I'm Back...

I never got around to posting my “I’m Back” status on Facebook, but I am back. This is so weird to be typing what will be my last post from this “adventure” (unless I get the pictures from my class trip to Croatia and have to document some of that here). I have had what is undoubtedly the craziest, most fun, challenging, unique year of my entire 18 years of existence. I am still shocked to hear people speak English when I walk through the mall. I am still so confused by the fact that I can just call up my friends and family on a whim….and see them. I am still excited to see Reese’s on the grocery store shelves, and be able to buy literally anything I want to in my local Meijer!

Although I could never summarize year in a little paragraph I have some high points for you all.

·         I met and became like a LARGE family with a group of people from all over the world…who have couches I can sleep on: hence I have amazing new friends and places to stay/reason to travel all over the world!

·         I can speak another language, which is something I have always wanted to do.

·         Being able to travel to 11 (12 if you count airports) new countries!

And so much more, please just know that!

Although I am really excited and amazed at our country and all of its splendor, my family, and being around my friends once again I have to tell you that the whole reverse culture shock thing is all too real (still… almost a month later). In my first weeks back I pretty much ignored everyone I know by going on my church mission trip and working to meet new people, ducking into random buildings at the fair, and generally being a hermit. I was all too aware of how loud everybody here is, how much people here hug all over you, and how casually the normal American dresses for a day out. I am slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things, but I promise it might take a while.

So as I sit in “my room” here in the USA surrounded by the contents of the suitcase I cannot bring myself to unpack I am thinking about the great adventure which started one year ago today, all of the incredible friendships I gained this year, and how much I want to go back to Austria and at the same time explore the rest of the world. I am totally in between in my life. My friends have spread to the wind and away from each other. I recently went to the fair…without an animal to show. That was WEIRD! But I survived and   Although I am really not sure if I will ever be able to wear a tee-shirt out of the house ever again, or hear some music from my year without welling up in tears I know that I am SO GLAD that I took the leap and spent a year in Austria instead of doing what I was “supposed to” and I wouldn't have it any other way.

So that's it for now. I guess  I need to sign off. unpack my suitcases, and move forward with my life into more of the unknowns. Even though I know I will not be living as much of a day-to-day adventure, I am excited to see what is next in my life, excited to see what Central has in store for me as a business major, and terrified of what the future might hold; just as I was when I went to Austria and before the beginning of every. great. experience. ever. Here goes nothing...

Four Questions

Since I have been back and slowly readjusting myself to the world I am constantly being asked four things,

1.    How was your trip?

      2.  Are you happy to be back?

      3.   Can you speak German/do you get to test out of lots of college classes?

      4.   Were you homesick?

Let me shed some light on all of these questions

      1.  Which trip? One of my visits to Italy or German? Euro tour? Croatia? My year in Austria was NOT a trip. I went to school, lived with a family, and experienced everything you would in an entire year of life and overall it was INCREDIBLE and I feel so incredibly blessed to have been given the opportunity to go to Austria and live out a year of my life!

      2.   I feel conflicted at best. After a year away I have a whole group of people who are important to me that I did not have a year ago. I miss them A LOT! My friends and the people who acted as my family, both my host family and the other exchange students, are people who I feel missing in my everyday life.

      3.   Ja…. And nope. I worked on forming a functional use of the German language and maybe skipped some of the grammatical subtleties to study German at a higher level and filled in my gaps with dialect. I could go on all day about how our system of learning a language in American is fundamentally flawed, but that is a topic for another day.

      4.  The simple answer is no. See number 3. The group of support people I had in Austria was beyond incredible and I was often so busy I did not have time to be homesick.

Now that you have all of those answers I would LOVE to talk to you about how the culture differs from our own, how the food was, what my daily life was like etc… Excuse my sassiness, but I just needed to put that out into the universe. I hope you don’t all hate me now…

One Moment Of Courage

One quote that really speaks to me is from the unlikely source of a children's movie; We Bought A Zoo and it is, 
      "You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally             twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will           come of it."

Now let me tell you about how I came to be an exchange student. I know my outbound coordinator through my church and one day she came up to me and asked if I wanted to be an exchange student, I laughed in her face. Another Sunday about two years later she asked again if I would like to be an exchange student, this time I said yes and never gave it a second thought. I quickly started filling out the paperwork and emailed my parents a copy of a powerpoint of the program; at which point my mom just kept telling me what a "interesting idea" it was until she realized I was sure this is what I wanted. Then a few months later I went to the interviews. A few days later I got a call saying I had been accepted into the program. A few months after that I received news that I would be going to Austria. Another few months later I told my parents I didn't want to hang out in the airport and got in the security line to get on the plane to my new life.  

Now its 10 months after I got on the plane and I have barely ever regretted the decision for more than 5 minutes at a time. 20 seconds of insane courage has led to on of the best experiences of my lifetime (so far) and I cannot wait to see what other kinds of crazy opportunities I can take advantage of if I lose my fear for a meager 20 seconds. 

Euro Tour Rewind

As many of you know I just returned from a 16 day, whirlwind tour through Europe. I saw the Eifel Tour light up at night from a boat on the Seine River, I enjoyed a Belgian Waffle while strolling past the famous Mannekin Pis statue, I took cheesy tourist photos pushing over the leaning tour of Pisa, and I didn’t feel like any of it was real.

My parents are wonderful people with lots of life experiences, but neither of them has been outside North America. All of my friends spend their days working their butts off in their last moments in High School or the first moments of college. My best friend at home works two almost full time jobs. I can’t help but remember that things like this don’t happen to normal people like me. So while I drove through the countryside of Andorra, stood by the Harbor in Monte Carlo, and spent my day shopping through the famous Gallerie Lafayette in Paris my camera shutter snapped by the reality of what was happening never really clicked.

I was going to write some obnoxious post detailing my tour and everything we did, but the recount of events and meals will never be able to describe how surreal this whole experience was and how blessed I feel to have had the opportunity to travel around Europe with 90 of my  friends, family members. Instead of some cheesy vacation breakdown I will say this; We laughed. We cried. We didn’t sleep very much (some days 5:30 or 6:00 was time to LOAD THE BUS). We ate some incredible food. We ate some pretty bad food. We saw some of the most incredible and recognizable sights in Europe. We visited some countries that I barely knew existed. WE LIVED!

Words can hardly begin to describe the way I feel sitting in my room after this world wind trip, but I do know that as I exited out bus for the last time at the very familiar Linz Banhof it did not feel like another stop on the tour, or a different vacation; but instead I felt relieved. I was home, and now the thought of coming back to Michigan is almost as daunting as the thought of getting on a plane to Austria ever was. 

Fangirling in German: How I figured it out

So I have been really bad at this whole "blogging" thing and I am sorry, but not that much. Through my series of tongue out selfies and quirky posts I think you can figure out what I have been up to! Today I want to give you a really honest blog post, i would really appreciate if you would just read it. Tonight I did something abnormal for me.... I went to a movie with Austrian friends, and it was in German. These are two things that kind of intimidated me for a long time.

Now let me explain some things to you. First: As an exchange student in Austria the general trend is that it is really hard to make friends and do things with them. My classmates are very  nice, but they are so stressed out with studying and school work that they have little time left.
Second: The movie being in German would seem normal but as there is a theater in my town that shows movies in their "original language" (usually English) I like to do that. My life is so filled with German that I find it refreshing to see a movie in English sometimes. I also have spent the last eight months telling myself that movies in German give me a headache, or that I don't really understand and before today had only seen 2 movies in the theater that were not in English and I did struggle. Third: I am sometimes so intimidated about hanging out with Austrian friends because I feel like my German is not good enough to really talk to them. I don't want to be "the stupid American" and make everyone speak in English to me, so instead I chose to mostly listen....for almost eight months. I let this worry and anxiety have way too much over my life for WAY too long.

Tonight however, on the third night of my spring break, I went to see Insurgent with 3 of my school friends and we had an amazing time (or at least I did...) We laughed, joked, and just hung out. It was so great. I always told myself I couldn't watch, understand, or enjoy movies in German, but today I laughed and I cried (at the appropriate times). I understood what was happening and walked away not with a headache, but feeling invigorated and revitalized. I am so proud that I finally realized that my German is at a point where I can understand almost every word in a dialogue heavy movie. I never though this would happen. When we walked out of the movie I was even able to fangirl "auf Deutsch" with one of my friends about the movie, how it was not like the book, how cute the actors were, and how excited/nervous we are for the next movie. Until today I didn't know I could do that! By trying again to do some things I find genuinely scary I had one of my best nights in Austria so far.

So the point of this post I guess is to say that I finally feel like something is really happening.  I have enjoyed traveling, meeting new people, and having tons of new experiences. I spend a lot of my time here thinking I cannot speak German, have no social life, and wonder sometimes what I will take back from my exchange; but today I had my epiphany. When you decide that you want to do something, you can. When you really feel excited it is acceptable to use grunts and hand motions mixed in with and instead of words, and that is a great way to communicate, and you don't even have to feel like an idiot. Sometimes you just have to try not harder, but more.Even if something doesn't work out the first time, that doesn't mean it wont the second, third, tenth....  I spent many years in FFA working to get "outside of my comfort zone" but I can honestly say that nothing in English is really uncomfortable to me, but living my life in a new language and culture is defiantly a challenge. I remembered today that it is ok to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy because life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

(just for you mom!)

Now I am not claiming that everything will be perfect now, or my year has just been permanently changed, but as my exchange winds to a close I hope that I can remember these little lessons I learned and try to live my life without (or with less)  fear so that I can have many more great memories!

PSA: please forgive my English here and when we talk next in person, although my German is better and better my English is not benefiting from my exchange and my spell check can only do so much!

Doch and Other Deutsch

(you will probably never use any of this, fair warning)

Today I want to talk a little about German, i.e. the language they speak in Austria (in case you didn't already know that). I would now definitely consider myself mostly conversational in German, but it did not come easy.... at all. With four versions of "the" and "a", lots of conjugations for everything, and plenty of vocabulary learning; German is definitely a process. I took two years of German in lower high school and would happily credit that with teaching me how to count, color names, some basic conjugation if a piece of paper is included, and various other tidbits that honestly did not help me that much (sorry). When I came to Austria we had an intensive two week language course which really laid the foundation for my German skills but every day I am still learning. Some interesting things I have learned about German are as follows.

There is not a specific word for "do". You can make something (Machen) but you CAN NOT simply "do" it.

For every word you have to conjugate forms for "ich, du, er/sie/es, wir, ihr, Sie/sie" aka "I, you, he/she/it, we, they all, and formal You" but here is where this gets bad.... all of these words and conjugations change for "Dativ" and "akusitive" which I am not going to get into because I promise it will give you a headache, but trust me on this one (or just google it).

There are lots of quirks and struggles with "Hoch Deutsch" or normal German but here in Austria the dialect is really different. While I usually speak Hoch Deutsch with my host family, teachers, and friends I have obviously picked up some Austrian Dialect (but only for my city, every place has a different dialect and it is so difficult even for the Austrians to understand sometimes). My dialect here in Linz is called Muhlviertel, by the way (I'm pretty sure). So here are a few examples of why dialect is hard having learned only "Hoch Deutsch" in school and language camp.

(HD=Hoch Deutsch, AD=Austrian Dialect)

Laufen

HD-Walking

AD-Running (there is not dialect word for walking, they just use "gehen" which means "going")

HD-Ja

AD-Jo

HD-nein

AD-nahhhh

January

HD-Januar

AD-Janner

HD-Ich habe

AD-I hob

HD-Guten Tag

AD-Gruß Gott/Gruß die/Gruß Euch (again conjugations)

HD-Auf Wiedersehen

AD-Wierderschon

(a different goodbye, by the way it is really common to say goodbye in at least 2 ways)

AD-Pfiat di!

Now if you don’t feel comfortable with the German language after spending 5 minutes reading my blog post, don't worry. Almost everybody I've met here speaks English. For the first couple of months here everybody always tried to speak to me in English and I did (and still do....) find great joy in answering them in German. It is such a cool feeling every time I can tell someone what a word is in English or answer or question randomly, or really participate in a conversation. I really like it.

Now that I have done some bragging about my German I feel much need to tell you some of my biggest German mistakes (so far).

Every time my host mother hung up the phone she would say, "tchuss Pfiat di" (pronounced chuice feetde). I thought she was saying Tchuss vertig. (fertig)Vertig means "finished". I literally thought she was announcing on the phone that she was finished....OOPS!

This is the best one....

I was sending an email to my counselor about transferring money and I kept writing "putzen" which I thought was a coverall term for put.... It’s not. "Puzten" means to clean. I almost emailed my counselor asking him to clean the money into my account. Good thing I had my host mother check that, although I'm not sure I will ever live that down.

One last thing I learned about the German Language is "doch" and to be fair I have been here for seven months and I am still unsure how to use that correctly in context, so don't worry about it ;)

I hope my bits of German knowledge were helpful for you or at least interesting (I’m assuming if it wasn’t you would not have read this far!) Thanks for reading and get ready because more Austrian culture stuff will be on a blog near you (mine) soon!

50 Random facts About Austria

For the average, relatively smart American 4 things come to mind when they think of Austria. Mozart, The Sound Of Music, Arnold Schwartzeneger, and Wolfgang Puck. Although Austria is a relatively small country it is unique and full of culture. So without further adieu here is a list of 50 facts about Austria.  

1) The population is 8,572,895 (2014 estimate). 

2) The average birthdate. Is 1.44 children per woman. 

3) The life expectancy for men is 78.5, 83.6 for women. 

4) The literacy rate is 98%

5) There population consists of appx. 9.8%illegal immigrants (estimated)

6) The minority populations are Carinthian Sloves, Croats, and Hungarians. 

7) 88% of the population is German speaking. 

8) 73% of the people are Roman Catholic. 

9) 1/4 of Austrias total population lives in Vienna. 

10) Austrias Großglockner Mountain (3798 m.) is Europes second tallest. 

11) The voting age is 16. 

12) The drinking age is 16 (18 for the "hard stuff") 

13) The driving age is 18. 

14) Austria is completely landlocked. 

15) 2/3 of Austria is 500m. or more above sea level. 

16) Austria is home to 20 Nobel Prize Laureates. 

17) Linz (my city) is Austrias 3rd largest. 

18) Austria has a national healthcare system.

19) 62% of Austria is covered by the Alps.  

20) Austrias flag is one of the oldest, dating to 1191. 

21) There are cities in Austria called Egg, Rottenegg, Rum, and even Fucking. 

22) The oldest zoo in the world is Tiergarten Schönbrun (1752)

23) The first postcards sent were in Austria. 

24) Rebull is based in Austria. 

25) Alpine Skiing is Austrias most popular sport. 

26) Many roads and sidewalks are made of cobblestone. 

27) City blocks are not square because the cities were not planned out (for the most part).

28) Austrians use 24 hour time. 

29) Woodstoves are a common way of heating houses. 

30) People from Vienna are called "Wieners" 

31) Students pay little more than the cost of living for university. 

32) Public transport is everywhere, and widely used. 

33) When a teacher enters the classroom all of the students stand. 

34) The handwriting style here is so different that it is almost as difficult as reading a different alphabet.

35) You have to pay for grocery bags in the store. 

36) Riding in the car here is terrifying due to fast speed and sudden turns, but I think it is actually really safe (no matter how it feels...)

37) Wet clothes are hung up to dry since most people here don't use dryers. 

38) There are no "superstores" that sell everything from eggs to hammers. Each store has a specialty.  

39) Food here is cheap but everything else is expensive. 

40) The relationship between Germany and Austria is like that of The USA and Canada. 

41) Nudity on TV, in advertisements, and even in public is pretty widely accepted. 

42) American CSI is similar to Soko Donau. 

43) Their crime shows (and real life interactions) are significantly less violent than ours. 

44) It rains here..... ALL THE TIME (including right now....)

45) You should drink something hot in the morning, or people might worry. 

46) When you go visit someone in their home, they will most likely offer you house shoes to wear. 

47) When people talk about the weather here they genuinely care, it's not just small talk. 

48) People open the windows year round (for short time periods) because they want fresh air (and to freeze us). 

49) Hiking is arguably the most popular pastime of Austrians. 

50) Some people even have special hats for the occasion. 

 To make up for my lack of blogs throughout this year so far Iam starting a new project. This post is the first in a series of many posts in which I will discuss some real aspects of Austrian culture, mentality, and everyday life. I hope through this project you can learn more about the "real Austria" than a Wikipedia article. 

*demographic information from statistic.at

Stuck

My experiences here recently have been some of the most authentic and incredible experiences of my exchange so far. With so much to process I am having a bit of a hard time forming coherent thoughts that really justify how lucky I feel to be living this experience. For now I will stick to the facts. For Christmas there are real candles on the trees. My host family is full of wonderful generous people. Inarguably this was one of the best Christmases I have ever had, and by far the best Christmas I have ever celebrated outside of the USA. Munich New Years fireworks are extrememely beautiful and also dangerously lit off by super drunk people resulting in the possibility of a head injury (but not for me luckily), it was definatly a once in a lifetime experience (because I already risked head injury once....). My time here is limited. I. Have already been here 5 months (that's almost 1/2 way!!!!) and I am going to try and enjoy every second of it! 

So I hope you are not too disappointed in my post or lack thereof.... I promise once my brain begins to function (in English) I will post something with more than surface value. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for all of your support of me in this year and always!

(My host family and me by the Christmas tree, or "Weihnachtsbäume"