School 2 - BORG Straßwalchen

My month living in Salzburg was very very very long. My whole experience there is a mystery to basically everyone, including myself sometimes, because I was so miserable I didn't write in my diary for 2 weeks! But that's not what I'm here to write about just now. Onto school number 2!

By the end of my stay, school was the best thing while I was living in Salzburg. I think there's always a place for exchange students (at least at some point) which is so much better than anywhere else. A place where they feel a bit more comfortable than anywhere else and they can escape there - something to look forward to and that was kind of school for me. Even though it still wasn't amazingly great and pretty difficult, it was a way in which to be distracted from brooding in my own thoughts and as I mentioned in my last school post, an easy way to meet people.

So there I was, living in my little village Henndorf am Wallersee. The city of Salzburg is about 15km south and the town of Straßwalchen is about 11km north, which is where I went to school for the month or so I was living there. Getting myself out of bed every morning was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Because every morning I had to wake up between 5:30-5:45am to get ready for school. Horrible. Now, I never really considered myself a 'morning' or 'night' person, but by being here I've come to realise I'm definitely more of a night person. I used to adore mornings, especially getting up at sparrow's fart to go on some exciting adventure (i.e. band tours, school trips, balloon festival, travelling), but the thing is that wasn't EVERY DAY and I was generally in a wonderful mood! Anyway. Here I would drag myself out of bed, groggily cursing at the unfairness of it all but always managing to get ready in time to crunch my way through the snow in order to catch the bus at 6:30am. BECAUSE SCHOOL STARTED AT 7:30 (and finished at 1pm - MADNESS!), and the next bus was (supposedly) too late. Twas a long month. It was always dark (and note: I love and live for sun), it was always cold (see previous) and there was always someone smoking at the bus stop. But it wasn't all bad. I would appreciate the drive to school, listening to music, staring out the window into the strangely dark recesses of snow and fog. It was definitely a thing of beauty.

My afternoon bus stop

No photos of mystery and fog, but this was on my way home from school :)

My school was BORG Straßwalchen. BORG Straßwalchen is also a Gymnasium (Austrian/German Secondary College) and has two streams within it - arts and natural sciences. I was in the arts stream and was initially very excited about it because I thought "WOW an arts school in Austria must be super awesome!!" But it turned out just to be a pretty normal school which happened to have arts subjects. I have come to understand that all students in Austria have roughly the same curriculum, consisting of subjects such as Maths, German, History, Chemistry and English, but then depending on the stream in the Gymnasium they also have extra subjects. So in this case my normal classes were: Maths, English, Physics, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Chemistry, German, Geography and Sport, but also Music, Art and Latin in addition. Latin was definitely my favourite subject and I looked forward to it more than anything else. Gosh I'm such a nerd! But I will explain myself.

I have always been fascinated with languages, a love I caught from my mother! Learning German has been challenging, but I always find the similarities it and English amazing. English is a Germanic language, so really they are quite similar, and both of them have large parts derived from Latin. So by learning Latin I could see the similarities a lot more clearly and the history behind certain words! For example: "Servus" in Austria is a casual greeting to say "hello" or "goodbye" obviously depending which context you use it in. But "Servus" in Latin is the equivalent of the English "slave" or "servant". So essentially this greeting originated in Austria by people offering their services - "I am your servant". Just something I found really fascinating. Plus most people in Australia don't learn any Latin! The other classes were reasonable, but I generally kept to myself quite a bit and would just try my best to get through the day. My class was full of girls - with only four boys out of about 20 of us - and they were all really lovely and welcoming. They were interested in me straight away and wanted to include me in everything they did. I now realise how special that was, because it's often hard to find a group of people so willing to include you so quickly. And now I actually miss that school and the friends I made there!

Straßwalchen, nearing the end of Winter

MY SCHOOL! At the beginning, there was lots of snow around... But this was taken on my last day (end of Feb)

I have one last funny story. On the last day we were meant to have sport, instead of going to the gym, we went out as a class to breakfast. The sport classes were split into separate girls and boys classes which I found kind of strange, seeing as that stopped for me in year 8. We went to one of the local cafés - which was always really wonderfully yum! At this point, I still wasn't too great at German, but I was good enough to get the general jist of what was in the menu. I decided to order the "Lady's Breakfast" which consisted of toast with ham, cream cheese, salmon and a bit of capsicum and onion on the side, a hot chocolate (or coffee - but hot chocolates in Austria are heaven), a pastry and to my great surprise:

A glass of champagne...

Not one of my best photos, but you get the general idea!

 I was so unbelievably shocked because I was not expecting that AT ALL. And as far as I know, you don't get anything like that in Australia (at least not in my experiences...!). Everyone thought it was absolutely hilarious, and although I was a little taken aback and embarrassed at the time, looking back it's just one of those moments which makes you laugh! A wise friend here once told me that often the hardest and most horrible things to go through here are the ones you remember the most and look back in the greatest amusement. This is just an example of how sometimes language can really get the better of you!

And yes, I drank it :)