Week 1 in Vienna

THURSDAY, 4th February 2016

ARRIVING IN VIENNA

After a last-minute packing and a mad rush to the airport, a long flight, a 13-hour layover for a flight I eventually missed, a 24-hour stay in Doha and the literally much awaited for flight, I finally arrived safely in Vienna 😍😍😍

My exchange university WU Wien offered a buddy system – where exchange students are paired with local students who will be going for exchange at their home university. I can’t emphasize how lucky I am to have Alexandra as my buddy. This girl is an impersonation of German efficiency.

She picked me up at the airport, having collected my apartment key in advance from a separate office. By the way this hostel office only opens 8am to 12pm so by the time I reached Vienna, that office was closed and without Alexandra I would've had to spend the night elsewhere and wait for the next day to collect the key 😩😫😨😱

SETTLING IN

I reached my apartment at 3pm and dropped my luggage. Before I could even sit down, she took me out to help me deal with the red tape matters of settling in a new city. Within 2 hours, we went to 3 different offices. First I had to sign my tenancy contract at the OEAD office. Next we headed to the town hall to get the Meldezettel, to formalize my residence in Vienna (free entrance to museums, tourist attractions and discounted transport all over Europe whuddup 🙌) My last stop is the Wiener Linien office, where I paid €75 euro for a my semester ticket which allows an unlimited use of the public transport in Vienna throughout my stay here! HOW AWESOME IS THAT? €75 euro is easily how much I spend in a month in Singapore. Barely 5 hours and I'm loving Vienna already :")

Basically we completed what others would take 3 days to do in 3 hours  #blessed

Afterwards, Alexandra brought me to the WU Campus and showed me around a little. The campus is magnificent 😍 It's modern and futuristic and I'm now a little bit too excited for school! We settled at Das Café for dinner together with other WU students and their buddies. It's a casual restaurant serving western food on campus so here's my first meal in Vienna!

After which we had a wind down spritzer a la Viennese

Spritzer = wine + sparkling water, aka watered down carbonated wine. It's apparently an Austrian thing. I had the violet spritzer because I was curious of the taste of violet…but it was obviously for aesthetic purpose only

I got back to my apartment and finally sat down to take it all in. My room is all I ever dreamed! It's new, clean, spacious, and the location couldn't be any better! It's beside a major train station Westbahnhof which has 2 U-bahn lines (U3 and U6), and is beside Mariahilferstrasse,a major shopping street in Vienna. There are 3 supermarkets within 100m (not kidding) and Travel Shack where the erasmus parties are at, is 5 minutes away. 

FRIDAY

It's our first day of school! Well kind of. WU Wien organized a 3-week long orientation programme for the exchangies filled with day tours around the beautiful Austrian capital and some day trips to the neighbouring cities of Graz and Linz. I'm so looking forward to visiting all these pretty places in Vienna and experience living in this city that's clinched the top spot for most liveable cities in the world. I've been only here 2 days and I'm already in love!

 - we had a welcome session involving talks, campus tour and orientation games. Unable to sit through hours of boring talks, I went to the library cafe for a pretty brekkie of coconut chocolate cake.

yummy!

I had plenty of time to admire my new campus - all the buildings are so artistic and futuristic. I especially loved the Library building which resembles a spaceship, designed by the famous architect Zaha Hadid. I didn't manage to snap photos of my campus in the cold, so here's some photos from WU Wien.

The Learning Center

D4 Building

D2 Building

D5 Building

Executive Academy Building

Teaching Center

And amidst the futuristic buildings, one was strikingly different

D4 Building Extension

During the campus tour we found out that all the buildings in the campus are separately designed by different architects. I guess that explains 😂

Tacos for Lunch

With the Russian girl

After lunch we had get-to-know-your-groupmates games. One thing striking about my group, and apparently the whole batch of exchange student, is the number of Americans - there are more of them than everyone from everywhere else combined, talk about 80%. Everywhere I went all I heard was their distinctive American accent - and there are only 4 of us from Singapore. *cries*

At night we had a dinner of traditional Viennese food with the other exchangies. Most people had the Wiener Schnitzel and I had the Käsekrainer which is their take on mac and cheese. 

Käsekrainer

Except that it was alright. I was still hungry afterwards and almost cried in happiness when I saw a Chinese take-out place that was still open at 10pm.

Salmon teriyaki with rice yay

SATURDAY

I went grocery shopping for the first time in Penny, a supermarket near Gasgasse. Groceries here are sooo cheap - I'm talking about €0.60 for 1L carton of milk and €0.50 for a 500ml cup of yoghurt. 

White wine by the cartons? LOL

One thing sad though, is the price of stationery. These pens would've cost a fraction in Singapore. Thank god i brought my pencil case along

SUNDAY

Another thing that will take some getting used to in Vienna is how everything is closed on Sunday! While I had a good rest today after a hectic week, I'm gonna have to find something to do for the next many Sundays!

Tonight was the Superbowl finals and I went to Travelshack to see what's going on there. I never knew the extent of how MASSIVE American Football is until I went for this night. Basically every single American turned up to catch the match together.

I can't wait for the next many months of exchange to come, in Vienna and beyond!