"Oh to be young and feel love's keen sting."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been out for four days...and I have seen it three times. Surely, Internet, this is the life.

As promised, I will explain exactly what I'm doing, work-wise, now that I'm here. After visiting the Literaturhaus, Reading Room, and Literary Archives, Dr. Kling and I have decided that there is no possible way that I'd be able to do any actual research in the next two weeks. First, because there's a lot of sources. Second, they're in German, which I can barely speak. Instead, I'm going to compose a list of resources (an annotated bibliography of sorts), so that when I'm applying for the Fulbright Scholarship, I can write what specifically is in Vienna that I absolutely cannot get in America. So, that's about it...not as exciting as I originally made it out to be.

I've continued my exploration of the city, visiting the Secession Museum and Leopold Museum, as well as...



The Museum of Natural History
Ohmygod, dinosaurs! I think I need to preface this by saying that I love dinosaurs about as much as six-year-old boys love dinosaurs. They are so freaking cool, I almost can't stand it. Clearly, I'm agitated just thinking about how neat they are. Anyway...the weather was super hot the day that I went, but my thoughts were, "This is a big tourist place. It must have air conditioning. Where better to go on a hot day?" Wrong. As I sweated my way through five rooms of rocks, trying to find dinosaurs, I began to rethink my decision. Especially because there were five. Rooms. Of rocks. Although, it was kind of funny, because I wasn't reading any of the accompanying information (since it's in German), so very often I would walk from one room to the next and be like, "...the hell? How could this possibly relate to what I was just looking at?" I must say, it made the experience interesting, albeit frustrating. But I found the dinosaurs, which was AWESOME. And I found the bear/lion/seal and elephant/giraffe/whale and antelope/bison/oxen rooms, which was cool (although again...organization?).

Here are two more pictures/thoughts from my trip:



BIRDS ARE HUGE. Holy crap. I mean, I live in New Jersey, where birds are the size of my fist, and even hawks aren't that big. But apparently some birds are just giant killing machines. I don't like it.



I'm including this picture because it's just plain weird, and there are probably better ways to catalog mice. But no, this was just an entire case filled with drawers, with what appeared to be glued-together mice sort of tossed haphazardly into it. This is one of the reasons I wished I could read the information next to it, or at least ask a curator who bummed their way through this job.

When I woke up yesterday it was thunder storming and soverycold. So I hung out in my apartment all day, cleaning, napping, and researching graduate schools. I might have found my ideal Comparative Literature program (squee!), but I'm still looking into some other schools. Fingers crossed, Internet.

Today, since the weather is lovely, Dr. Kling and I are going for a hike, then seeing the opera Rigoletto at the rathaus (City Hall).

I've been feeling a little homesick, so comment and tell me you miss me.

Auf Wiedersehen!