Teacher goes to Prom!

A few weeks ago one of my students handed me little pamphlet as I was exiting the teachers room, saying, "Here is an invitation to our Prom. I hope you can come!" Naturally, I was incredibly curious about what an Austrian Prom is like, especially a Prom to which teachers are invited. And not just teachers; the Austrian "Schulball"is an event put on by the school to which students, alumni, teachers, parents, and community members are all invited! So wipe your brain of all pre-existing notions of what "prom" is like, and I'll tell you what my experience was.

Naturally I didn't want to fly solo at an event like this, so my friends Michelle and Annie graciously agreed to come as my dates for the evening! The attire was much more fancy than any dance at a US High School. Basically everyone was dressed in floor-length gowns or the male equivalent. The theme was "Ein Sommernachtstraum" (A Summer Night's Dream) so the town community center, where the ball was held, was beautifully decorated with twinkle lights, tissue paper flowers, silver and gold leaves, and vines. There was one large room with the stage and dance floor, but the dancing area was quite small because most of the room was taken up by tables. When you buy your ticket for the ball, you have the option of reserving a table as well and most people do so. Already this is sounding very different from your typical prom. There were TWO bars, one with beer and wine and the other with hard alcohol, and there were waiters who would come around to the tables and take orders (of course there was a wristband system for ordering drinks, but since the drinking age is 16, most of the students were old enough for the bar anyway!) There was also a limited but impressive food menu for people to order.

The ball was officially opened by a presentation of "debutantes," just like the traditional Viennese Ball I went to in January. There were about 10 female students in white dresses, escorted by adorably dapper male students in tuxes. They did a very formal choreographed dance, then there were speeches by the principal, mayor, and other official people, and then the debutantes and their escorts opened the ball with the first waltz. Remember, these are 15-18 year olds doing this very formal performance. Some of my favorite students were out there on the dance floor and I felt like such a proud mama watching them look so beautiful and classy!

The rest of the night went on in a similarly classy fashion. There was a band that played a mix of waltzes, salsas, tangos, swing, and traditional austrian music (we Americans were pleased to hear a little Frank Sinatra and Beach Boys thrown in there), and to my surprise, many of the students continued with the formal partner dancing...and they were so good at it!! And the best part of it all was that they were dancing amongst parents, community members, and teachers. Everyone was hanging out together and having a grand old time! It was so fun to witness. Annie, Michelle, and I discussed what the reaction would be if you brought the average American high school student into this atmosphere. I think they would be confused and weirded out and they would definitely make fun of all the couples waltzing and tangoing together! They'd be like "where's the bump and grind?" We also decided that if our high school dances were like this, we would have had way more fun.

Another funny part of the evening was when we discovered this secret room off the side of the main hall, where a bunch of boys were huddled together, watching something projected on the wall. Turns out it was the Champions League Final! The smart Ball-planners realized that they had scheduled their ball on the same night as the biggest club football event of the year (especially this year with two German teams in the final), and decided to be prepared with a projector and laptop to live stream the game. I imagine this kind of thing would happen if the Super Bowl took place on Prom Night. It was cute to see all the kids in their tuxes and dresses anxiously watching a soccer match!

The ball went on until 3 AM but we definitely did not make it that long. Instead, we stayed until midnight, when the raffle prizes and Ball King and Queen were announced (turns out they were already a couple...dawww). The best part of the midnight show, however, was the teacher performance. All the teachers came out in bizarre costumes and did an impromptu Harlem Shake, and then ran out and pulled students onto the floor for a massive one-song dance party. It. was. awesome. Have I mentioned how much I love this school???

All in all, the night was really fun. It was great seeing all my students all dolled up and coupled off--I definitely was really excited when I figured out two of my favorite students, who are in different classes, are a couple. It was certainly a prime night for teacher gossip, and just an all around fun, classy, beautiful event! If Woodbridge High School's dances had been anything like this, I definitely would have gone to more of them! Well done, Austria. Well done.

Textbooks are weird

My time teaching is quickly coming to an end! With just four days of teaching left (!!!!), I'm close to hanging up my teaching boots, at least for the time being. As the year draws to a close, I thought I'd give an overview of the kinds of lessons I've taught throughout the past nine months. I've mentioned classes a few times on this blog, and I frequently tell people about how bizarre my lesson topics often are, but here is a pretty comprehensive list of all the strange themes Austrian English textbooks handle (at least the ones my school uses).

As I've said before, the nature of my job changes a lot based on which teacher and which class I'm working with on any given day. One teacher lets me talk about literally anything I want to each and every week, so for those classes I've chosen topics from the US Election to holidays to travel to food to gun control to Country Music, and more. Most of the other teachers give me a little more instruction, sometimes asking me to work through activities from the book, sometimes asking me to come up with an activity or lesson based on the themes in the book, and sometimes asking for something timely or seasonal. For example, I taught on Thanksgiving, winter holiday traditions, the US election, gun control (when that started heating up a few months ago), and the US Economic system. Now it's these book topics that lead me to the kind of crazy lessons. Like the time I was asked to talk about Christmas in Australia. The nature of American Humor. Death. September 11th. Extreme Sports. Extreme Situations. Native Americans. etc etc etc.

Here are the tables of contents for the 6th and 7th form textbooks (these are 15-17 year olds)

Thank goodness I was never asked to talk about Victorian Times... 

Chapter 5 is why the students have knowledge of vocabulary like pathogen, intestinal disease,
hyperventilate, hypertension, avian...

Cheery topics like equality! Violence! Death! And Canada?

Make Your Way 7: Home of everyone's favorite chapter: HEADGEAR!

Some other true life chapter titles in the books for the lower grades include: You Are What You Eat, Dilemmas (very generic), The History Of Everyday Things, A Shopping Spree, Amazing Animals, Strange Things from Space, and one of my favorites, Virtual Worlds.

And since these books are all made in Britain, sometimes there is stuff that portrays America in a less than positive light. Like this gem, which makes Americans sound like jerks:

Like, HELLO....not.

Because I'm pretty sure people stopped using the "not" thing in the mid 90s.....psych!

We have a Facebook group for TAs across Austria, and every once in a while people will post topics they need help with, and reading those always makes me grateful for the classes I've been assigned, because some are just crazy. Some of these gems include genetically modified food, William the Conquerer, the Amish (this happens surprisingly often), celebrities, J-Pop, cancer, AIDS, Bollywood, the Red Scare, etc.

As much as I claim these things are bizarre, I have had a lot of fun working with some of these topics. For Dreams, I led the class in a discussion of Billy Joel's River of Dreams, for the various chapters on food (which appear in pretty much every textbook) I had a lot of fun with a matching game and presentation about regional food differences in the US. The violence, art, and death/dying chapters led to super interesting discussions, and all the jobs/employment chapters gave me the chance to be very practical with resume-building and interview practice. So while many of these topics are bizarre or depressing, I guess if you have to fill 8 years with English curriculum, you need to really exhaust all possible conversation topics. And I do appreciate that these students are expected to handle deep topics like globalization, environmental responsibility, and racism. I've been quite impressed with their abilities to honestly discuss these things in a foreign language. So while I give these books a hard time, there's some good stuff in them, and I've definitely had a blast using them this past year!

ART2013: Road Trippin'

As I surely mentioned in previous blog posts, Austria has a lot of holidays. Because Austria is still, technically, a Catholic country, most Catholic holidays are also state holidays, and therefore the month of May is absolutely over-run with days off. Exactly one of the five weeks in May is a full teaching week. It’s awesome. This means that I get to use my last month of school to check everything off my Vienna/Austria bucket list, and I got a good chunk of that done last weekend!

We had last Thursday and Friday off because of “Christi Himmelfahrt” (aka Ascension?) so some other TAs and I decided to plan a little vacation in the regions of Austria we hadn’t yet seen. We rented a car and drove west, hitting a total of 4 different provinces. Here’s a map of all the places we went!

We started our trip in Sankt Pölten, the capital of Niederösterreich, where Michelle and Hannah live. From there we drove to our first stop, Sankt Gilgen. St. Gilgen is located on the shore of Wolfgangsee, part of the Salzkammergut, the incredibly picturesque lake district that surrounds Salzburg. The geography of eastern and western Austria are very different, so it was fun to see everything change as we drove west. As we crossed from Nieder- to Oberösterreich (Lower to Upper Austria), we saw mountains slowly start to appear in the landscape, getting bigger and bigger the further west we drove. By the time we got to the Salzkammergut, they were getting pretty big, and the combination of the striking mountains, dense multicolored forests, and crystal clear lakes made for a beautiful, beautiful sight. I didn't know there were so many shades of green! I had been to the Salzkammergut before, when Michal and I came to Salzburg in January. Our Sound of Music tour (read about that here!) took us into this district to the city of Mondsee, but the weather was so foggy, rainy, and horrible that we never actually saw any of the lakes or mountains. Thus I was SO happy that we chose to stop in St. Gilgen, and I could finally see the lakes as they are supposed to look! 

Our trusty steed for the weekend

view from our hostel window in St. Gilgen

Wolfgangsee

We wandered the very small downtown that evening and had a scrumptious dinner of traditional Austrian food (although we had some difficulty deciphering the menu items, which used words from the Tirol/western Austria dialects) in an outdoor seating area that had a beautiful view of the mountains. The atmosphere was delightful. And the food was amazing. I had Brenesselknödel, a kind of bread, vegetable, and cheese dumpling with some kinds of flavors and herbs that I couldn’t identify, but were amazing.

Rathaus and little Mozart fountain (Mozart's mother was born here) 

beautiful cemetery in St. Gilgen 

The next morning we awoke to an even more beautiful view out our hostel window, and although we had to hit the road early, we took our time driving to our next destination. We drove partway around Wolfgangsee and Mondsee, the next closest lake, before getting back on the Autobahn. The drive was, again, simply gorgeous. Words don’t really do this landscape justice. So the following pictures will have to suffice. Our road took us through the “Deutsche Ecke,” a little corner of Germany, and then back down into the province of Tirol. Again, the mountains kept getting bigger and bigger, causing us to make intelligent remarks like “THEY’RE JUST SO HUGE” over and over and over again. We really were blown away by the beauty! The valleys are really wide and SO green, filled with farms and fields and SO MANY COWS (!), and tiny little villages (each with its own church, of course). Then right behind the huge field is a gigantic mountain that looks like it’s grown out of nowhere. We stopped at this one gas station to use the bathroom, and we ended up hanging out for about 10 minutes taking pictures of the surroundings because they were so gorgeous. There was a huge field of yellow wildflowers, with a few little huts, and then a giant craggy, snow-topped mountain right behind it. When you think of Austria in your mind (or watch the Sound of Music), this region is exactly what you’re imagining. The whole thing was pretty unreal.

After slowly making our way west, we made our first real stop of the trip: Haiming. This was the “adventurous” portion of our trip, because in Haiming we went Canyoning. Canyoning is basically a mix between hiking, rock-climbing, swimming, scrambling, etc. We put on wetsuits, helmets, and harnesses, and piled into a van with our two guides (Daniel and Simon) and our two new German friends (Daniel and Damien—there were a lot of Daniels). We drove up into the mountains and stopped on the side of the road, where we got our “safety talk” and then we were off! We started on a bridge over a river, and with basically no “how to” instruction at all, we rappelled from the bridge, down into the river about 30 feet below. This was just the beginning. We then proceeded to follow the river downstream as it flowed through the canyon. Every time we reached an obstacle (usually a set of rapids or a waterfall) we had to somehow pass it. This meant sometimes we rappelled, sometimes we jumped, sometimes we scrambled sideways across a cliff with our carabiners attached to a steel rope, and sometimes we utilized any combination of the above. It’s definitely an intense experience when you’re standing at the top of a 15 meter cliff and someone tells you to stand at the edge, get down on your knees, and just “lean back.” Especially when you have known that person for all of 10 minutes. And your life is entirely in their bony, scrawny little hands. By the end of the 2 hours, though, I felt much better about my rappelling skills, and I’d even say that I was getting the hang of it all by the end! The whole experience was pretty tough physically, and my hands and feet were totally frozen by the end of it all, but it was a total blast. I felt super accomplished by the end, and although I feared for my life several times, we all made it out with minimal damage! I’m already over the few scrapes, rope burns, bruises, and sore muscles I acquired in the course of the journey! I never would have thought to do this, had my friend Annie not suggested it, and I am so so glad we did! It definitely got us deep into nature, in a very up close and personal way, and the sense of accomplishment at the end was worth every second of fear I experienced along the way!

Got our equipment and ready to go!

Ready to jump off a bridge? Okay let's go!

Group shot in the waterfall!

Not terrifying at all...

After Canyoning we headed into Innsbruck for another lovely Austrian dinner in the city center. Innsbruck is a really cute old town, with very colorful buildings and a nice big pedestrian center. It’s even more beautiful than your average European city because it’s right in the middle of the Austrian Alps, so there are giant mountains anywhere you look. Unfortunately we didn’t get to explore the city as much as I had hoped, because the days we had planned for touring the city turned out to be pretty rainy. But it’s still beautiful nonetheless!

more amazing food: Tiroler Bauerngroestl

famous light wall. it's famous, okay?

Famous "Golden Roof" AND beautiful mountains

Friday morning we got up and drove still further west to Längenfeld. There, with the hope of recovering from the rigors of canyoning, we spent the day in luxury at the Aqua Dome, a thermal bath nestled in the Alps. The most eventful moment of the rainy drive there was when we turned down the road taking us to the spa and as we rounded the corner, we found ourselves stuck behind two HUGE cows walking down the road with their attendant supervising. These cows had to be pregnant or something because they were actually ginormous. You can imagine how excited I was…

The spa itself was glorious. There were two large indoor pools, and a sort of lazy river that led outside to a cone-shaped tower that was surrounded by three big “bowls” at varying levels. Each bowl had a different kind of water. One was very warm and salty, another had jets that switched on and off throughout the day, and the third had a sulfur fountain in the middle, that was supposed to provide both a massage and a mineral treatment. The coolest part of these pools was the fact that they were outside in the open air, so we had a perfect view of the stunning surroundings. We were quite literally IN the mountain, so all we could see on any side were mountainsides covered in thick tree-cover with really low, wispy clouds flowing through. It’s hard to describe, and of course we didn’t have our cameras with us, so you’ll have to just try to imagine how gorgeous it was. Everything looked very mystical—it was almost like we were in an enchanted world. And even though it was misting, raining, and pretty cold outside, we were in the warm pools, so we weren’t too cold. Basically everything was just amazing. There were also these private sauna boxes with differing lights based on what kind of mood you were looking for, and tons of “relaxation areas” with panorama views of the mountains. After a few hours we all felt amazing. For the rest of the day all four of us kept remarking about how much the others were glowing from the royal treatment we gave ourselves at the alpine spa!

Giant Wooly Mammoth inviting us to treat ourselves

Saturday was again pretty dreary weather-wise, so our plans of exploring Innsbruck and going up the mountain in the cable cars had to be scrapped. Instead we explored Hall, the little city we stayed in on Thursday and Friday night, and it turned out to be quite delightful.

We then drove back in the direction we came from, east towards Zell am See. This drive took us through lots of mountain passes and windy roads, giving us the opportunity to see a bunch of really small towns, mostly ski resort towns, including a few famous ones that hold ski competitions. In several of these we got out, walked around, and marveled at how adorable so many places in Austria are. I really enjoyed Kitzbühl, which many people compare to Vail or Aspen, in the sense that it’s kind of ritzy, and thrives off of ski tourism. We also stopped off at a few scenic overlooks, which were still stunning, despite the dreadful weather, and then finally made it to Zell am See, another city on a lake in the province of Salzburg.

Kitzbuehl teddy bear!

Downtown Kitzbuehl

On our last day we finally woke up to dry skies and a little bit of blue peeking through the clouds. This gave us a chance to actually enjoy Zell am See a little bit more. We had planned to drive up Großglockner, the tallest mountain in Austria, but we were worried that because of all the rain we had gotten the roads might be closed, or we might need special tires. And we weren’t sure if there would be much visibility, because the clouds were still quite low. Instead, we decided to check out Krimml, the home of the 5^th largest waterfall in the world! I am SO GLAD we did! Again, the drive there was beautiful (that goes without saying). We hiked about 15 minutes to the base of the falls, and then a pretty steep 30 minutes to the top of the falls, which was at a total elevation of about 1200 meters. The view from the bottom of the waterfall was incredible, since there was so much water after all the rain and melting snow, and then once we got to the top, we could see the entire valley below. The waterfall was so powerful and so impressive, I am really glad we ended up checking it out!

Zeller Lake from our hostel porch

We're going to that waterfall in the distance!

View of the valley from the path to the falls 

And then began our long trip back home. We drove a similar route to the one we came in on going again through a corner of Germany, through Salzburg, and back on the Autobahn all the way to St. Pölten, where we again parted ways. The entire weekend was simply wonderful. We got to see really spectacular scenery, and I just love the ladies I was travelling with. They’re always a blast, and it was great to have this trip to ensure a nice long weekend together before we all part ways in just a few short weeks! We laughed a ton, ate a ton and a half, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute! It was most definitely a weekend to remember.