BLOG 5 (2/2): VIENA, SCHOOL TRIP

The night between 24th and 25th of October was going to be our last night at the hotel and we knew that. We all felt that we had to enjoy this last night, so we started playing FIFA. But not normal football games, if your opponent scored you a goal, you  had to drink some nose medicine… On the first game, Kevin (an Austrian boy) and I  won Henrik, so he drank it. After his reaction we decided to stop that game, it didn’t look really tasty. We had other adventures related with: McDonald’s, showers, chocolate shops, mixing Mentos and CocaCola, but I’d better tell you more when I am back in Spain… My mother could read this blog!

Waking up on the last day was hard, but finally we did it on time and we had our first activity of the day: visiting a really modern university. At first, we went into a really cool big building that looked like the university… but it was just a library! After this visit I can say that the education system in Austria looks really good (my high-school has made me think the same).I show you here a picture of that building.

 After visiting all the university buildings we had lunch and then we went to a synagogue, a Jewish church. At the entrance we were given the typical small black hat that they wear at church. The building was really big and the architecture was very cool, but the guide spoke in German and I was very tired because of the previous night, so I fell asleep in the church. Then we went to the train station and we took the train home. During the two hour trip we felt hungry and we had a funny idea to solve that problem. At the train station there were people giving free “Mediterranean rice” that you only have to put in the microwave for a few minutes and it is ready to eat, so we decided to ask the man of the cafeteria   if we could use their microwave oven.  After insisting for some minutes, we finally convinced him. The train trip was cool and I must say that although that rice wasn’t as good as Spanish paella it was good too. Finally, we arrived home but the story doesn’t end here. We had been invited to a school party and we decided to go. We thought it was going to be a boring party because it was organized by a school, but surprisingly it was a good party. There were funny performances by the students, places to eat and drink and a cool disco. I met a lot of people there, and a lot of them were learning Spanish, so I think that I could win a lot of money if I became Spanish teacher here.

Well, there have been lots of fun in these three days away but they have been hard too, so now I am going to sleep, I need to rest!  Good night!

BLOG 5 (1/2): VIENA, SCHOOL TRIP

The school trip is probably one of the best experiences in our school life and I was really lucky because I could enjoy a three day school trip to Viena, the capital city of Austria. I was really excited about it and I got to train station two hours before the train arrived. The train trip took us one hour and a half but it wasn’t long for me because we had lots of fun on the train.

When we reached our destination we had  lunch at a shopping center and then we went to the hotel. I shared a room with five students and it was really cool because as you can imagine six friends in a room with an Xbox and games like FIFA and Call of Duty can’t be bad!

On the first day we made an interesting visit to the Austrian Parliament. Then we went to a cabaret where a comedian and musician made a performance which seemed to be really funny… but as  everything  was in German, for me it was a cool siesta.

The second day started with one of the coolest activities that we have done so far. It was a circuit without any lights, so it simulated that you were a blind person (they gave us the walking stick blind people use). It was very interesting and difficult because the guide (a real blind person) gave all the instructions in German. Our next activity was visiting a really cool and luxurious castle-museum, like the Selgas Palace but multiplied by ten. As a funny anecdote, I really appreciated that you are given a chair when you enter the museum so all that pain that you feel in your feet when visiting a museum does not exist there!  An amusement park was our next stop. As people that came to Barcelona last year know, I really “feel” roaller-coasters (I shout a lot) and here it wasn’t different. We only had time to go into one, but it was amazing. On this second and last night a lot of things happened, but I’d prefer to tell you about them when I am back in Spain… Sure you will be impatient! The last day of the trip will be in the next blog, there are a lot of things to tell and I prefer it this way. The pictures are from the parlament and the castle-museum respectively.

Regards from your Spanish-Austrian friend.

BLOG 4: FOOD AND NATURE

Trying the typical food of a country that you visit is obligatory. Because of this, the other two exchange students and I had an activity on Thursday  that consisted  in going to a restaurant to taste some typical food. I ate a burger that had, meat, eggs, bacon, lettuce, and a special sauce that is typical of Austria, that makes the burger very special and different. The “funny” anecdote happened at the end of the lunch. The waiter of the restaurant, (who had been very friendly with us and had told me that he used Spanish to impress the girls) brought us a really hot chillli and he said that if any of us could eat it he would give us free drinks. Nöel (the Belgian guy) and I decided to play a game of “Rock, paper or scissors” and agreed that the loser would eat the chilli. Unfortunately, I was the loser! I had to eat the chilli and it was really hard, I was drinking water at the bathroom for thirty minutes after that… but I won the free drinks! Obviously, I chose milk as  my free drink, I need it to stop the flavour of the chilli. I add here a funny picture of me and Henrik after eat so much.                           

On Saturday we went to a kind of zoo that had a lot of types of birds and rabbits. There were from pigeons to tropical birds, and I remember that I saw a bird really similar to the capercaillie, that bird that is in danger of extinction an it is almost only found in Asturias. In the rabbit section, there were some seven kg. rabbits, that looked almost like dogs. For me the coolest ones were the smaller ones, and Anna (my host-sister) thought the same so… she bought one! It is a small black and white rabbit that is called David. Some judges valued and scored the animals and David was one of the bests. Then we ate there. Here was  a restaurant there that is totally eco-friendly and only serves organic food with products from their farm. It was a really cool healthy lunch.

This post is shorter because on Sunday I decided to rest for the school trip to Viena… so my next post will be the best for sure!

BLOG POST 3:

 LINZ, A CITY WITH A LOT OF FUN

On my third week I was completely used to my new life here and I had a lot of interesting activities to do. First I must tell you a strange anecdote that I lived on Sunday. I went to an enormous supermarket in Linz, but the curious thing was that an extreme right- wing politician (racist and almost a nazi according to my friends) was making a speech there. It was a bit scary to see all those people listening to that man saying that he wanted people who are not Austrian out of Austria… Well, better to start with the funny anecdotes now, I know you prefer them!

 On Thursday we had a class called “German for beginners”. At this class we learn German doing ordinary activities out of the class. For example, in this first class we went to Linz to play Laser Tag and go shopping. We visited the big shopping center (the same I had visited on Sunday) and then we went to a Haribo big shop. All products there were made of Haribo.  At first, I thought that some products were free and I started to eat them at the shop… Don’t get me wrong! I swear I hadn’t seen the prices on the products! Then we went to play Laser Tag, a game that has two teams, your objective is to shoot the people of the other team with your laser gun. It was an amazing game but it is really intense so we finished the game very tired.

I must say that the first games I played pretty badly and I almost had negative score because I shot people of my own team… but then I improved my level and I understood the game better, so I became a “good” player. On Friday we (my host family, me and the other exchange students, Henrick and Nö

el) went to an ice-hockey match, between the Black Wings (the team that we supported because they are from Linz) and the Red Bull Salzburg, one of the best teams in Austria. The match was amazing, historic, wonderful, magical…. The match had three parts of 20 minutes and it started very aggressively and crazy (some fights between players, kicks and a lot of hits) but without goals. In the second part our team (Black Wings) scored two goals and we started to think it was going to be an easy win, but Salzburg scored at the start of the third part… and they scored another goal when there were only 60 seconds of match left. But our hope didn’t disappear and… our team scored in the last ten seconds an amazing goal and we won! The stadium was full of people, so with that goal all the Black Wings supporters exploded with happiness and I felt the stadium literally shaking. Both experiences were very funny, but this doesn’t end here, I still have five weeks more here so I will live, and of course tell you, many other adventures.

SCHOOL, ART AND HISTORY

I woke up at 6:00, but I was feeling energetic because it was going to be my first school day in Austria. Isabelle (my Austrian mother) drove me to the school, HTL Perg, a big modern school. First of all I met the other two foreign students, Henrick, from Sweden, and Noel, from Belgium. Then Mrs. Danner, our tutor, introduced us to the classroom and we played some funny games to get to know each other better. This day I was at school just for four hours, so we didn’t do much more. That afternoon Isabelle and I took Hellios (the family’s dog) for a walk along the Danube bank. I ended the day playing a ludo game with the whole family. The ludo was one of the presents that I took them from Spain.

The next day my first class was Physical Education. The teacher let us select what sport we wanted to do, I (as a good Spanish) chose football! I know that you don’t want to hear more about lessons and you want to read my adventures at the weekend, so there we go! On Friday, Sebastian, two of his friends (Niklas and Thomas) and I went to Linz to paint graffiti. On the way to the wall that we were going to use (a wall builded to paint graffiti over it) we saw an incredible graffiti by a famous artist who painted the faces of some famous rappers, it looks like a photo! I had never painted graffiti before, so I enjoyed my first time a lot! I am not very good, but they said that being my first time my graffiti wasn’t too bad. They painted a big graffiti that was very cool.

On Sunday I made other cultural visit, but very different from my visit to Linz. We went to Mauthausen, one of the biggest nazi concentration camps. It is very near our house and it is certainly not a funny visit, but it is history and it is important to see and remember what happened there. We chose a good day to go there because, at the same moment, Spain was living difficult moments and a lot of violence because of the Catalan referendum and in Mauthausen, where a lot of Catalans and Spanish republicans died, there were a lot of Catalan and republican flags.

In summary, it was a week when I did lots of different and varied things.

BLOG POST 1:

FROM ASTURIAS TO AUSTRIA

Travelling to another country with a suitcase for two months isn´t easy,so this blog post is going to be about my travel from Asturias to my new home in Austria. My mother came with me to the airport of Asturias to catch the first flight to Madrid. It isn’t an enormous airport so it wasn’t difficult to find it. The only problem was that my suitcase weighed weighed 30 kg   (two months of your life into a suitcase isn’t easy…), and the maximum was 23 kg, but we divided my baggage into two suitcases. As an anecdote, at the boarding room I was seated next to the Auryn Singer, I don’t like his music much, but it was a funny moment. The first flight was short (one hour more or less) and

I arrived in Madrid at 14:15. Madrid airport is one of the biggest in Europe, but (to my surprise)I didn´t get lost and I could catch my plane on time. This second flight had some problems: the first problem was  an enormous man seated next to me, I couldn’t see  anything apart from his belly!

Then the flight got delayed. The last problem was that the man who was seated behind me didn’t like planes much and he was very nervous so he was always talking a bit loud, almost shouting and it was a bit stressful. I arrived at Viena airport and after a long time waiting for my suitcases finally I met part of my new family. Isabelle and Tobias were waiting for me there. It took us one hour and a half to drive from Viena to their house. It was a funny travel talking about ourselves and things about Spain and Austria. We arrived at their house very late so their three children were tired (the same as me) and sleeping. I met them better the next day. Their names are Sebastian (16 years old), Anna (14 years old) and Jonas (12 years old). It has been a hard experience, (I am writing this on Sunday and I’m  still tired) but I think this experience in Ausria is going to be good for me.  On Monday, 25th, I am going to start to attend HTL Perg, my new high school! I am going to inform you about my Austrian experience on this blog, so see you soon!

Gabriel Sánchez Poyal 1st Bachiller.