First Impressions

Total travel time: 26 hours

Total sleep during travel: ~3 hours

Total sleep on Saturday night / Sunday morning: 13 hours. New personal best.

I tried to think of a list of adjectives to describe what this place is like, but the English language doesn't quite do it justice, and I would also hate to bore you by describing every single place I went and what I thought of it, so I'll post up some pictures and let you fill in your own descriptors. My dorm is called "Rössl in der Au", which apparently translates as "Pony in the meadow" in colloquial Tyrolean. I live on 3. Stock, which is actually the fourth floor, because the German system starts numbering above the ground floor. Here is a picture of the view from my room:

Yes, those are the Alps in the background, and yes, the air is as fresh as it looks. Here's a picture of me just outside one of the buildings of the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck in which I'll be taking my intensive German course for the next 3 weeks:

Last night at our welcome dinner I tried to eat french fries (Pommes Frites) with my fingers....I know, right?! How rude. Eating them with a fork (as is good and proper in Austria) isn't as difficult or awkward as you might think, and neither is using a fork with your left hand. The main course was, of course, Wiener Schnitzel, which was just fantastisch. For dessert, we were served an Austrian classic called Heiße Liebe ("Hot Love" - vanilla ice cream with raspberry sauce) which was both delicious and an excellent topic of conversation, thanks to its rather suggestive name and texture.

I went to a Super Bowl party at a local bar on Sunday night. Kickoff was around midnight here, and I didn't quite stay that late even since I was still a bit jet lagged. I met a cool Austrian dude there who said that he likes American accents and that he hoped the Colts would win because everyone in Europe wanted the Saints to win. But no one was really there to watch football, and I think everyone sort of recognized that fact.

That's all for now - the pictures that I post on Facebook will hopefully tell the rest of the story much more efficiently. Mach's gut, everyone!