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