Orientation and Oktoberfest, Round Two

The view from my private room at orientation

This year, I had the privilege of returning to Saalbach-Hinterglemm for orientation as the all-knowing second year.  Or rather, one of three all-knowing second years (aka the fearless leaders).  Charles, the other American second year, had actually been at the other orientation last year.  Fulbright divides the TAs in western and eastern Austria; those in western Austria end up in a hostel in the mountains, while those in eastern Austria apparently get either a castle or a monastery as their orientation location.  Though a castle sounds fabulous, I'm sure we had the better views.  This year, unlike last year, I got my own private room - confirming our second year status (stati?) as VIP.  Additionally, we were given the task of "helping out where needed," which was the Austrian way of saying that we were there for boosting morale and answering questions, and very little else.  This was fine with me.  I was still slightly jetlagged and quite happy to take some afternoon siestas while everyone else was in workshops.  The three of us (Charles, Tom the British second year, and I) spent some solid time napping in the sun in the backyard of our hostel.  Last year the weather was so bad that I didn't even know that the hostel HAD a backyard!  This year's weather made the annual hike quite pleasant.  It was even more exciting because I had skied the very same mountain during my ski week last year.  Unfortunately, it was missing Hans and his accordion.  Still, there were Sound of Music sing-alongs, mountains to be seen and buttermilk and beer quench our thirst.  Man, my life is tough sometimes.
 

Charles, the other American second year orienter

Tom and Charles, my counterparts and 2/3 of the fearless leader team. Tom was the British second year orienter

Hiking

Saalbach.  I have skied the mountain on the far right.

With Adrienne, one of the first year Fulbrighters, at the top of the mountain

One of the stations that I may have a photo of from ski season.

Kara, a fellow Bowdoin German student, and me at the top of the mountain.  We realized after we took this picture that we were wearing Bowdoin colors.  Go U Bears!

Sitting outside in the mountain hut

The gang, singing along to Sound of Music

This is Celeste, who knew Maija from College.  We left room for Maija in the picture - see how tall she is?

The Sunday after orientation, Emily, her boyfriend Matt, and I decided to go to Oktoberfest for the day.  After my experience last year in the hostel, I decided that a day trip would suffice.  Emily and Matt had never been, and I knew that if I didn't go I would regret it, even though I was exhausted.  So we put on our tracht (dirndls and lederhosen) and went.  Munich is about two hours away on a good day, so we figured we'd get there by about 11.  We ended up getting to the fête closer to 1 due to a late train and a short stop in Müller for some cheap sunglasses.  By the time we got to the Theresienwiese, the lines to get into the beer tents were out of control.  The beermaids were practicing what my roommate Martina called "gesichtskontrolle" or face-control, meaning that if they didn't like how you looked, they wouldn't let you in.  Each tent was closed to everyone who didn't have a reserved spot.  We, of course, did not, and waited with everyone else in the mob around the door.  The security guys were super unhelpful and wouldn't even point out if someone was falsely standing near the exit rather than the entrance.  How typical.  But we figured out where to stand, based on our German eavesdropping skills, and waited with the rest of the masses.  Loud drunken people were never let into the tents, and if you looked American, it seems, they figured you would fall into that category.  Italians were often placed in that category due to their volume, and the Australians due to their drunkenness.  This left us standing there, holding up our fingers to show that we had three people in our party, smiling as politely and quietly as possible.  Slowly, I maneuvered my way to the front of the crowd with my three fingers held high.  The beermaid (not a technical term, but you know what I mean) spotted me, figured I was harmless enough, grabbed me and escorted the three of us to her section in the Biergarten area of the Augustiner tent.  We ordered some 10 euro mugs - a price increase from last year! - and settled in with our drunk 16-year-old tablemates.  They were AMAZED at our German (probably because they were so drunk) and we were amazed at the fact that they were sixteen and allowed to drink their faces off in public.  By the time we had finished a beer and gone to the bathroom, however, they had been kicked out due to extreme intoxication.  Unfortunately, this was after they tried to help Matt eat his food.  At least it was before they puked all over everything, as I'm sure they were doing outside of the beer tent.  We spent the entire day in the same seats, mostly people watching.  It wasn't worth it to get up and lose our hard-earned position.  Eventually our antsyness got the best of us - that and the necessity of a bathroom with a shorter line - and we left the tent to wander around the carnival. By the time we left we had seen our fill, spent too much money, and experienced Oktoberfest fully. 

Matt, the wild boar

Too much Oktoberfest?

We were incredibly excited about Oktoberfest!

Almost a great picture.  Too bad it was taken by a very drunk 16 year old who couldn't figure out how to work the zoom

The scene

With our drunk 16 year old tablemates

The tablemates. 

This Italian man sat at our neighboring table and kept shouting "EMILY!!"  Shortly after this photo was take he kissed Emily's cheek

...so Matt kissed his

Schiwoche (Ski Week)

My ski group!  I'm on the very right, and Johanna is the one with the white hat and purple jacket in the back.

I have skied more this year than I ever have in my entire life combined.  I think I liked skiing about as much as I liked bowling when I was younger, and there was a point in my life where I would have rather go to the dentist than go bowling.  Skiing is exhausting and difficult, and I was not very good at it - definitely not as good as my brothers and cousins, who were the only people I'd ever been skiing with.  I finally started to enjoy it when I got out of the midwest and went skiing in Colorado in High School, where the mountains were real and so was the snow.  Still, if someone had told my 18 year old self that I would spend an entire week skiing in the Alps with a class of 12 year old boys and would actually keep up with them, I would have laughed in their face.  But that is exactly what I did.  I spent seven days skiing difficult runs from 9am until 3pm, and I only fell twice.  That's impressive!

The ski week started after a tearful goodbye with Dan.  I had packed my massive duffel full of ski pants and spandex the night before we left, and lugged it with me around Munich so that I could go directly to the mountain after dropping Dan off.  My duffel is ginormous.  It's big and blue and has my name embroidered on it, and it seems to be able to hold an infinite amount of stuff.  Imagine me with this massive thing, meeting two hippies from the UK on my train back to Austria who had a grand total of one backpacking backpack between them, and becoming incredibly insecure about the amount of stuff I had with me.  My train from Munich to the mountain took me back through Salzburg, and I had an hour between arriving and my train down into the mountains.  So I went back home and desperately tried to lighten my load.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I got to the mountain and found that some of the kids had brought TWO suitcases as large as mine (though I'm not sure why - they wore the same sweaty clothes every day.  I know because I could smell them from a mile away.)

Like I said in the post before, I took a train (Munich - Salzburg) to a train (Salzburg - Zell am See) to a bus (Zell am See - Hinterglemm) to a taxi (Hinterglemm - the top of the mountain) to our mountain hut (called an Alm).  We stayed in one of the remotest places on the mountain.  No cell phone service, no hope of getting to any civilization after dark, and no way down but to ski or get a 4-wheel-drive taxi to pick you up.  When I got there, the whole group had gone out skiing already.  I had no idea where I was, was a little sad and a little disoriented, and had no way to contact anyone since my cell phone was out of the network.  So I sat with my book and read until everyone got back.

Aside from the craziness of the beginning, the ski week was rather relaxing.  We skied intensely every day, had some free time, ate meals with the kids, did an activity with them most nights, and then stayed up late snacking and playing a game called 'Maxl' every night.  The weather was gorgeous - warm and sunny every day.  It made the snow pretty awful in the afternoons, but by the end of the week I was able to navigate even the most mashed potatoey of snows on the red slopes.  Often I was the person at the back of the group, waiting for one of the kids to fall.  Then I would ski slowly (well, slowly for the kids but normal speed for me) to the bottom offering kind words and encouragement in broken German.  My understanding increased so much over the week!  German itself is fine, but fast Salzburg dialect is a whole different level of understanding!

Even with the messy snow, we only had a few minor mishaps.  One kid fell and cut his chin on his ski, and ended up with stitches (of which he was incredibly proud).  Another broke his wrist, and I believe we had a few broken fingers.  But the real problem was this awful stomach flu that swept through our mountain hut like the plague.  One poor kid had it so badly that he wasn't sure whether to sit on the toilet or face it, and ended up pooping himself.  How mortifying as a young teenage boy!  I didn't catch this awful plague until I got back.  It knocked me out for two solid days, but Maija was nice and brought me some soup and ginger ale because I was too sick to get to the grocery store around the corner.  Aside from that, it was an excellent week! 

Skiing, day one

I skied this! 

We stuck to blue runs mostly

Some of my kids were awesome, like this one.  All of them went off the jumps. I tried and fell on my butt (thank goodness they weren't watching...but the teacher was and laughed at me)

I skied caboose for most of the trip, allowing me creepy photos like this one

Proof that the weather was awesome

My boys on the mountain

Johanna, the other teacher

Our mountain hut - home for a week

Sunset from our window

The reflection of the sun on the mountains. Gorgeous

Ski Weekend in Saalbach

Sebastian, me, Vinci and Anna at the top of the mountain.

Oy vey! I'm very sorry for the text-size problems in the last post.  Hopefully they've been resolved.  I switched over to the new version of the blog updater, and it clearly has some bugs left to work out.  In the meantime, I'm attempting to edit my text size by myself using html codes.  The funny thing is that I'm not even joking.  I would never in a million years describe myself as a technological...well...anything.  I sometimes have issues even connecting to the internet, so actually writing website code is something totally foreign.  So, with my bragging out of the way, we now return to *3* blog posts in 2 days:

I am very lucky in that I have met a ton of people during my time here who have gone out of their way to make me feel at home; the prize belongs to my student Sebastian's family.

I discovered on my first day in his class that Sebastian and I have some odd people in common. It turns out that he went to camp Chewonki, which is literally a few miles from Bowdoin's campus. Therefore he knew all kinds of facts about Maine, New England and even Bowdoin when I asked about them in my introductory lesson. Not only that, but two of his counselors at camp went to Bowdoin with me; one dated my sophomore year roommate, Marissa. Who would have thought that I would find someone who had personal connections to Bowdoin all the way over here in Austria?

Apparently he and his family were just as shocked as I was to find such a connection. Days later, I received an invitation from his family to join them for skiing in Saalbach, where they have a house. At first I declined - it felt kind of weird to accept an invitation to go skiing with a student, especially one who goes to a Catholic all-boys school. But after invitation number 3 I finally gave in. Honestly, when else would I have gotten such an experience??

The family has a gorgeous apartment in the town of Saalbach, which is 4km away from Hinterglemm, where we spent our week of orientation.  The two towns share the same mountains.  Sebastian, his father Clemens and his friend Vinci picked me up on Friday afternoon at my apartment, and together we drove the 2 hours to Saalbach, sharing music and cultural tidbits.  At first I tried to speak German the entire time, but eventually we settled into a system where I would interject into their conversations in German, but mostly everyone addressed me in English.  Luckily, Sebastians sister - Anna, 12 - and brother - Ferdinand (Ferdi), 7 - haven't had the English training that everyone else has, so that forced me to use my German a fair bit during the weekend.

The apartment itself is in a fairly generic, 60s style building in the town above the grocery store.  The hallways are dark and the elevator is old, but the family has decorated the corner apartment to look like a little mountain hut, complete with old wooden beams on the ceiling and hand-painted antique wooden cabinets (very typically Austrian).

The first night, after I picked up my skis and boots, we sat around getting to know one and other over a dinner of Fritattensuppe (soup with stringy crepe bits - sounds odd but tastes delicious) and various meats and vegetables.  Then the boys (Vinci and Sebastian) and I went out to find their friend at his work, which ended in us playing a game of 'stump' at a bar.  Stump is a game involving a tree stump, a hammer and nails.  It generally goes hand-in-hand with drinking, making it even more dangerous.  The fact that the game gets played in a bar tells you something about Austrian Apres-ski culture: it gets a little wild.  The three of us eventually found the friend, played a few games of air hockey at a different bar, then went back to the apartment for a solid night's sleep before our first day of skiing.

I am by no means an excellent skier.  I am fairly athletic and very stubborn, and never liked getting left in the dust by my brothers and cousins at the bunny-hills in Ohio, which means I've built up some ability to ski over the years.  The Austrians, on the other hand, seem to be born with skis on their feet.  I kid you not, there were three year olds on the slope who probably had barely learned to walk before they strapped on skis and headed off down the black runs.  I hadn't skied in two years and have never even SEEN mountains as big and steep as these, let alone thought about skiing them.  But like I said, I'm stubborn, therefore when we took the gondola all the way to the top of the mountain I said nothing.  And when we teetered over the edge of a red run before I'd regained my ski-legs, I gritted my teeth and went for it....and promptly fell.  But I got back up and kept going.  All in all, I only fell three times each day; six times in total.  Not bad for me!  We skied mostly red runs.  Austria has only three colors: black (the hardest), red and blue.  The colors are determined based solely on the steepness of the slope, without any regard to moguls, ice, stones, etc.  So what we skied, which were labeled red, could be anywhere from a red to a black in the US (since in the US they take the obstacles into consideration when labeling the slopes).  Not bad for someone who's only been skiing 6 times ever!  By the end I was exhausted, but had actually begun to feel comfortable on the skis.  I still prefer easy skiing (like the blue slopes) and I still don't feel entirely comfortable going fast, but at least I'm making progress!  If I stay here for a second year, I've got to learn to keep up with these Austrians somehow!

Me post fall, with my goggles falling down and everything.

Mountains!

Me, excited to be skiing (after I'd fixed my goggles).  The logic behind my bright blue helmet was that I'd be easily found if I fell off the mountain.  It certainly makes me easier to spot!

Anna, left, me, and Ferdi, right.  These two kids left me in the dust when it came to ability, but they kindly took it upon themselves to "teach" me how to ski. 

Again.

And once without goggles.

Solo shot on the mountain

Anna building at our lunch stop on top of the mountain

More of the beautiful mountains

The town of Saalbach from above

Sebastian and I.  The poor kid had hurt his knee a week earlier and therefore couldn't ski that much, but we managed to get a photo in.

Action shot!