The beginning of session two has been an interesting experience. It is very different having a lot less people here in the program, let alone brand new people! However, it's a new experience and I have definitely enjoyed it so far. On Monday, we started the first day of classes of this session, so I had my first Senior Seminar class. I am really excited for what I am going to learn about myself and the other people in my class, but it definitely will be a lot of work for just a couple weeks. We will also have a guest speaker almost every day from people who live in Vienna but have had very different experiences throughout their lifetimes. In class on Monday we talked about our backgrounds and about what we're going to be doing in the next few weeks. After class Jessie and I got lunch and I was pretty exhausted after the seriously crazy weekend, so I spent the rest of the day at home just relaxing, doing homework, and skyping with the family.
Tuesday in class we had a discussion on readings from a book that we are working through called This I Believe which is a book of essays written by all sorts of people, from famous to unknown, that finish the sentence "This I Believe". It's a really great book so far and I am excited to read more. After our discussion we heard from Herbert Czermak, who was actually the professor for the history class from last session. He has lived such an interesting life, being born right next to the Czech border and studying in a small town, and then going to the United States to study for several years. He's also traveled all over the world and spent time in so many different countries and has so many great insights on living a life that is focused on the global community. After his presentation we had about an hour for lunch and then went back to class for another speaker. We got to hear from Maria Verber, so one of the coolest ladies I have ever met. She is 90 years old and has such an amazing story. Her family is Jewish so she saw the discrimination against her family during WWII. She managed to make it out of the country over to England and then to the US. She got married in the US but ended up coming back to Vienna and has lived here for the rest of her life. She has so much energy even though she has seen some terrible things. She asked us questions too and made us think about our own families too. After she finished talking to us Jessie and I decided to go shopping but spent another pretty relaxing night at home.
On Wednesday we had another speaker in class named Mickela Moore. She is a lawyer who grew up in the United States but always had a desire to live abroad, so in college she spent a year in Spain and since then has lived in England, Hungary, and Germany, but her base has been Vienna for a long time. She has had such an interesting life but right now she is doing what is called "art law". I didn't really understand what it means, but I think they recover paintings and make sure that the right person owns the painting. She really loves art, so as part of her presentation she had us paint! There weren't enough paint brushes so a lot of people had to finger paint. I don't really have any artisitic talent, but she gave us some topics and told us to paint symbols that go along with those topics and they could mean anything we wanted. It was so cool to have that freedom to paint whatever we wanted and it didn't have to be good as long as it meant something to us. It was such a fun day and it was really fun to see all of these seniors in college having a blast finger painting.
What a great start to this new session, can't wait to see what the next few weeks bring! Tschuss!
No comments:
Post a Comment