Italian Weekend, etc.

Item 1: Italy.
I spent the weekend camping on the Italian coast.

camping!

It was less of a coastal campsite and more of a beach with long-term parking. In my host family's defense, that's not their idea of the real thing - kitschy tourist towns just happen to be more practical when kids and other families are involved.

And it's not like it had nothing to offer. I saw some interesting things there including but not limited to:

* a few very creative body piercings

* This thing:

* a woman reading a magazine with the help of a magnifying class, a set of enormous reading glasses, and a pair of binoculars which were somehow attached directly to the lenses of said glasses.

Overall, it was a good time. Christian loves basketball, and even though I explicitly stated in my first letter to my host family that I do not play basketball I decided to play anyway because, you know, how bad could I possibly be? I was as bad as one would expect. Luckily, I redeemed myself when an American football was put in my hands and my ridiculous simian arms were finally put to good use. Props to my dad for teaching me how to throw that thing way back when and props to David for forcing me to go outside as a child.

Item 2: Didgeridoo

I went to a local baumarkt and made a didgeridoo out of PVC pipe and joints, with a duct tape mouthpiece. My host family loves it.

I'm not going to lie; I am pretty proud of myself for the choices I made in its construction. The tubing has the best acoustic properties I could ask for, their lengths make it compact enough to fit in my backpack, and the resonating chamber I put on the business end amplifies all the right frequencies. It handles surprisingly well - even better than the eucalyptus didge I played  a few weeks ago. 

...
Next report will be on Salzburg, apparently one of the most beautiful places in Austria.

Cheers,
-Jared Boze

Week One, Official Day One

I'm going to start with a preview of my shower, which is much more compelling and much less erotic than it sounds, unless you're weird.




It can travel through time and shoot lasers. There's another pic of it at the end of this post. Can you fight through to the end? I promise it'll be worth it. Besides, it's a big one that will take some time to load and it's only good if the whole thing is loaded, so why not bore yourselves with my thoughts and stories?

I woke up at four in the morning yesterday and studied German from five until ten. I don't know what gave me the ability to be so obsessive, although I guess it could be that I understand roughly 50% of my host family's accent and dialect and half of what I do understand is made up of words I have never heard.

That brings me to one big concern of mine: I know the rules of German grammar, but I should have made sure that my latest year of progress prepared me for the vocabulary. I should have done more independent work, and I know that I certainly would have preferred to discuss vocabulary in a way that allowed long-term comprehension over what I allowed to happen, which was talking about Germany's general cultural history, green energy policies, etc., being tested on vocabulary and then never using those words again at any point in the rest of the curriculum. Thank God I'm done with gen-ed classes. Both inside and outside of class, I took a technical approach and consequently ignored certain areas of importance, such as WORDS. Sure, I can explain and then use the first and second subjunctive moods and that will be extremely useful in my continuing linguistic development but where will that get me when I go to Austria and I can't even order a cup of coffee because I either don't know what to say or can't understand what is being said to me? Gaarr. Es ärgert mich.

After considering that wonderful gem of a realization, I had breakfast with my host family, four lovely people who will remain without description until I have the presence of mind to photograph them and prove that they exist. They seem to be very understanding of my predilection for listening rather than speaking - I think they are acutely aware of the differences between standard German and Graz-speak. I estimate that I'll fully understand the accent in two weeks; hoping for less would be too optimistic.

Yesterday's plan was to pick up a fellow IU student and go to Leoben. While I waited for that to happen, the kids got a little restless and I was forced to defend myself. Blows were exchanged and furniture was dismantled.

Leoben was pretty good - we visited an exhibit about Alexander the Great and then went to the "Asian Spa," which has a spa section and a wing that serves as a small indoor waterpark. We had a lot of fun, but I was a little saddened to realize that Austria's hot dogs (not their sausages, I'm talking about their ripoff of our own Americanized fast food) are much better than America's version. To their credit, the Austrians pretty much invented the practice of stuffing meat into animal casings for inexplicable use as food, so I shouldn't be surprised. Oh, well; I'm slowly discovering that literally everything in Austria is produced at a higher standard.

EDIT: Had my first classes today. The profs are good and my new colleagues are intelligent and witty people with a wide variety of academic backgrounds and personal motivations. I'll be studying the German language and Austrian culture. If it's important to anyone, I haven't done my homework yet.

My motto here is "es ist egal," the German equivalent of "I don't care" or "whatever you prefer;" I find it is the perfect response to any question my host family asks me. Want to go to Leoben? Egal. Want to go camping on the Italian coast? Egal. More wine? Egal. They like that response - I'm a low-maintenance guest.

Here's the image I mentioned earlier. It's a pretty heavy .gif, so let it load if it hasn't already. If you look through the steam, you will see an illuminated control panel with twelve buttons that serve many, many functions, including the operation of steam emitters, a radio/CD/mp3 player, and something that looks a lot like a telephone. You'll also see me, but that's not particularly interesting considering I'm standing next to a time machine that can wash hair and I happen to be fully clothed.








Bis später,
-Jared Boze

Week One, Day One

Here is a fairly accurate assessment of what my day was like:

Gino's pizza is amazing, and by "amazing" I mean "amazing with italics." You all need to eat it. Then I flew to Stockholm, watched Avatar, and caught a plane to one of Europe's cultural capitols.

I think Avatar lived up to the hype. Yeah, the bioluminescent ground and airborne jellyfish were tacky, but its story was I don't want to talk about this any moreViennaohmygoodnessVienna.

Everything progressed smoothly, until I landed in Vienna. The metro was confusing, I bought one too many tickets, and the schedule I had seen online did not match the Westbahnhof's actual schedule. I really shouldn't lump that last one in with the others, because the other ones are minor glitches and the last one meant that I had no train to Graz. I had no train to Graz.

I was forced to improvise, and by "improvise" I mean "ask about the best way to get to Graz from Vienna then spend thirty minutes figuring out which U6 is the U6 I am actually supposed to take and then realize that I'm never going to figure out whether the Floridsdorf or the Siebenhierten would get me there faster." I never figured it out; I just took the Siebenhierten because it arrived first, and it put me where I needed to be: the Wien Meidling. I booked a train to Graz and called up Klaus to let him know I was going to be late. It was an awesome moment of me being responsible - those who are not surprised by this don't know me well enough.

The train ride was disorienting because I slept twice, and I didn't have a watch immediately available so I didn't know how long I had slept, which would have been a great indicator of whether or not I had slept through the stop at the Graz Hauptbahnhof. While I was preoccupied with figuring out the time and my position in Austria or possibly Hungary, Croatia, or Slovenia, which were also likely places I could have been, the scenery rolled by.

The scenery, you say?

Oyez.

Do tell.

I was about to do that before you interrupted me. It was pretty much your standard alpine foothills, complete with low clouds, mists clinging to valley walls, sheer cliffs of Lovecraftian bent, and a rainbow that followed the train for about five minutes. Each turn of the tram revealed the countryside's vacillating constitution of dark mystery and simple brightness.

The houses. Remember those houses you drew in grade school; the ones that are a perfect square with a triangular top? Half of the houses I have seen so far look exactly like those houses. All of this sounds nice, no? Yeah, it was good, but the ride was exhausting because I had no real clue where I was, and even when I knew the time and that Graz was ahead and not behind, I was still frustrated because the ride was three hours and not two and a half, meaning I would be even later than the lateness I reported to Klaus.

Eventually the train stopped, and I hit Graz like an anemic sloth. I couldn't think and could barely move, but luckily Ilse was there to pick me up. I was then given a tour of their home, was introduced to the family, and then ate dinner, which was the first real food I had eaten in twelve hours.

Photos will be posted around Sunday. Hopefully I can find a blogging rhythm and figure out when to post and on what basis. Keep in touch through this blog, hotmail, facebook, or skype.

Cheers,
-Jared Boze