My first impressions.

To begin with, I’m just going to let everyone know that some of the stuff that goes onto this blog could be found as offensive. Obviously, that is not my intentions; the writing I do is just my thoughts, experiences and memories of this trip. Now, to begin…

The flights to get here seemed like forever. Adelaide to Melbourne, Melbourne to Singapore, Singapore to London, London to Vienna, Vienna to Salzburg. All up I think it took nearly 40 hours, going from one plane to another and waiting in the airport. It was just lucky we had a Rotary member at most of the airports to help us get from one gate to another. By the time I was in Salzburg I was so exhausted all I wanted to do was eat something and go to bed. Luckily, my host parents had been to Australia so they knew how I felt and they gave me some soup and sent me to bed.

I always said to myself “I’ll never have a problem with jetlag.” I was so wrong! Every night, for the first five or so nights I was in bed by 8:30pm and woke up at 4:00am. I was the most grateful person in the world when I could finally get a decent night sleep.

Something gives me the feeling that while I’m over here, the longest sleep in I’ll get is until 8:00am and being a teenager I like my sleep. There’s a little boy in the house I’m living in now (I’ve been asked not to use names, so for this he can be Kane.), he’s 4 years old so he doesn’t agree with my sleeping in habit. Every morning that I’ve had the chance to sleep in over here I’ve woken up to Kane yelling about something downstairs.

My first couple of days in Austria were very relaxed; my host family had to go to work/school so I spent time at home just settling in. On the first day, my host sister (we can call her Rachael) came home at 2:30pm from school so that she could take me into the city to get some clothes, seeing as I was sent over here with the clothes on my back and one spare set of clean clothes. I’ve borrowed a lot of clothes too; Rachael has been kind enough to let me borrow some of the stuff she no longer wears. I consider myself to be a good shopper, I have a habit of bargain hunting so I got a lot of different things for only a little bit of money.

As I’m on a student exchange and using a student visa, I have to go to school. I’m at my host sister’s school, Musisches Gymnasuim, which would probably be about the same size as the local public high school at home, Murray Bridge High School. That’s about the only thing that’s the same though… Everything else is incredibly different! But we’ll get to that shortly…

On my first day at school, Wednesday, my host mum took me to school and showed me around a little bit. I needed to get to know the school as soon as I could because after my initial tour, I’d be on my own. Nobody wanted my first day to be too overwhelming so I was told to only go for English. Once I was in the class, I was asked to introduce myself a little bit. I didn’t really know what to say so I said a lot of “um” and “ah”. Luckily, seeing as my German consists of very basic German, it was an English class so everyone could understand me when I spoke in English. When I didn’t think I had much else to say I asked the class if they wanted to know anymore. They all came up with funny questions like “Have you been to Uluru?” and “Do you go scuba diving?”, but the strangest question I got asked was “Have you ever seen an Aborigine?”. Now, to me, this was the most stupid question in the world. Of course I’ve seen an Aborigine, I’m a friend with lots! They couldn’t believe that it was normal to have Aboriginal people in school with “the white people”. Once I asked them to explain to me what they thought of when they say Aboriginal, I realized why they were so shocked. In school, when they learn about Australia, they hear about the Aboriginal people that are still living in the bush, wearing hardly any clothes and carrying around boomerangs to catch their food, etc. It took me a bit to explain to them all about the Stolen Generation, but I think I made them understand it all. I was just lucky I paid enough attention in class at home to know about it. By the end of the lesson I was feeling reasonably comfortable with the people and the teacher which made me excited to go back from then on.

Now, to how school’s different (these comparisons are between Musisches Gymnasuim and Murray Bridge High School, not any other schools)… Everyday, school starts at 7:45am, so I have to be awake at 6am at the latest to be on time for the start of day. The school day ends at a different time everyday depending on your timetable, for example, the earliest I can leave is 12:30pm but my latest day goes until 6:30pm! There isn’t a set recess and lunch-time either. There are short breaks of 5 minutes between each lesson and after the third lesson there’s a 15-minute break where you can leave you class and stretch your legs. Everyone has a set class, so you’re always with the same people, until you have a “special subject” (Music, Dance, Art). I’m in the class 7e. We have a specific room, most of the time, and the teachers come to us. For me this was unusual because I’m used to switching around classes and moving to where the teachers are. There are some classes that we move classes for though- Physics, Biology, Music, Dance, Art, PE and Geography… but for the most part we stay in the one class. There isn’t a dress code, my personal dress code is four layers of clothes at the least, and after that it’s whatever. I’m not sure if I like not having uniform. I feel like people are more likely to judge you on what you look like if you get to choose what to wear, rather then having a uniform to wear everyday. We don’t wear shoes at school, we have to take them off and put them in our locker so we don’t make the floor dirty. My class is very relaxed about everything; people are allowed to eat whenever they want so some students leave the class midway through a lesson just to get some hot food from the canteen. All things considered, I like this school… it’s very casual and I can tell already that it’s not going to stress me out.

There’s one girl in my class, her name’s Roosa; she’s amazing. She’s done a very good job at making me feel happy in the class. She’s also from the exchange program, but she’s from Finland and she’s been here for 6 months already. It’s amazing the people you meet while you’re away from home. She’s what I call my “oldie” and I’m a “newbie”, I’m guessing it’s fairly obvious how the names work? Anyway, she was my first friend at school. Actually she was my only friend for a while.

The main way to get anywhere in Salzburg is by bus. I had to learn the bus route quickly too. By Thursday I was taking it from school on my own, not by choice but because I had to. We take a train to school, but to get home again we have to go by the bus. My host parents are too busy to take us to and from places because of their jobs, but it’s okay because we’re old enough and smart enough to work it out together. So far I haven’t been lost, but I’m waiting for my day.

My first Friday night in Austria was the Senior Ball for school. At first I was a bit nervous, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know of anyone that was going that I knew because Roosa had other plans for the night. The only other people I knew were my host family. The night turned out to be truly amazing! I met my next host sister and hung out with her for the night. There was three main sections of the ball… the traditional area, where people could do choreographed dances like the tango, salsa, waltz etc. I spent most of my night in the disco area, because that’s the only kind of dance I know. There was also an area where there wasn’t so much music, so people could go there when they didn’t feel like dancing. By the end of the night my feet were killing me! I wore heels to the ball, at home I don’t wear heels to parties, I wear flip-flops.

I had my first one-on-one German lesson with a girl on Saturday. She was lovely. It wasn’t much of a real lesson where I learned new words; it was more a day of working out what I already knew. It turns out I don’t really know too much, but Kane’s helping me more then anyone to learn new phrases because he doesn’t understand English so he tries to make me understand German. Being 4, he gets frustrated at me when I don’t get it, I just laugh at him though and he laughs beck most of the time.

My host dad took Kane and myself into town for the day to show me the local castle. That was very cool. It’s things like that that interest me a lot. I took lots of pictures so I’ll always remember what I saw there. It was so gorgeous! Being there made me feel like I was from the medieval times, but I also felt like a princess. While we were in the castle I had to look after Kane for a bit and I had two girls come up to me and ask, in English, if I was an Au Pair. It was really funny but I understand why they asked me. They were Au Pairs themselves and when they heard me talking English to Kane with him talking back to me in German (we were probably talking about completely different things but…) they must have assumed that’s what I was doing. They were really lovely though, and I appreciated them coming up to me and asking, it must’ve taken a lot of guts.

I’ve also seen the Sound of Music Museum exhibition. That was amazing! Having grown up with the musical I found it incredibly interesting to find out the real story behind the scenes. I couldn’t, and still can’t, believe how different the movie and reality really is… but at the same time it makes sense when you put them both together. I really appreciated seeing all of the cool things in the museum and I even bought a couple of books to get some more information out of it.

Sunday, exactly one week into my trip, was the first day that I got sick. It was only a cold but having a cold in this weather is horrible! My nose ran like a tap for 3 days and my throat was so sore! My host mum and Kane were also ill at the same time as me. I took one day off of school but then decided to go back because if I was at home mum wouldn’t have said I could stay home more then that.

I had my first dance class at school on Tuesday, it was so bad. I don’t get embarrassed very easily but this made me feel so useless. They were doing jumps and tumbles and couches all in time to the music. I was useless, always at least half a beat behind everyone else. I could hear them all laughing, so I knew I looked stupid. I just laughed with them at the time because there was no point doing anything else, but when I got home I told my host mum and she told me we’d sort something out, THANK GOD!

In a few days I go on Language Camp for a couple of weeks, and from what I’ve been told it’s meant to be amazing! That’s the next big thing for me but you’ll have to wait to hear about it when I get back.

Until next time.