The Apartment 2018 style

November 28, 2018

Here are some "before" pictures of the BYU Vienna apartment.  We had a small leather couch
and matching chair.  And the guest room was arranged pleasantly for a couple or for two people if the beds were moved apart.  There were two large chairs (not shown) that convert into twin beds.
We added a nice Vermeer painting to the guest room (I couldn't find a picture showing it) above the beds.
The other guest room had a twin size trundle bed.  The apartment could comfortably sleep seven guests.  There is also a large full bath and a half bath.

When we arrived this year we were amazed to find many changes.  The large guest room can now sleep eight !!! people.  Two bunkbeds were added, each with a 3rd spot in a trundle bed.  The twin trundle bed is now in that room.

    

    Here is the new couch.  It is velveteen and very deep.  It seems nice, but we can't seem 

      to get comfortable on it.  Since we have to use the living room for our Sunday meals with

    the students, it is not helpful to have a couch that can't take spills.  And for classes - you

   can imagine how easy it would be to fall asleep on that large couch (many students did 

   just that so we had to threaten to move it to the bedroom if the sleeping continued 😃).

We wonder what happened to the leather one.

The new guest room - it feels like a dormitory!

The smaller guest room.  The two chairs can be made into twin beds.

The kitchen before

The kitchen after:  At least this is a positive change:

The kitchen has been re-decorated in pink, green and turquoise.  It's prettier in real life.

There were also several small sets of drawers added to the apartment.  From the first day I began to feel claustrophobic with all the new furniture.  When Julie arrived we rearranged it all until it felt less crowded.  As you can see in the living room picture, we moved the blue chairs into the living room to make more student seating. It feels crowded but gives comfortable seating to more people.  Several students still have to sit on the hard wooden IKEA chairs.  Those students have no trouble staying awake in class!

The apartment can now sleep fourteen people, far too many to be accommodated in the bathrooms.  Roger jokes that someone was running an Airbnb here!  But we feel grateful to have a warm apartment with room for visitors and in a location close to public transportation and the inner city.

JULIE ARRIVES

July 17, 2018  

 JULIE ARRIVES!

  

Vienna Airport -- Axdon, some strange men, Grant, Remington, Julie

They look more tired than excited.

                            We toured the city. 

                                And saw lots of fun things--Axdon, Grant and Pinnochio.

                           Remington had never heard the story of Pinnochio so I filled him in.

                                                 Boating with Opa on the Old Danube.

 

It was in the high 90 degrees while they were here, but we had a little rain one day to cool us off.
The apartment has a small window air conditioning unit in the living room that can lower the temperature about 2 degrees just in that room.  It's hard to sleep and cook.  The larger table had been moved into the living room, which made it a little nicer place to eat than the stifling hot kitchen.  We moved it back into the kitchen when the temperature went down.

                    Remington got to paint at the Children's Museum at Museumsquartier.

 Everyone loved riding the subway and streetcars.  The boys learned the system so well that we could give them errands to run and they could find their way.  Remington learned his way around and loved leading us home from the subway.

One night we found Remington had moved from his bed out into the hall to sleep under the cardboard house he had made (what was left of it).  And he took along his blankie and pillow!   I almost tripped over him when I got up in the night.  I took this picture with a flash and he didn't wake up.

VIENNA AGAIN - 2018 !!!

November 26, 2018

VIENNA STUDY ABROAD - FALL 2018

BYU STUDY ABROAD -- BYU KENNEDY CENTER

Imagine living in the city where Mozart and Beethoven, Franz Joseph, Maria Theresia, Freud, and Semmelweis lived and worked. Vienna once lured people from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still attracts tourists and students from around the world. We will arrive in Vienna at the most beautiful time of year; the last of the summer flowers will be in bloom, and soon we will watch as the trees on the grand Ringstrasse and in the Vienna woods reveal their autumn colors. We might catch the first snow before we depart. Vienna, the long-time capital of Austria, is the place to immerse oneself in the language, history, art, music, and culture.

 WHEN
14 Sep–11 Dec 2018

COST
$8,300–8,800

CONTACT
rpm@byu.edu

We are directing a BYU Study Abroad Program for Fall 2018 in Vienna, Austria.
This is the 3rd study abroad program we have directed.
The program lasts 3 months, but we applied for a 6-month visa to stay in Vienna for 3 extra months so Roger can work on his book on Austrian family history research. He will have 2 months before the program begins and one month after it ends to do his research and writing.

We arrived in mid-July 2018 and will stay until January 8, 2019, exactly 189 days, the limit of our visa.

We signed up 11 great students who arrived on September 14.  They live in pairs around the city.  We have 9 female students and 2 young men.  Since we have an uneven number of women, we placed 3 of them together.  Those three live very far out and need at least an hour to commute into the school and our apartment.  The other students all live very close to the inner city.  But the three say they have the very best landlady who makes up for the long travel time.

GRAFITTI

EUROPE'S GRAFITTI PROBLEM

CHRISTMAS IN VIENNA

St. Stephens Platz 

                 The Christkindl markets opened on Nov. 20

There are booths with yummy pastries & Bratwurst & Punsch 
-- be sure to buy Kinderpunsch and not regular Punsch!

Vienna all tied up in a bow

St. Stephens is all lit up

Kaerntner Ring

Kaerntnerstrasse

Graben's chandeliers

Celebrating at the Opera House

We rode under the arcade of lights on the Strassenbahn

Beautiful things to see around every corner -- a view of St. Stephens

Pretty store windows

Interesting things to buy

and pretty flowers

Christmas tree market in the park in front of our apartment building

Vienna 5th Ward Christmas party

The Census takers (missionaries)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM VIENNA

We had a leisurely dinner at Wienerwald.  The only thing I did was buy a jar or Preisselbeeren (similar to cranberries) to add to our meal.  We went with our friends, Jon and Karen Green, who are serving a mission here in Vienna.

MOM TRIES TO CONFESS (1972)

In 1972 Mom sometimes walked Bill, a 2nd grader, to school.  One day she came home quite distraught.  She had gone into a beautiful church on the way home just to look around and a priest came along and kept trying to shove her into the confessional booth. She was finally able to escape without confessing. 

After our visit to Bill's former school we passed a church just up the steps from the school.  We think we found the church where this terrible incident occurred!  It's the only church between the school and our apartment.

The beautiful church Maria am Gestade

We had quizzed Mom about what exactly had happened and what she had said.  She told us the priest asked her if he could help her and she had told him she was just looking.  But instead of saying it in German she had used Dutch, "eve kijken" (I'm just looking).  We decided he must have thought she was speaking Viennese dialect and had said "i will beichten" which could sound a lot like "eve kijken" and means "I want to confess".  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.  The priest probably went home with a funny story just like Mom did.

The infamous confessional booth