Our First Workshop

To your right you see Schloss Leopoldskron. I can almost smell the fresh Austrian air.

Finally, this past Friday our group met at school for our first workshop. Now I feel like there is too much information to blog about! We were immersed in filling out various agreement forms, our personal biographies for the seminar, etc.

We got thick booklets of information to seep through: our syllabus, reading assignments, tips for traveling abroad, weather forecasts, and more.

In the very beginning we played switch: we would talk to a new person and find out as much as we could about them until Dean Craig would say "switch." Turns out that two pairs of people have identical birth dates in our group! Whoever found out first would win an umbrella. I think Kimberly won. It was fun, and I was delighted to find out that our group is super diverse: a lot of us have similar stories of working another job, getting married, simply having a nontraditional path. Everyone is from all over the place, Morocco, Turkey, Israel, Haiti, Germany, Philippines, and the list goes on and on.

Dean Craig had saved quotes that we said when she told us that we had been picked for the trip. She'd show them to us and we'd have to guess if it was us. It was pretty neat, most everyone guessed right and many gave a recap of how they'd felt.

Dean Craig also told us that last year some students ended up having visa problems and couldn't go. Yikes. I hope that our group won't run into that. You'd think that they'd cut us some slack and provide a smoother way of getting visas for everyone without having to run back and forth and gathering insane amounts of paperwork.

We've developed a google group that we communicate through and are sharing information about insurance and carry-on restrictions and such. We'll be interlinking our blogs here until the school finds a way to give us a website that we can all post to.

Our next workshop is in two weeks. Stay tuned for more updates!