Many of you are veterans of international travel but I am a complete novice. And wow. A nine hour flight following a five hour layover was quite the experience. I told myself I'd sleep just fine. We had great seats (considering that we resisted the $600 per person charge to upgrade to business class). But although the adults on our flight seemed to understand the need to sleep (all armed with neck pillows, blinders, and ear buds), the children on the flight definitely did not understand. And so by the time we arrived in Austria this morning, I'd had 1.5 hours of sleep and Mark had less. . . . Two days had become one very long day, and we needed to stay awake until at least 8pm tonight to help our bodies adjust.
We were picked up by TCM at the airport and were able to do a quick stroll of the TCM grounds before lunch. We met the other two teams who are here with us, and found common ground with many of them. Several have roots in the west side of Indy or in Greenwood. After lunch we were free until dinner.
When you have slept so little, it is better to keep moving. And so we walked through the Vienna woods (why yes, those would be the same Vienna Woods that inspired Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven and other composers) to the Stift. Mark had been here on previous visits but I never really understood what it was. The Stift Heiligenkreug is the second oldest Cistercian monastery in the world and the oldest continuously active and inhabited one. It was founded in 1133!! While we waited for the 2pm tour we enjoyed their very nice cafe and had some much needed caffeine. The tour itself was as amazing as it was hilarious. We were given a handout in English, but the tour was in German. The priest giving the tour, however, was not happy with our nodding and reading the English descriptions. He pressed one of the other women on the tour into translating for him. She was willing, but her English wasn't fluent. Between all of us we got through the tour, riest in charge urged a poor Austrian woman who spoke a little English to be our translator, and he worked hard to help us understand. About halfway through the tour when we were viewing 700 year old stain glass windows, he said began to laugh about how we Americans don't have anything old in our own history. He'd point to something that was 125 years old and say, "To you American's that's old, but to us that's new!" He found this extremely funny and spent the rest of the tour pointing out what Americans would say was old and contrasting it with what was really old. We assured him, we thought 700 years was OLD.
(Since my evenings are fairly free I am trying yet another way to get this blog to work. So it might look messy while I experiment)
We stocked the kitchenette of our little apartment with diet coke and passed out for 30 minute naps, which pretty much saved us from being worthless the rest of the evening. In our evening meeting I found out my duties for the week and had a meal with the other workers and Haus staff. Now back in our apartment for the night, ready to do some serious sleeping. Tomorrow is a tour day, and we are set to go to Vienna. Then it is a week of serving the students who begin arriving Wednesday. Mark is hard at work with last minute details for his class. It is going to be a wonderful week - after all those years of hearing about the Haus from Mark and his parents, I am finally here to see this wonderful place and participate in the work in a small way.
These pictures are out of order - the first three are the Stift:
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| Stift |
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| Window at the Haus |
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| Stift at Heiligenkruez |
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| Vienna Woods |
Our path through the Vienna Woods
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| Haus Edelweiss |
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