Some things are destined not to happen. Maybe I am destined to never go to Innsbruck, Austria. For the last two weekends I have made plans to head to Innsbruck without any plans. I wanted to rent a bike and ride 150 miles, stopping for meals, paragliding, and camping whenever convenient. I am guessing that Innsbruck heard I was ugly because it forcasted falling dog poop and successfully rejected my plans for weekend spontenaeity...twice.

But, sometimes things work out well. I had a blast going to the Heurigens with my friends. So your asking what are Heurigens? They are similar to wineries, howerver they function more like a restaurant. I guess you could call it an urban winery. Anyway, we were able to visit a couple on Friday with the free time program from my language school.

At the last heurigen there was just our table of about 6 people and a huge italian family of about 50 that was on some type of reunion tour. So we were playing a card game and decided that the loser has to go over and start a conversation with the laughing, singing, Italian Grandfather who was obviously the leader of the group. I don't know how exactly we expected to talk with them since noone could speak italian. The loser was a girl from Russia. As soon as she started walking toward the family everyone got quiet. The second she sat down near the Grandfather, he started speaking italian to her in the loud playful way that you might stereotypically expect from an italian grandfather after after a couple glasses of wine. After a couple of sentences, every single person in the Restaurant was laughing for about 2 minutes straight. They were laughing because they understood what he was saying and singing, and we were laughing because she didn't. I guess this could majorly be one of those you had to be there stories, but it was great and the whole family stood up and clapped for us as we left.

German Class…

Its my last month here and German Classes are going well, but like I said before, as the deadline approaches, I am questioning my German capabilities. I was, however, able to move up 3 levels this month instead of the normal 1 level advance. It is a little harder but I think it will be better in the end.

End of a Chapter…

Today I heard a song that I listened to a lot when I was a freshman in college. I thought of how memorable that year was, I thought about tailgating and football, about living in Columbia and being on my own for the first time in my life. My thoughts wandered to my next year at the fraternity and then the many visits I made after I transferred. I finally reached the present and it occurred to me that those memories are all that I have left in Columbia. Abbey is starting her final year, and needless to say, I will be making no weekend drives there. I don’t know, I guess it was just kind of a weird realization that I had today and I felt like writing about it.

My Austrian friends that I usually play poker with invited me to come with them to the Casino. I have never been in a Casino before. I did not plan to win any money and I definitely did not. But it was still fun to have gone. As students in the poker tournament we didn’t have the money to rebuy like the rest of the people there but I didn’t really have any hopes of winning in the first place.