Innsbruck/Kitzbühel, update

Grüß Gott everyone!

Last weekend I traveled to Innsbruck and Kitzbühel in the province of Tyrol. I arrived thursday night after about a 7.5 hour train trip. I met up with Chris, one of the teaching assistants that I met at orientation my first week in austria. We walked from the train station to our hostel, which was directly in the city center on a nice little side street. It was pretty late and we were waking up early the next day to take a train to Kitzbühel, a ski resort town about an hour away.

We got to Kitzbühel around 9am, and about an hour later we went to the tourist office where we were meeting the tour leader for snow shoeing in the mountains! I had read that the office organizes this during weekdays in the winter in one of my travel books and thought it sounded neat. We were also there during the Hannenkam downhill ski races, a really famous international event.

Because of this, our snow shoeing hike was a bit "special".

We walked up the mountain a bit and then stopped by a little guest house for a while at the racing track and watched all the skiiers whoosh by.

Here's the track:

And a view from where we were standing.

After it was over we hiked a bit more until we got to a little guest house and had some lunch.

A look back at one of the mountain faces we walked on:

This is an old man that we talked with a bit on our hike, he told us he was 83, and still snow shoein'!

Around 4pm we were back at the train station. I htink my overall impression of snow shoeing was: I'd rather be skiing. But it was fun to walk downhill and slide through the untouched snow, and of course snowy mountains are beautiful. I really felt like i was "in Austria" here in Tyrol.

We went back to Innsbruck and went to a brewery and had some good homemade beer and then had some delicious pizza. Night shot of a cool rococo building and the moon:

The next day we wandered around a bit. Here is a view from our hostel door:

We walked along the Inn river

walked to a little church along the way (yes this is little in austrian standards)

went to the city park that used to belong to the royals

(that stone in the center, we learned, was placed there at the location of the center of Innsbruck to help the energy flow throughout the city, dedicated by the chi society or something), went to the folk art museum and saw the hofkirche, which has a crazy big sarcophagus of one of the emporars and lots of bronze figures around it, wandered around the Hauptplatz

saw the goldenes dachl (golden roof) where the emporer used to watch people below

went to the dom st jakob, an old baroque church

which had this nativity scene, which reminded me of the ones i saw in Steyr

and walked up the 150 staired tower and took a look over the city

Innsbruck is literally completely surrounded by mountains, which was really cool. We also passed by the state theatre and asked if anything was playing that night. In fact there was a play called "Frühlings Erwachen" that was playing. We didnt know much about it but they had tickets that they sold an hour before the start time for only 9 euro, so we decided just to go see it. The play was alright, for some reason the story line was a bit hard to follow, but it was basically about growing up and confronting moral and cultural norms. I just found out that classes at my Gymnasium in Leibnitz actually read this play as part of their German Literature classes.

On sunday we checked out and went to kitzbühel again to see some of the downhill slalom racing, but we didn't want to buy tickets for 20 euros just to watch it for a few hours before we had to leave back to our respective homes, so we just walked around for a little bit and watched the races on the many tvs around.

Anyways, teaching is going well. I am getting to know my students much better and feel like we can really talk with each other inside and outside of class. Sometimes i don't feel like teaching, but usually when I am in the classroom I get in the swing of it and have fun. I am used to how my teachers want me to run the class, and almost all of them are really nice and supportive of what i want to talk about. I overheard a couple of my teachers talking to each other about one of my lessons and saying how good it was and how i really got the students talking about the issues, which made me feel really good. (They were actually talking about a lesson that I did on martin luther king jr, the civil rights movement, and had the students discuss nationalism and patriotism, i even sang the national anthem at their request. patriotism can be kind of touchy in Germany/Austria for obvious reasons). Sometimes my students seem apathetic to politics and cultural issues, but i think it's important to talk about and usually more interesting than just 'what high school is like in america'. I have done some lessons on sports and music though, and they really like those topics (obviously!). I also have sang with the school choir in Leibnitz a couple of times. It is pretty fun to sing with my students (rather than older people in the church choir i was in). We learned a really cute austrian folk song that we sing in dialect last week. I also helped out with a language recognition project at the Technical University here in Graz. I got 20 euro for just reading sentences in english. They needed native speakers to do this. woo hoo, easy money! I have been seeing Lisa (from my hike) about every week and hanging out with my american colleagues too. We went bowling the other day at the only bowling alley in Graz, and it's only about a quarter as big as the ones in america! The weather is a bit cold, around 25 degrees usually. I don't see blue skies very often here in Graz, and i usually spend the days I don't work just sitting in my room, which isn't boring to me but kind of sad when i think about it. It is so cold outside though! and i don't have anything I really want to do. I signed up for a Pilates course though that meets once a week to get some more exercise. I am planning a trip to Spain for our semester break too, to meet up with Andrea and Emily! I am planning on going to Barcelona, Madrid, and maybe Valencia. Today I did a lesson with one of my classes where the director of my school was the substitute teacher. Afterwards he told me that it was "top" meaning really good and told me how great it was that I got them talking. This made me feel good! I don't know if teaching is really in my future though...

I love you all!