27.02.2017 (ff)  – After getting in the bus at ZOB, the final travel towards Vienna started. The last barrier of things known to me has gone now, no more comfortable bed sheets, no more easy walks in a room at night without lights, no more having known people around yourself. From now on everything was new. The bus was filled with Slavic languages, the landscape took shapes unfamiliar to me, and I did not know where I will sleep in a 7 days future.

During the time before going to Vienna I paid little attention where exactly I end up. I got very comfortable with not knowing where I am heading, it gives a hard describeable kick, a feeling that you only will be able to succeed. Nevertheless, back to the bus trip. Around 4 o’clock I finally arrived at Vienna Erdberg, eventually the bus terminal of Vienna. The Friday before I booked a hostel called “Wombats City Hostel -The Naschmarkt”, wonderfully located, next to Naschmarkt, an area of many restaurants and a fixed food market. Needless to say it is next to the Technical University of Vienna. The idea at that time was to put myself in a nice spot to find a shared apartment in the long run.

The first evening in Vienna, I treated myself with a nice Schnitzel and a good local beer. You might ask yourself who took the picture. After a few minutes after I moved in the shared room in the hostel I had a small talk with a room mate. It turned out he will be studying in Vienna as well and more importantly he did an exchange year with YFU. So making first contacts in Vienna was not that hard. (Small disclaimer for my fellow readers. YFU stand for “Youth For Understanding” and organises cultural exchanges for teenagers between 15-18 around the whole globe. I highly recommend my readers with kids to send their kids away in the young age.)

Sven is his name, I will ask him if he is willing for a portrait in a future post. Spending some time with him he informed me that he will be moving in a dorm on the first of March. But this will no bring me away from plan to find a shared apartment and get to know local Austrian people.

28.02.2017 (Tuesday) – How should I spend my first day in Vienna? Start writing emails and making calls to find a shared apartment, get the camera out and explore Vienna, or start writing the blog? I stayed in bed and listened to EAV (Link To Youtube). But no, this was just for a couple of minutes, I packed laptop and camera in my bag and went out to the main building of the TU Wien. TU Wien is the university I will be staying until the end of June.

After having a small breakfast in one of the surrounding cafés I sat down at the university to write emails. So many emails I hadn’t have written for a long time. It did not take long and the first people replied. So it came that the first visit was organised in a matter of hours for the second of March.

Spending some hours wondering around the inner city I decided to head back to the hostel as I was planning to meat Sven for dinner. So far I have to make you happy with this image bellow, but there will be whole series coming. 😉 No worries.

01.03.2017 (Wednesday) – Official start of the academic summer semester of TU Wien. Starting with an introduction lecture for incoming exchange students I already missed my first lecture, because of the overlap. I was told that the first lecture is more an introduction to the field of Econometrics of Business Informatics rather than jumping right in the topic, so no big harm done. After the introduction session of the TU Wien we were introduced to the ESN Buddynetwork (Link), this great network will take care of the social aspects of studying in Vienna.