Vienna waits for you

Holy COW. Vienna. Wien. I'm going to have to split this up into several posts.

Actually, I'm going to start with the Sunday before Wien. After church, my host family decided to go see the Heide. (Heide = Heather). The area is basically a super-huge field of heather, and there's nothing like it anywhere in the world. It turns purple! We were a bit early in the season (we've had a very cool "summer"), so it wasn't as purple as it could be. It was still very pretty.

The sucky thing though, was that I wasn't completely packed and ready to go for Wien. We got back around 9:00 PM. I was planning on getting to bed before then, but... oh well. It was worth it.

So I got about three hours of sleep when all was said and done. We had to leave the house at 3:30 AM so I could get on my train. That was fun. It was the earliest I've woken up, but in a way, it was kinda worth it! I have a rough time sleeping on public transportation, like planes and trains and such, so yeah... I was able to see a lot of Germany. Germany is so beautiful!!! I couldn't help thinking that throughout the whole trip.The best thing was that I got to see the sunrise (which I've always been to lazy to do) over some small mountains. It was waaaay awesome.

So I got all the way to Vienna all by me onesies. I had been a little nervous, because I've never been on such a big trip by myself before, and nobody was waiting for me at the train station. But I managed. And being the penny-pincher I am (or shall I say Eurocent-pincher?), I decided to walk from the train station in Vienna to the hostel. I had looked it all up on Google Maps and had my directions and everything. Well, Google let me down. It was supposed to take one-and-a-half hours, but it didn't. It lied. And Vienna lacks street signs. These things combined led me down the wrong road. Not very far, and I wouldn't consider myself lost, but it did take a bit longer than expected. I simply stopped at a gas station and figured it all out. No big deal. I got to see some of Wien that nobody else did. All those suckers that used the U-bahn (subway) missed out on quite a bit of Wien. And the sore feet and shoulders. Oh well. Wien is absolutely beautiful! And I didn't even see the touristy pretty area that day.
So, the first thing I did after check-in was take a shower. If you had just walked for 2.5 hours around a foreign city around 90 degrees Fahrenheit with all your luggage after being on a train or three for nine hours, you'd want a shower too. After dinner, we had a dance. Dances in Europe are way different than the Mormon dances I've been to in the US. Firstly, there is no such thing as a slow dance. Strange, yes? They have this basic dance step called the Disco Fox, which is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and then they just throw in some twirls and stuff. It is a lot more fun! Secondly, they dance this strange dance to all sorts of music. No crazy mosh pits or anything. Thirdly, they play a lot of unedited versions of American songs. They just don't realize that there are bad words or anything. Ironically, the only guy I danced with was from good ol' Idaho. We actually found quite a few Americans. By the way, the conference was for Latter-day Saints (Mormons) from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Speaking of Switzerland, I met my first Swiss person ever. I was a little too excited. I think the whole craziness of the day was manifesting itself...
After the dance, we went up to our room. Can I just say that there were some crazy coincidences goin on? My friend, Jeanette, who was my neighbor at the German House at BYU, had decided to come on the Tagung at the last minute. I thought she had signed up to be in our room, but she hadn't. Somehow, though, she was put in my room! What a coincidence! I was really glad about that though. So we just had a little English-speaking BYU room with the three of us.
I'm going to have to write about Tuesday on another post. Nobody wants to read about all of this in one sitting... But really, Vienna is fantastic. I would highly empfehl visiting there.