Austria

christina says our days of sun are almost over. we have had frighteningly beautiful weather. at least it lasted through our weekend of adventuring. this has been like a tiny preparation for the long haul we will embark on at the end of the month, and it makes me a little nervous about our stamina.

thursday night we got in and saw a play, pool (kein wasser), which is actually an american play (by mark ravenhill) but was of course in german. watching a play in a language you don't understand is exhausting. my german comprehension is improving by wee bits. i am much better than christina, anyway. however, nowhere near enough to watch a play. every 15 minutes, if i'm lucky, i will have a flash of understanding. then it's all gone again.

leonie and joel were taking the toefl on friday, so we spent pretty much the whole day on our own. we found our way to schloss schonbrunn, which is the hapsburg hunting-lodge-cum-palace where mozart gave his first public performance at six (the age, not the time). the palace was very nice, the grounds outside beautiful. stunning shrubbery. we walked a lot. the gardens were huge and we only saw a bit of them, in hours. then we went back to the city, wandered around, found the stadttempel -- the only synagogue in vienna to survive kristallnacht -- and the jewish district, and then found our way to the restaurant where we were supposed to meet up with leonie and joel. there, we had wienerschnitzel, which is not anything like i expected it to be, but pretty good. afterwards we saw another play in german. i don't know if i can see too many more plays in german, especially if i'm not familiar with them. and then we hung around until our train to munich came at 11pm.

slept badly on the train (not a sleeper train) and got in to munich around 6:30. leonie's dad picked us up and we drove to the countryside, had breakfast, and then joel, christina and i hung out in the garden most of the day, reading and napping. eventually we walked to the biergarten where leonie works to visit her. she lives in a little bavarian town in the bavarian countryside, the name's uberschweinsomething, something that means "waiterpiglittlestream" and is apparently funny in german, too. we had some beer and fried strawberries and after she got off work we watched grease. i had forgotten how bad it is. it's bad.

today christina and i went to munich; leonie stayed at her parents' to work some more, joel came back to augsburg. our attention spans had begun to wane. we did lots more walking; munich has the biggest municipal park in all of europe, bigger than hyde park and central park. it was great. made me want to go to school in munich and have picnics in the park. saw some churches, ate korean food, and then gave up and came home (40 minute train ride back to augsburg). so my point is, we will theoretically be doing that x 14 in a few weeks and we were exhausted after just two days of it. hm.