Ich hab' gerockt!

After a few weeks back in Vienna it's time to be a tourist again.  This weekend, our program is heading to Prague for some sightseeing.  We'll be touring with the group and my friends and I will be meeting up with some other Americans studying abroad in the city.  We'll also get the chance to practice a little currency exchange outside the Euro Zone.

As I was prepping and packing, I realized that I hadn't posted a blog in a while that actually informed anyone of what I've been up to.  So here it is in a nutshell...

As amusing as it may sound, the hardest thing to deal with since I've been abroad (or one of the hardest) is learning how to deal with all the spare time we have.  While American university courses, like mine back home, usually meet two or three times a week for at least three hours a week, all the classes in Vienna meet only once a week for between one and two hours.  That being the case, the workload from day to day is a lot less strenuous and leaves a lot of time open to potential boredom.  Even in Schwäbisch Hall we could count on having class for four-and-a-half hours a day five days a week to keep us busy.

That means that in Vienna it's up to us to make our own fun.  I've heard a lot of other people complaining about how much time they're spending in their rooms and I've run into the same issue.  Vienna feels dangerously close to normal and all the boredom that implies.  Of course, I've been able to keep myself busy reading, working on my country, and working with the kids at the school where I teach English; my friends and I go out a few times a week to check out different bars and cafés, but all this downtime can still get to you.

Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't things to do in Vienna or that I am bored.  I am by no means bored.  Last week my friends and I took advantage of the vast art museum complex by going to see a Matthew Barney film called Drawing Restraint 9, which was really quite weird but not abstract enough at all... I was disappointed to find that it had a plot, of all things.  Still, it was worth seeing, if only to experience the strange abstract mood that inevitably followed.

My friend, Rachel, is also a very big fan of the movie The Third Man, which takes place in Vienna.  As it turns out, there's quite a lot of things in Vienna to do related to the movie.  For starters, we went to a museum that houses the personal collection of a man who is obsessed with the film.  We saw basically every kind of memorabilia related to the movie, and even watched a minute and a half of the film on an gigantic, rattling, old film projector from the 1940's.  It was very cool.  We also took a tour of all the filming locations in Vienna and got to see a lot of the city we hadn't seen before.  Finally, we saw the movie at the Burg Kino (cinema), which plays the movie a few times every week.  It was nice to find that I could understand even more, if not most, of the untranslated German than I did the last time I watched it in February.

A few friends and I have also been checking out the music scene in Vienna.  The weekend before last, we went to the arena to see a bunch of local bands.  At first we were disappointed, when the first three bands were middle or high school age and played mostly emo music, all in English, but were vindicated when the fourth band came out with long hair and a keyboard.  The show turned out to be very good with a lot of different styles, and all of whom sang in German, which was too difficult to understand, but more authentic.  There was even a "chick rock" band that only had drums, bass, vocals, and keyboard.  They were very good.

I went back with some of those same friends this past Monday to see a rock band from back home, Coheed & Cambria.  Their opening band was excellent, with a drummer who was nothing if not fierce.  It really made me miss playing music and being in a band.  Coheed themselves were as awesome as I expected them to be... possibly more awesome than the first time I saw them.  The highlights included a cover of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" in the middle of one of their songs and a 20-minute instrumental solo in the middle of the encore song, "Welcome Home."  The 5-minutes or so of the drum solo was just mind-blowing, making me glad Chris Pennie left Dillenger to play for Coheed.  And, of course, Claudio Sanchez, the lead singer/guitarist, played guitar with some part of his face and even played the theremin, both with his hands and with his hair (see the picture below)!

Claudio playing the theremin.  We were front and center!

I also uploaded a whole lot of pictures from spring break to Facebook.  You can see them under my photography section.  That's all for now.  A lot has been going on and I'm sure I'll think of more to write soon, but for now I'm off to Prague.  Tune in next time to see what happens!