Update

I haven't written much lately, not for lack of activity, but rather for lack of finding anything worthy enough to follow my entries about ball season. I move from the Hofburg Palace, home of the former Habsburg dynasty, to the glorious ... high school classroom?! Hmmm.

So what have I been doing lately?

Yesterday I registered for classes for the spring semester, which begins next week. I should be taking one class in water and sanitation technologies for developing countries and another class in geographic information systems (GIS). There are a few other classes I want to take, but at the moment, they all conflict, so I have to figure out what to do about that.

Last Friday I went to a cabaret show, hosted by the rowing club of the head of my engineering department. (If you have some spare time, look up "Raimund Haberl". He's apparently been the world champion in men's rowing. Here I thought he was just an engineer!) The cabaret was absolutely hilarious. There were 20 pieces with topics ranging from lazy government officials to Turks in Vienna to a modern version of Hänsel and Gretel. Each piece, performed in Viennese dialect, poked fun at Austrian culture. I'm not sure which was more amusing for me: the storylines or listening to the dialect ... I understand dialect now, but it still sounds so strange to my ear!

On Saturday, I had some friends over for dinner and movies. I made some Indian curry and was going to pick up some naan (Indian bread), only to find that you cannot buy fresh naan in Vienna. The guy in the Indian grocery store told me that the climate isn't right in Vienna to make naan. I didn't know that the climate had anything to do with the temperature of the oven, but he seemed convinced this was true. In the end, we went naan-less, but had lots of other goodies instead.

Tomorrow I'll be going to see my school's play "Teechers", performed by the English drama group. I'm looking forward to it, especially since I know most of the students in the play.