Wednesday, May 16- Day 3:

Today marked day three of my Austrian adventure. We started out the day with a walking tour by Austrian native Elisabeth Wurzl. Although the tour was two hours I feel like we barely scratched the surface of Vienna's rich history. We saw lots of old buildings, rich people stores, and statues of men on horses, but the most intriguing part of the day was the statue memorial for the Jewish holocaust victims. The statue was located in the front of the Albertina museum. In my opinion, the artist captured the sorrow that surrounds the topic very well. Just standing there and staring at the different parts of the statue you start to feel heavy and emotional.

I was very interested when our tour guide described what the Austrian flag meant. She said "I love my country, but I hate my flag." The flag is striped with a red stripe, a white one, and another red one. This symbolizes when the troops got back from war covered in blood and took off their belts. The only white part on the uniform was where the belt was removed from. This country is rich in history and years and it just proves how young America is as a country and how far we still have to come in learning.

After our walking tour we went to the Albertina museum. The permanent exhibit was Monet to Degas. We saw lots of beautiful paintings as well as some very weird ones. We got to see an original part of the palace that had been restored to its original style. Lastly, we saw the Keith Herring exhibit. Keith Herring is an American artist that died of AIDS. His art was very... interesting to say the least. Very sexual.

One of our teacher assigned goals was to meet someone new today. Accidentally this was one of the first things we did. On our way to the Institute we took a train our normal route. A young man maybe 25ish years old offered a young boy some of the candy he had (apparently normal because the kid took it and the grandma let him). After this, the man offered me some and started speaking German to me. Obviously I did not know what he was saying so my response was "English Bitte" (English Please). All of the people around me began speaking in English and asking all sorts of questions. When it came time to get off the older woman with the child said to us "Thank you for being so polite." Americans have a bad reputation for being loud, rude, and annoying, but today we changed that in the mind of 3 Germans and 2 Viennese. Small victories!