Advent Markets and Snow at the Kartause!

The weekend after Budapest was a three-day weekend in which Advent Markets all around Europe were going on. Many people stayed back and took day trips around Austria using our special Austrian transportation discount cards (vorteils cards), since most people’s Eurail passes are expired.

Thursday was our first day of snowfall! That night was Thanksgiving dinner in the Mensa for all of us students! The mensa workers brought out a turkey with sparklers and everyone stood up singing the Star Spangled Banner (an age old tradition in the Austrian program). Everyone was dressed in their traditional Austrian dress, even the Kartause kids and families!

After dinner was the Thanksgiving ball – an instructor taught us traditional dance (similar to square dancing). We also saw Austrian folk dancers who performed a few schuhplattling dances which consist of patterned slapping of the body and shoes. If you look it up on YouTube you should be able to find a demonstration of it ;) It was SUCH a fun night!

Friday morning I slept in till 11:40… which is like the third time in my whole life that I’ve slept in that late. Didn’t really do anything the whole day. I procrastinated and ate leftover ice cream from Andrea’s birthday party and like four friends came to our room and we played Catch Phrase till dinner, and just hung out the rest of the night – looked at train schedules to Vienna for a day trip in the morning :)

Saturday morning, Andrea, Lydia and I woke up at 6 in order to start walking to the train station by 7 to catch an 8 o’clock train. We heard trains out of Gaming were still having troubles though, so we ate breakfast and just caught a bus right by the Kartause at 8:10 to Pochlarn and took a train from there to Vienna. The bus ride was absolutely gorgeous, there was maybe 5 inches or more of snow on the ground. Here's what we saw in the morning and during our walk to the bus stop:

The three of us just hung out in Vienna for the day and saw the Advent Market there :)

I've fallen in love with Bratwurst (the German name for the hot dogs in the above picture) since coming here! They are SO yummy with I think Dijon mustard... mm mm :)

We also saw some of the coolest street performers EVER! I tried uploading a video but it didn't work :/

And here we are riding back to the Kartause on the train :)

Sunday mass was at 10 at the Kartause like usual. At brunch after mass, we found out a group of students was going to Vienna to see a soccer game. We find out at 11:40 that they’re leaving at noon. We make a rush decision, and we rush to get ready to go.
Here we are walking to the train station:

Ohh trains. We've spent a looot of time on trains this semester :)

There was 10 of us going and we were supposed to get off at the Vienna station at 3:30 but we got delayed an hour, so we didn’t get in till 4:30 (and the game started at 4). Well turns out the game was an away game, so it wasn’t at the stadium we were supposed to be going to. Instead it was a good 30 minute subway ride away. If our train hadn’t been delayed we might have gotten there in time but we would have been an hour late if we had tried going then. So instead we went to the Advent Market (the second time for Andrea and I). It was snowing pretty hard and it was cold but we got to see the market at night with all the lights and this time I got a little treat so it was a little different than the day before :)

We caught the train back and had a snowball fight… in the train… we scooped snow from outside the window when the train was stopped… luckily there was no one else in the train, and it didn’t last long :P

It was snowing SO hard when we got back. We were able to hitch a ride back though which was such a blessing!

This whole week has been SO much fun! Tuesday was my last class of the semester and some of us walked around the Advent Market which has been AMAZING the whole week that it’s been going on. The Kartause has been bustling with people and half of the place is filled with shops and food stands which are lining our classrooms, hallways, and the courtyard outside and I’ve seen some of the cutest things for sale all semester!

We have about 11 or so LCI students from all over Europe who are studying here with us too and learning English. (LCI stands for Language and Catechetical Institute). They have been so fun to have with us and all of them are so sweet! They put on a play of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in English for us and it was so cute!

Wednesday night at 9pm our staff, professors, sisters and friars served us a hot American breakfast to celebrate the end of classes and to kick off “reading day” (a free day on Wednesday for studying before finals).

Tomorrow is my last final, and most of us leave at 3am on Thursday for home! We'll be having a bonfire at 9 and midnight mass at 12... in other words, we'll be up all night so hopefully we'll sleep on the plane and get over jet lag sooner.

Thanks for reading and hopefully you were able to experience a little of this amazing semester that I've been able to experience. I can't thank my family enough for such a beautiful opportunity to live and travel in Europe. If it wasn't for them and the God who created us, I wouldn't be the person I am today :) I owe it all to them! See you back in the States!