BLOG 4: FOOD AND NATURE

Trying the typical food of a country that you visit is obligatory. Because of this, the other two exchange students and I had an activity on Thursday  that consisted  in going to a restaurant to taste some typical food. I ate a burger that had, meat, eggs, bacon, lettuce, and a special sauce that is typical of Austria, that makes the burger very special and different. The “funny” anecdote happened at the end of the lunch. The waiter of the restaurant, (who had been very friendly with us and had told me that he used Spanish to impress the girls) brought us a really hot chillli and he said that if any of us could eat it he would give us free drinks. Nöel (the Belgian guy) and I decided to play a game of “Rock, paper or scissors” and agreed that the loser would eat the chilli. Unfortunately, I was the loser! I had to eat the chilli and it was really hard, I was drinking water at the bathroom for thirty minutes after that… but I won the free drinks! Obviously, I chose milk as  my free drink, I need it to stop the flavour of the chilli. I add here a funny picture of me and Henrik after eat so much.                           

On Saturday we went to a kind of zoo that had a lot of types of birds and rabbits. There were from pigeons to tropical birds, and I remember that I saw a bird really similar to the capercaillie, that bird that is in danger of extinction an it is almost only found in Asturias. In the rabbit section, there were some seven kg. rabbits, that looked almost like dogs. For me the coolest ones were the smaller ones, and Anna (my host-sister) thought the same so… she bought one! It is a small black and white rabbit that is called David. Some judges valued and scored the animals and David was one of the bests. Then we ate there. Here was  a restaurant there that is totally eco-friendly and only serves organic food with products from their farm. It was a really cool healthy lunch.

This post is shorter because on Sunday I decided to rest for the school trip to Viena… so my next post will be the best for sure!

BLOG POST 3:

 LINZ, A CITY WITH A LOT OF FUN

On my third week I was completely used to my new life here and I had a lot of interesting activities to do. First I must tell you a strange anecdote that I lived on Sunday. I went to an enormous supermarket in Linz, but the curious thing was that an extreme right- wing politician (racist and almost a nazi according to my friends) was making a speech there. It was a bit scary to see all those people listening to that man saying that he wanted people who are not Austrian out of Austria… Well, better to start with the funny anecdotes now, I know you prefer them!

 On Thursday we had a class called “German for beginners”. At this class we learn German doing ordinary activities out of the class. For example, in this first class we went to Linz to play Laser Tag and go shopping. We visited the big shopping center (the same I had visited on Sunday) and then we went to a Haribo big shop. All products there were made of Haribo.  At first, I thought that some products were free and I started to eat them at the shop… Don’t get me wrong! I swear I hadn’t seen the prices on the products! Then we went to play Laser Tag, a game that has two teams, your objective is to shoot the people of the other team with your laser gun. It was an amazing game but it is really intense so we finished the game very tired.

I must say that the first games I played pretty badly and I almost had negative score because I shot people of my own team… but then I improved my level and I understood the game better, so I became a “good” player. On Friday we (my host family, me and the other exchange students, Henrick and Nö

el) went to an ice-hockey match, between the Black Wings (the team that we supported because they are from Linz) and the Red Bull Salzburg, one of the best teams in Austria. The match was amazing, historic, wonderful, magical…. The match had three parts of 20 minutes and it started very aggressively and crazy (some fights between players, kicks and a lot of hits) but without goals. In the second part our team (Black Wings) scored two goals and we started to think it was going to be an easy win, but Salzburg scored at the start of the third part… and they scored another goal when there were only 60 seconds of match left. But our hope didn’t disappear and… our team scored in the last ten seconds an amazing goal and we won! The stadium was full of people, so with that goal all the Black Wings supporters exploded with happiness and I felt the stadium literally shaking. Both experiences were very funny, but this doesn’t end here, I still have five weeks more here so I will live, and of course tell you, many other adventures.

SCHOOL, ART AND HISTORY

I woke up at 6:00, but I was feeling energetic because it was going to be my first school day in Austria. Isabelle (my Austrian mother) drove me to the school, HTL Perg, a big modern school. First of all I met the other two foreign students, Henrick, from Sweden, and Noel, from Belgium. Then Mrs. Danner, our tutor, introduced us to the classroom and we played some funny games to get to know each other better. This day I was at school just for four hours, so we didn’t do much more. That afternoon Isabelle and I took Hellios (the family’s dog) for a walk along the Danube bank. I ended the day playing a ludo game with the whole family. The ludo was one of the presents that I took them from Spain.

The next day my first class was Physical Education. The teacher let us select what sport we wanted to do, I (as a good Spanish) chose football! I know that you don’t want to hear more about lessons and you want to read my adventures at the weekend, so there we go! On Friday, Sebastian, two of his friends (Niklas and Thomas) and I went to Linz to paint graffiti. On the way to the wall that we were going to use (a wall builded to paint graffiti over it) we saw an incredible graffiti by a famous artist who painted the faces of some famous rappers, it looks like a photo! I had never painted graffiti before, so I enjoyed my first time a lot! I am not very good, but they said that being my first time my graffiti wasn’t too bad. They painted a big graffiti that was very cool.

On Sunday I made other cultural visit, but very different from my visit to Linz. We went to Mauthausen, one of the biggest nazi concentration camps. It is very near our house and it is certainly not a funny visit, but it is history and it is important to see and remember what happened there. We chose a good day to go there because, at the same moment, Spain was living difficult moments and a lot of violence because of the Catalan referendum and in Mauthausen, where a lot of Catalans and Spanish republicans died, there were a lot of Catalan and republican flags.

In summary, it was a week when I did lots of different and varied things.