During the rough days of my internship, I had one thing to look forward to: the obligatory trip to Vienna.
According to our official looking 'curriculum manual', this trip is all about discovering the beautiful Austrian culture. Main goals are learning about the school system, language, food and culture. Sounds great (and a little pretentious to be honest), doesn't it?
But if you put a group of 36 college freshmen and sophomores in a hostel in Vienna, you know things will be slightly different than the curriculum manual promises...

I went to Vienna on April 16th. After that date, everything becomes a blur. You see, we ran from one side of Vienna to the other, then back to the almost exact point where we started. And that for five days. We lost people on the Tube, we lost people on the streets, we even lost people on the toilets! It was chaos, but an organized and fun chaos.
We visited Prater, a luna park right in the middle of the city. The entire freshman class went go-karting, which meant full-on craziness. The roller coasters were constantly filled with screaming freshmen and I even went 117 meters up into the air in the world's highest swing ride: the Prater Turm!
The next day we toured the city in a bus and visited Austria's national television studios. I saw a lot of gigantic buildings that day, a ton of expensive cameras and a rehearsal for the Eurovision Song Festival.
Day 3 began with a tour of the Stephansdom and its catacombs (which are filled with bones). While most of my (hungover) classmates fled the catacombs as soon as the first skull came into vies, I enjoyed the peaceful cilence and the creepy vibe. I was even a bit disappointed when I had to leave the catacombs and head for Schloss Schönbrunn. Schloss Schönbrunn was a bit 'meh...' to be honest.

Me accidentally being in a picture of Schloss Schönbrunn

On the last day I did absolutely nothing. We visited a school in the morning and claimed a gigantice lounge-bed-thingy in the hostel for the rest of the day.

Let's take a moment to appreciate this fine piece of art, shall we?

So that sounded pretty nice and calm, didn't it? Well, it wasn't. In between the cultural activities, there was a lot going on.
I drank wine for the first time in my life. When my roommates realized I wasn't going to puke or have a hangover, they gave me a round of applause and pronounced me a 'grown-up'. As if :P
One of older roommates, however, got so drunk that she puked all over herself and one of the guys. She had to spend the night in the guys' room, where she was at the moment of puking. When she came back she brought a sour stench of wine puke with her. Upon entering the room she wrinkled her nose and said: 'You guys, you make the room stink.'
It wasn't all about drinking though. When people weren't getting wasted, they were taking pictures, lots and LOTS of pictures. In one of them my friend and I were photobombed by an old fat man. After getting back to the hostel and talking to our roommates, we discovered that this man had photobombed almost all our pictures that morning!

I also became the center of attention for the first time in my life, as my roommates decided to straighten my hair and showed me to the guys - who didn't even recognize me ar first, Probably because they had been drinking since noon that day.
Not everyone wanted to drink all day long, so at one point two of my roommates and I hid in our room with Chinese take-out and acted like we were on the Big Bang Theory. We discussed the most awkward thing of all: sharing a toilet with six people. This brought us to the great idea of impersonating the guys and their war over the toilets. We also decided our bathroom smelled disgusting (the drunk girl left her puke-stained clothes there) and one of the girls used her deodorant to mask the smell. We almost suffocated because of all the gasses and everything smelled like mango for hours. When one of our roommates came back and asked what had happened in the bathroom, the three of us yelled: "Mango poop!" and laughed for a solid five minutes.

So yes, things got crazy. A bottle of wine exploded in my hands. I bumped into a guy in a Superman suit (he even said 'hi' to me!). Batman chocolate eggs were eaten all day long. It was simply awesome. Next year we'll go to Berlin, hopefully with less drunk people and more Big Bang Theory style take-out!

Stay Awesome!