...means, of course, "Happy New Year" in German :). Silvester (that's what Austrians call the 31. of December; I'm actually not sure if it's called the same in America) was fun. Slept until like 1pm or so (still adjusting to Austrian time), then woke up and did my last assignment for this past semester at Mannes, a bunch of counterpoint exercises, over lunch/dinner. Then my whole family went to the Stephansplatz (I guess that translates to St. Stephen's plaza or square) which is the dead center of Vienna; a friend of my dad's had a little hut there where he was selling food (prawn chips, spring rolls, sausages, and - an old childhood favorite - Langos, which is basically a deep fried flat piece of dough with some garlic sauce) and beverages (Glühwein - red wine mixed with water and served really hot, and Punsch - red wine mixed with orange juice and also served hot). My brother and I each had a Glühwein, and my brother was feeling all dizzy afterwards :). Also, by then, which was around 10pm or so, people were already firing all sorts of fireworks and crackers.

After hanging around for a while, I left the Stephansplatz to meet up with my friends. One of them, Attila, works as Marketing assistant for one of Vienna's radio stations - Energy.at - and is basically in charge of all the parties the station organizes, including the New Year's party they were throwing at the Nachtschicht, a club in the outer districts of Vienna. It so happens that one of Attila's duties at those parties is to make up the VIP list, and so, I conveniently had not only free access into the club, but also got free drinks and snacks :). You have to imagine, me - Asian, looking like a 16 year old - walking up to the two bouncers at the door and telling them "I'm on the VIP list." They didn't believe me, and asked me like "Who put you on the list?" and "Do you have an ID?" In the end, I got in fine though. Got a neat VIP pass to hang around my neck and all :). Unfortunately, none of my other friends had shown up due to various other commitments (Flo with his new girlfriend who doesn't like the Nachtschicht, Georg with a whole slew of invitations by relatives and friends, and the two Alexes at some other club in Vienna because one of them almost got beat up last year at the subway station next to the Nachtschict after he made some racist comments near a group of Turkish people and has since avoided the Nachtschicht.) but Attila had a few of his friends there. A heartwarming greeting, introduction to those friends,a few drinks - then it was time to hit the dance floor :P. I think that was the first real party (with dance floors, that is) I've been to since my Swarthmore years. Nice to relax that way again...

So we stayed there past the big moment - they had a countdown going and all, and at midnight sharp played the Donauwaltzer, or Blue Danube Waltz in English. Seeing almost everybody on the dancefloor waltzing to it was quite a sight. I just stood on the side - having left Vienna before reaching the age for learning ballroom dancing I didn't know how to waltz, plus I didn't have anybody to waltz with either :(. Then later, there had a live performance by a group called Groove Coverage that by the lead singer's accent I think is from Germany. They're pretty popular in Austria (Europe?) these days and the people at the club totally got into it - that was pretty awesome :). In the meantime, my brother was hanging around on the Stephansplatz - using our new digital camcorder to record the fireworks and all.

At some point later that night, Attila, his friends, and I left the Nachtschict and went into center city Vienna to another club, the Kursalon, a pretty elegant building near the Vienna Musikverein, where they had another New Year's party. Here we met up with Flo and his girlfriend, Georg, and one of the Alexes (the other had to call it a night after he threw up a couple times and fell asleep at the other club they were at). More warm hello-hugs and quick chat before getting a few more drinks and hitting the dancefloor, though this one wasn't quite as good - for one, the lighting sucked (it consisted of pretty much the standard room lighting) and the music wasn't quite as good either - even to a techno-music layman like me. But, the company was fun, so it was all good. We stayed until around 5:30 at which point we left and somebody drove me home, where I took a shower to get rid of the awful smell of smoke on me - most of my friends fell for this unfortunate habit years ago and never got out of it - and then lay in bed for a while, thinking about things. At some point - probably between 7 and 8 - I finally fell asleep.

All in all, a pretty moderate evening, compared to the one three years ago :). I didn't even really get drunk!

The next morning could not have started better - what could possibly be better than waking up to the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic playing waltzes and polkas?? Ahhh...the typically Viennese jagged waltz rhythm just felt soo good that it almost made me forget that it was only about noon and I had slept for less than 5 hours. The remainder of the day was less exciting, basically just visiting a couple friends of my dad's at their restaurants and eating lots and lots of food, albeit pretty good food.

Today, I woke at at noon again, then did some work for my dad, who's redoing the menu for his Thai food place. The previous guy whom my dad hired to do this had to go back to China because of Visa problems and took all the documents with him, so I'm going to have to retype everything, take pictures of various dishes with my camera and put it all together, all within this next coming week. Then, my dad, my brother and I went to play table tennis in the afternoon. That felt good - not only did I virtually do no physical exercise all fall semester long, but my dad has been showing me videos of recent tournament games that made me all psyched up to play. Playing today makes me miss the old days of table tennis tournaments, championships and [winning trophies] and want to get back into it again! Anyways, afterwards we went to my aunt's place again for a big Huo Guo dinner, followed by a Mozart cake. I left around 11 to head towards the 19th district of Vienna where the Buddha Club is located. It's Georg's birthday today and he was throwing a dinner party there - free entry, food and drinks for all invited. That must have cost Georg quite some money, I imagine. The place was packed with people - Georg is member of a Studentenverbindung, which I guess is comparable to a fraternity. It was great fun though, not only was the music pretty good (phew, some non-techno music!) but some of my friends that I didn't meet on New Year's eve were there too: Miki, the other Alex, and Rene, whom I haven't seen since three years ago. Rene was pretty drunk by then and kept hugging me over and over and saying how glad he was to see me again :). I only stayed until about quarter past midnight though, because most of my friends have jobs to wake up for tomorrow, so when the last one of them left (with exception of Georg of course, who still had lots of guests left to entertain), I left too.

So, what's still in store for the coming week: A snowboarding/ski trip to the [Hochkar] with my brother and my cousin, a coffee house gettogether with Miki, a gettogether with all the boys in sober (at least initially) state, probably another snowboarding trip to the Hochkar with some of them, another birthday party (Flo's girlfriend), a trip to the Czech Republic (where lots of stuff is cheaper to buy), hopefully an evening at the Vienna indoor soccer tournament in the Wiener Stadthalle and watching my favorite team, [Rapid Wien], and most definitely at least one shopping spree for chocolates and wines as gifts for people back in the US. So busy!

By the way, apologies for any weird spelling errors, especially with y's and z's. It's the German kezboard :P...Pictures to be put up soon!

Another update, though not nearly as much to write about as last time. Monday was kind of an off day, we went to my other cousin's (she is like 15 years older than me) restaurant and ate lunch there...then I walked around and shopped for postcards, then went home and worked on the menu for my dad. Tuesday I gave into the pressure that literally all my relatives here were giving me and got a haircut; then unsuccessfully fought through a jungle of web sites and agencies referring me back and forth to find someone who was running a bus to the Hochkar ski resort on weekdays. Blah, the latest plan is now to go on a weekend bus on Saturday with my brother (no cousin since he's leaving for Taipei tomorrow), and with Flo and Georg and maybe Attila on Sunday. Then, hung out with Flo, Attila, and the two Alexes for a good four hours in a nice homey tavern over a couple beers, chatting about all sorts of stuff.

Today, spent the early afternoon helping Attila move into his new apartment, which gave me the opportunity to see his mom, a professional cellist. She was saying how her job has become harder and harder because competition is just getting tougher and tougher with the borders to Eastern Europe open now because of the EU. On my way home, I was walking past an area of Vienna right next to the Danube canal and saw the biggest and most beautiful rainbow ever hanging in the sky - it was sitting on both ends on the horizon and went all the way around and was so vibrant! It was just such a glorious sight...I was glad to see people walking by and noticing it too, smiling, some even striking conversation with nearby strangers about the phenoomenon. Such is nature, capable of such terrible destruction and such harmonious beauty...Bought a scanner for my dad, then later in the evening went over to my aunt's house again with my brother to spend some time with and say good-bye to my cousin who sadly is leaving tomorrow. Then, finished the day off back at Attila's new house, where we watched a DVD of Vienna's most famous cabaret artist. Pretty funny stuff, even though at times his Viennese dialect was a bit hard to understand (especially when he was playing a drunk character).

Quick recap of my last few days in Austria...Thursday I spent the morning with my family saving our photo, coin and stamp collections and some books and sheet music from certain doom and moved them from a dusty storage space to our apartment (they were put there when my dad sold our old house and had to move everything out). In the afternoon, I met up with Miki in a Viennese Cafe over hot chocolate and live music performed by a piano trio! It was kind of unusual - but nice! - to be on the other side for once - usually when there's classical music in that kind of setting, I'm the one who's providing the music. Anyways, a nice two-plus-hour chat with Miki later, I went to play more table tennis with my dad, despite heavy soreness in my right pec from last time.

Friday was a busy day. First, my brother and I both had an appointment with a physician to get a referral for a blood test since it's been a while and we both still have some health insurance under my dad's name. What we didn't know was that in order for anybody to get a referral, there has to be something wrong - symptoms for which the doctor needs a blood test to help with a diagnosis. Luckily, the doctor was understanding about it and played along, and so my brother ended up having "constant feelings of fatigue", while I had "trouble concentrating." After we got our blood taken, my brother and I walked along the Ringstrasse trying to find a travel agency to book our snowboarding trip for the following day. Along the way, we walked by a drug store, which reminded my brother that he had to buy some contact solution. Not knowing what the German word for it was (and not believing me that it's Kontaktlinsenloesung), my brother spoke to the salesperson in English - only to turn around to me when it was time to pay and ask "Oli, hast du 50 Cents?" ("Oli, do you have 50 cents?") in perfect, un-American-accented Austrian German. Must have been confusing to the salesperson; certainly, it was subject to much laughter between my brother and me after we left the store.

The next thing on the schedule after booking the snowboarding trip was the Wiener Hallenfussballturnier. On the schedule today were seven games - the last one being one of the highlights of Austrian soccer: The Wiener Derby, Rapid Vienna against Austria Vienna, the two Viennese rival teams in the Austrian top league. The chanting competition between the fan blocks of both clubs alone was worth every Euro-cent of the ticket price. They also had all sorts of activities going on outside the main event hall, fanshops (I bought a Rapid Vienna scarf), soccer players autographing for fans, and various games where you could win stuff. I tried out one of them where you had to shoot a soccer ball into one of two holes in a wall...unfortunately, I closely missed both of my shots. I blame my boots for it :). After all the games were over (Rapid unfortunately lost 3-2 despite having many more scoring chances than Austria did), I headed to the last stop of the day, the Palais Auersperg, where the birthday party of Flo's girlfriend Evelyn was being held.

Saturday of course, was the snowboarding trip, which was fun...my brother, standing on the snowboard for the second time of his life, fell a lot :), but got a lot better towards the end. The weather was absolutely beautiful - clear sky, sun out, but not too warm to make all the snow melt away. I'll let the [pictures] speak for themselves...

Sunday was supposed to be another snowboarding day with my Flo and Georg, but Flo chickened out... Instead, my parents and I moved more stuff from the storage space to our apartment (my brother hung out with a friend of his from Swarthmore who was visiting relatives in Vienna), then spent the afternoon packing. In the evening, we went to my aunt's house for a farewell dinner. Emotional goodbyes...then a final gettogether with all my friends in a tavern until the early morning hours. Went to sleep around 2:30...

...and woke up at 6 again to catch the airport bus. Around 8:45, a final look across the airfield (they took us to the plane on a bus instead of boarding straight through one of those walkways), a final breath of Vienna air, and in we went into our airplane. We stopped in Frankfurt, where we almost missed our connecting flight because my mom's green card had expired even though she was told that it wouldn't be a problem because a new one was being processed already. Arrived in good ol' Philly around 4pm where my mom had to get through more trouble but luckily was spared the $200 fine that's usually associated with attempts at entering the US with an expired green card. The rest of the evening was spent unpacking, repacking, and riding car, NJT, and NY subway back to 300 W 20th, my dorm.

It's weird though: now that I've had a day here, back in school routine, those memories of Vienna seem strangely unreal...like a dream almost. I guess it's because everything happened so suddenly - like POP!, here we are in Vienna, and POP! we're gone again...

Impression #1: Dude, where's my life? I'm taking too many classes. Continuing from last semester, I'm still taking Theory III and History review; new courses are Analysis for Grad Students (Schenkerian analysis), Formal Structures (an in-depth look into musical form that goes way beyond the plain-vanilla sonata form blah blah), and Intro to Grad Studies (a "how to do grad level research in the music library" class). On the chamber music front, I have a third group now, a string quartet. The two violinists are first-year freshmen with little chamber experience, and the violist and I (both master's students) have been recruited to help teach them "how to play chamber music." One of the violinists is from China, 16 years old and extremely talented, but what's interesting is that she actually doesn't really want to do music as a career, but computer science! And her parents were actually against her studying computers and pushed for music instead...what a crazy world. The other violinist is Korean and is actually the same age as me; but she had an elbow injury right after high school and had to pause for almost 3 years before being able to play violin again...a pretty impressive feat to get into a conservatory after such an ordeal. She was also the only person ever to have overestimated my age (she thought I looked 25, even with my new short haircut, which soo makes me look like a high schooler!).

My other groups haven't changed much. The trio is still the same, we're doing Arensky's first piano trio this semester. Arensky - not known very much for his music, but more for having taught two really famous Russian composers. I think Rimsky-Korsakov and somebody else...My quartet has a new pianist after last semester's fiasko, and we're doing Dvorak's D major quartet. Lots of cello lines :P.

Anyways, all in all, that's 22 credits, almost all my days are choke-full with commitments (but free Friday afternoons to chill in NYC before heading back home. yeah!).

Impression #2: Dorm life much improved, mainly because Josh has moved out. Yeah, pretty much everybody was psyched to see him go, he was just going on everybody's nerves with his rude and offensive jokes. Parker also moved out (moved in with his brother and is saving tons of money that way), David quit his program and went back to Seattle, and Jonas, of course, back to Sweden. The school has arranged for replacements for the four of them though; two have moved in already. Simon is from Canada and here to get a PhD in PoliSci, and Jared is from Ohio and here to get a Master's in Urban Policies. Good people so far, more on them at a later point.

Impression #3: How to lose 10 pounds in 10 days.

1. Do almost no exercise for a whole semester. You may get a YMCA membership with hopes of going swimming somewhat regularly, but your actual number of swims may not exceed 4.
2. Travel to Austria. Eat lots of food, drink lots of beer with old friends.
3. Come back to the US and head straight to school. Sign up for ridiculous amounts of classes, starting at 9am at least 3 times a week. The Thursday schedule must start at 9 and go straight until 6pm. Do not adjust your sleeping pattern to local time; instead, go to sleep early evening and wake up anywhere between 2 and 4 am. Try to sleep more, but do not. When the gym opens at 7, go work out. Do 20 - 30 minutes of bike work, then sit ups. Occasional weight lifting is also ok. Early morning TV is a good companion for the lonely ones among you. Eat lots of grapefruit, subway sandwiches, and self made burritos with nasty fat-free sour cream. Add some emotional stress.
4. As work load increases at school, you may reduce the workout frequency slightly. Sleep less; your total sleep per day may not exceed 6 hours, and never more than 4 hours in one sleep session.
5. If you follow these directions, you will lose 10 pounds within the first 10 days of coming back from Austria!

Note: Results are based on research done on 1 subject.

...and yesterday was a first for a lot of things. Like driving through the snow storm on 76 West heading into Philly and getting pulled over by a cop to help him push a woman's car that was stuck in the snow out of the way so that we (me plus two other girls he asked for help too) could then push his car out of being stuck in the snow after he stopped to help the woman get out of being stuck in the snow. Got it? The woman got stuck first, then the cop stopped and couldn't help her get out of it, but he parked his car right behind hers and now spinning in the snow, he couldn't get out, so we had to first push the woman's car out of his car's way and then get his car back on track.

Then, at 30th st station, my mom decided that I should buy an Amtrak ticket instead of riding Septa/NJTransit to get to NYC as soon as possible. We got to 30th st station around 3:15, so we bought a ticket for the 3:18 train, which was listed as already 40 minutes late. So after being treated to a Latte by my mom and then sitting and waiting around for a bit, I got into lane at stairway 3 around 4pm. And waited...and waited...and then, all the sudden they pulled the Stairway number for my train off the board. So we stood in front of the board and waited...and waited...then they put Stairway 4 on the board, and the crowd "swoop" shifted to stairway 4 and waited...and waited...then all the sudden, they put stairway 3 back on the board, so back the crowd goes to stairway 3. Then this woman appeared and was calling out for passengers on train 194 to come to her at - yep, stairway 4. So by the time they finally figured out whic stairway to lead us down to (which turned out to be both) and boarded the train (some of their doors were frozen shut!!), it was like 4:45 pm already. I found a nice open row, put my cello down in one seat and sat down in th enext, waiting for everyobyd else to settle down and the train to go. Waited ...and waited...and then the announcement came that the train was having power problems and that we'd have to switch to another train. It was like 5:15 when we finally left Philly.

Once back in my apartment in NYC, my apartment mates and i just spent the rest of the night consuming chocolate and wine from Austria and playing Trivial Pursuit. Mark and I played in a team, and for once I didn't feel like I was just there to read questions for the other teams :P. Mark and I at one point put down a streak of three straight pieces, going from 3 to 6, and almost intercepted the brain powerhouse team of Scott and Steve, but lost to them in the end.

[The Austrian version]
[The American version]

Hm...this week went by rather strangely...kinda fast, kinda slow, and I can't really remember all that many details. I remember on Wednesday having my first chamber coaching with my piano quartet and getting angry at times at our coach, because he's Korean and exudes a certain kind of Korean (Asian?) male superiority thing...a belittling condescending kind of attitude that just totally gets to my nerves. But, I gotta give it to him, it makes me want to practice like crazy so that he won't have anything to be condescending about.

I remember chasing homework deadlines en masse: researching in the library and finishing right at closing time and completing some short composition assignments during orchestra rehearsal break to turn in at class right after the rehearsal...I remember getting excited in Theory III class because this semester we're going to be covering canons and fugues, and we'll have to compose one of each. Composition really is the coolest, so free of any physical restraints, unlike playing instruments. Have I mentioned the 4F short film project before? Antonio wrote a short play last semester that Frank has turned into a short film, with Mark in the lead role. Now that Frank has just finished editing it and produced a pretty final cut, it's my turn as the resident music student to compose and play/record the music for it.

I remember struggling through two rehearsals of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion & Celeste, which is probably one of the least sightreadable pieces I've ever played...the second and fourth movements are fast, the rhythm is just all over the place (time signatures changing between 4/8 and 5/8 with syncopations and yadda yadda), and it's, of course, atonal so you can't very well go by ear either. But, now that it's starting to shape up , I'm actually starting to really like it. Concert's on 2/15; the other pieces on the program are Beethoven Eroica (always a blast to play) and Stravinsky Symphonies of Winds (always a blast not to have to play).

But that's about it...everything else is just kind of a blur of classes and rehearsals. I really ought to get a better grip on my schedule.

Msn.com had this article "First date foods to avoid" in which they talk about - well, first date foods to avoid. Foods like Spinach, Lobster, Ribs, Beans, Corn on the cob. Come on, that's just so stupid!! I think that at my next first date dinner (ha! I say it as if they are a fixed part of my schedule :P), I will make it a point to order only foods that I "should avoid." Yes...something with spinach and onions...not the lobster though, that'd be cutting a bit too deep into my Master's of Music ridden wallet.