New Sights, Friends, and Words

Greetings!

The weeks seem to be going by pretty fast.  Wednesdays come so quick and I keep forgetting that I post these on Wednesdays.  

This past weekend was STS Austria orientation in St. Giligen (which is near the town of Salzburg).  My host family and I went and explored St. Wolfgang and the town of Salzburg.  Both are beautiful towns!  

On Friday, we started driving toward Salzburg after the boys and I finished school.  The drive was amazingly beautiful, full of hills and mountains!  We stopped somewhere along the Wolfgangsee and took a small ferry to St. Wolfgang where we explored for a bit.

Saturday morning we went to the Town of Salzburg!  I ended up wearing my dirndl there.  Salzburg is a beautiful town and is where Mozart was born and raised.  We walked around and took it the sights.  We also got to tour the house where Mozart was born!  

I also ate some more typical Austrian food!  We went out to eat in Salzburg and I got some meat dumplings (or Knödel) served over a LOT of sauerkraut.  It was really good.  I also had an alcohol-free "beer" to go with it.  Stress on the FREE as in NO alcohol.  Don't worry.






For dessert we had Salzburger Nockerl, which is a very light and fluffy dessert served with a fruit syrup.  Very sweet.    

Overall, a very Austrian day (:

Saturday afternoon and evening was orientation!  It was a lot of fun and I had the chance to meet other exchange students from a bunch of different places.  We went over some rules, talked about our home countries, and got the chance to just hang out.  It was really cool to be able to hear about everyone's home country and their experience here so far.  I made a bunch of new friends.

I have definitely become a lot more comfortable speaking German, or at least what I know.  The other students in my class enjoy teaching the other exchange student and I very long words...

Panorama of the very long words

In German, you can sometimes put together a bunch of words to make one big word, which is what those pictured are.

They also taught me that the most important word is "Oachkatzlschwoaf" 

which means the tail of a squirrel.

Apparently it is also dialect, meaning not everybody everywhere uses that word.

That is all for this week!

Thanks for reading!