting up early to visit Melk Abbey and Dürnstein not too far from Gaming in Austria.

Grüss Gott!

Grüss gott is German greeting. I’ve been in Europe for a little over a week now and it’s incredible how much I have to tell already! I spent a week in Ireland with my roommates Andrea and Sarah and arrived in Austria on August 22.

A little overview, I’m located in Gaming, Austria – a small town two hours from Vienna. Franciscan University has a campus in a former monastery called the Kartause Maria Thron which housed Carthusian monks who lived there for over 400 years. It serves as our home base. The Kartause is a hotel during summer months and was the first functioning hospital in Europe. We follow a four-day class schedule that includes courses such as history, theology, art history, foreign language, and philosophy. We get the weekends to travel and there are school planned trips such as those to Salzburg, Munich, Poland, Rome and Assisi, and Lourdes.

I'll begin by talking about our time in Austria so far, and talk about Ireland later, since I'm already behind!