Day 1 -- Traveling and Welcome

To your right you can see Shiraz at the airport in Salzburg, Austria, and other members of our group.

So here we are, it’s 23:40 according to our Austrian timed alarm clock in our room. Sandra and I are conveniently rooming together, taking away my worries of waking up and only being able to talk in German.

We all arrived early at the airport in New York, and Dean Craig came to see us off as she filmed each of us talking about how we felt embarking on our big trip. There was lots of waiting in lines until we finally got here.

It took us two more hours than planned on the runway and we finally took off on a Lufthansa plane to Frankfurt, Germany, where our connecting flight was supposed to be waiting for us. We ended up arriving 40 minutes late which isn’t bad considering that we took off two hours after we were supposed to, but we still missed our plane. We had already been rebooked on the next flight, and after a trip to McDonald’s and some of us doing our assigned reading homework, it was off to Salzburg.

Since we were on the plane with two other schools, Bronx Community College and Kingsborough Community College, making up a large chunk of the group of 50, the higher ups had waited for us and we didn’t really miss much. We still had time for dinner when we arrived at the castle and then were off to the welcome speech during which each one of us stood up to introduce ourselves, as well as all the chaperones and some of the faculty.

Now I’m sitting in our room, not quite thinking straight and pretty sleep deprived, but I wanted to put something on paper, well, on the computer more like. This really is only the logistics of our trip, but leaves out much of the emotion and the things we talked and laughed about. Let me catch up on that some other time. For now, I’m going to sleep.

Addition: It's already the next morning and I'm posting this in the library since our room has a very weak internet connection. Fulda is up with me sitting next to me and I'm waiting on Sandra to get breakfast with me. I couldn't fall asleep last night and was up until past 2 AM. I decided to go down to the Bierstube, a homy bar in the basement, well, not really a bar but a basement space where we can hang out and sign out our drinks on an honor system, pretty cool. I ended up getting a beer so I could calm down, I was so wired, I may have stayed up all night. Ok, more tonight and later, I haven't even checked my e-mail yet. Off to another amazing meal!