omg omg omg omg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

O.M.G. I'm in paradise!! (omg translation : oh my gosh!!) I'm here, everybody. I'm in Bad Ischl, Austria where I'll be for the next year...or the rest of my life!! JOKE, family. This place, though, this city is stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. So I thought I'd be living in the outer foothills of the Alps, but it turns out that I really am in the alps. The whole town is surrounded by small mountains. I spent the day laughing at my luck. It's fascinatingly simple what Europeans do with nature. They're greedy with their beauty. "Oh, there's a small hill of an island in the middle of that lake? There I shall build my castle." I imagine it goes about like that. It's unfair. I grew up in Tulsa, and all we had to work with there was a dirty river, really. It's hard not to hate people who get to live in this wonder. Oh wait, I get to do that for a year. Let's all hate me, too.

Before I get any further, quick background. Click on the links:
Here's where I am geographically
http://maps.google.at/maps?q=bad+ischl&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=de&sa=N&tab=wl
As you zoom out you'll see that I'm about 45 minutes from Salzburg, and a couple of hours from Vienna and Munich. I'm in the region of Upper Austria, about an hour from the border to Germany.
Below are the best pictures I could find, but of course they don't do the trick.
http://harmonyhouse.at/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bad-Ischl-austria-615544_1024_768.jpg
http://www.eichingerbauer.at/images/content/big/bad_ischl.jpg

So I want this entry to be a kind of legend, or guide for you. I hope it will give you some tools to imagine my surroundings better. The very basics: Austria is a country. It is not Australia, and as you'll see in the map it is south of Germany, which is one of the few geographical facts relevant to me at this point. I encourage you to check out its history, as it was once the center of a powerful empire. They speak German all over the country, albeit in different accents and dialects that are hard to understand even for some native Germans. The region I'm in, Upper Austria, shares a common linguistic history with the German state it borders to the north, Bavaria. I was in Bavaria a little more than one year ago for my year abroad in the town of Eichstaett. Many of the people in Bavaria speak Bavarian, and Bavarian can range from an accent to a full out dialect with different words and sentence constructions. For a German from northern Germany whose had little exposure to the dialect, it can be very hard to understand.

To me: Many have asked me how well I speak and understand German. You can say I speak it fluently, but that's honestly a pretty inexact description. I finally thought of an apt metaphor to give you an idea of my German speaking and comprehension abilities. Imagine a 1000 piece puzzle of some German castle (maybe Neuschwanstein, the most famous). In the middle is the castle on a hill, below are trees, and above is the sky. About a third is trees, a third is sky, and a third is castle. The castle goes like a breeze, because every contour is so remarkable, but the sky and trees are nearly impossible. There's no way to look at a piece with tens of miniscule leaves, or twenty shades of white to blue, and fit them by sight. No, you have to painstakingly try each peace to similarly colored ones. There's about 30 pieces left in the puzzle. That's where my German is at. You see the castle perfectly, and you see most of the trees and sky. From a distance you might think the puzzle is finished. Some German's can't tell I'm not German until they've spoken to me for a few minutes. I'm not trying to brag. I think it's a fair depiction. Now imagine how many other puzzles there are: tanks, horses, a car, a map of a continent, Lord of the Rings, etc. I still have to put all those together. I can do everyday, colloquial German quite well, but have someone talk to me with many religious, literary, technical, military, etc. concepts and I'll be lost. The accent here is very similar to Bavarian, and one of my best friends is Bavarian, so I can understand the people here pretty well.

Well I think that's enough. If you got through this I think it will enrich other entries for you. I hope to get a stable enough life going here to write an entry once a week. I'll make it worthwhile for you.

Dan

P.S. you're a fool, a FOOOOL, if you have the chance to visit me and you don't. Much love

Fact of the week: Vienna (capitol of Austria) is one of the spy capitols of the world! http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/europe/10vienna.html

German word(s)/phrase of the week: Bad Ischl
pronunciation: Bah like the sheep, bah-d. Isch like sheepish, and lll with your tongue to your bottom gums. bahd ish-l. If we talk I might ask you to try and pronounce it. Be vewy vewy cawefol...

Topic of the next entry: My travels in Germany for the last few weeks
Herman Hesse, the German who watched Jerry Springer, throwing up, hitchhiking, and American Manifest Destiny. Stay tuned...