I'm in Vienna. The city is awesome in a totally other way than Berlin. Where in Berlin there were big grey apartment blocks, tons of recent history, graffiti, baller clubs and shitty weather, there is in Vienna baroque architecture, windy cobblestone streets, quaint little pubs where I can hardly understand the bartender - the dialect is so different - and the first signs of spring. It's a nice about-face.
And on that note, with Vienna has come a truckload of homework. I'm taking classes at the University of Vienna, in German, which have brought my workload back up to the liberal arts norm, i.e., only four hours of class a week but as a counter to that 300 pages of reading. It's more than I did in Berlin hands down, but it's also nice to really feel like a student and be in a university environment again with smart young people. Besides the university courses I've also got to take two courses at the Amerika-Institut, which require not only tons of reading but also going to the theater or visiting museums, which is a mixed blessing; it's cool to see all that stuff, but sometimes not when it kills 6 hours of your week's free time.
I went to Prague the weekend before this last one, which was quite cool, although I have to say the sheer volume of tourists there is borderline intolerable, and is probably worse during the summer. THAT is a beautiful city, good lord. I love the spiky towers and the way it's built into the topography. A really astonishing place.
Now I'm going to go do homework, since I have to read 50 pages of Don Karlos by tomorrow. I'll post a bigger, better and more uncut telling of Vienna soon.
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