I'm finally here!

Guten Abend!

Okay, so things haven't started out as smoothly as I would have liked. We were all set and on board our puddle jumper from GR when once we got to the runway, we had a three hour delay. Because of that, we arrived at O'Hare at 4:30, the time we were supposed to be leaving on our connected flight to Vienna. However, there were delays in Chicago so we (a group of 10 students) booked it through the airport. When we got to the right terminal, we could still see the plane from one of the windows we passed, it was still sitting at the gate! Well, after I finally got through the security check thanks to a guy who decided to pack each part of his desktop separately in his carry on and then didn't understand that each piece had to be unpacked in order for him to be cleared, we ran down the hallway to the farthest gate where we were hoping the plane still was. Unfortunately, we missed it - we were all sweaty from running and now stranded. The next flight wasn't set to leave until the same time on Wednesday, making us not get to Vienna until Thursday morning local time. We ended up working with this guy named Steve who was able to get us out of O'Hare and on our way to Europe at 10 that night, all we had to do was take a little layover in Frankfurt, Germany. Oh darn, another country to add to my passport :) The plane we ended up taking was REALLY nice (Lufthansa - I had never heard of it, but it was the nicest plane I had ever been on by far) and everything else seemed to turn out well. Well, except for the fact that we all felt disgusting most of the trip and our luggage won't be here until tomorrow. So, right now I can't upload pics because my adapter was in my luggage and I am typing on a German computer that has the y and the z flipped, among many other weird things about it. All I can say is that if the rest of this Vienna trip is as exciting as actually getting here was, this is definitely going to be a trip to remember for a lifetime.

Some random/cool things I've experienced so far:

• there are pink clouds over Vienna, and I flew through one of them.
• It was also really cloudy when we flew over O'Hare, and I saw a plane pop up out of a cloud... it was really funny.
• the German word for sugar = Zucker.... yeah, I'm gonna leave that at that.
• I think babies cry more when taking off and landing because they don't understand what's going on when the pressure changes.
• Step Up 2 is a really good movie, especially while eating chicken and greenbeans at 2 am.
• Watermelon Bubblicious works better than Strawberry Bubblicious for helping pop your ears during take off and landing.
• Mercedes make good taxis, but the drivers will smell worse than you do after being on a plane or in an airport for 24 hours.
• Never get the seat number that is also the gate number, lots of people get really confused and think that you are sitting in their seat.
• ALWAYS pack most of your stuff in your carry on, because just when you think that lost luggage won't happen to you - it will.
• In Europe, it's called CocaCola Light, NOT Diet Coke, but you really should be drinking tomato juice anyway.

Well, that's all I have for now, I only slept three hours on the plane, so I am really tired and I have my first class tomorrow!

Andi