I am sure you are familiar with ice skating in Rathaus on its flat and perfectly manicured ice. However, if you are looking for a more outdoorsy ice skating experience, you might wanna take a little road trip to Neusiedler See in Burgenland. The lake is one of the biggest lakes in the continent yet with a depth of about 180cm. I do not know how long it is to skate to Hungary, but technically and geographically, you can skate from Austria to Hungary.

My boyfriend and his parents and I left from Modling by car to the lake, and fortunately, they had a pair of skates my size and had their own skates. For it was a nice day, the parking lot was full of cars, and all the skates were all rented out. It was my first time skating on a real lake and not on a manicured ice rink. Once we arrived, we all strapped on our skates and started skating, but almost as soon as we started skating so about within five meters of skating. The skates of my boyfriend’s parents shattered in to many pieces, for they were probably about 30 years old.

There were many people on the lake walking around only with their shoes, playing ice hockey, ice sledding, and of course ice skating. I even saw someone ice-wind surfing (I have no clue what the name of that sport is). Unfortunately, this last week has been very warm (yay!), but overall the weather probably defrosted the lake, making it slightly more dangerous to skate on.

I want to start writing about Semmering with two things. One, amazing and UNESCO worthy train track; two, sledding. Semmering is basically where Alps begins and is located in in the district of Neunkirchen in lower austria. The town is also famous for hosting several skilling World Cups.

Referring back to the earlier post, a train ticket with a Vorteilscard to Semmering cost less than 15 euros from Vienna! The view outside the train to Semmering is also worthy of a trip. Semmering railway starts at Gloggnitz, over the Semmering Bahnhof to Murzzuschlag. It is also the first mountain railway in Europe opened in 1854. Apparently, the designer of the railway built it around the nature rather than through the nature, of which is proved by the beautiful view out the window. Having gone in the winter, I saw snow covered sights, but I am planning on going back on the train again in the spring or summer.

Once you get off at Semmering Bahnhof, you will be surrounded by mountains on all sides. From the Bahnhof, the skiing area is an easy walk away. From there, you can rent a sled for about 6 euros and then off to sledding. Another cool thing about Semmering is night sledding. There are not many eateries in the area, considering it is a small ski resort town. But a walk around the mountains through a couple of the oldest hotels, which also look a lot like the hotel from the Shining) is also worth the time.

So before it gets too warm, try this surprisingly affordable day trip to Semmering and grab a lunch in a typical ski cabin!

As many of you know, Vienna offers a huge number of museums, and as much as we all want to go to every single one of them, they are not free. If you are a student of aged 26 or under, you are eligible for student discount for most museums. Yet it still takes a toll if you want to make regular trips to museums. So I searched some options available to regular museum visitors and stumbled upon museum memberships, particularly for students.

The first museum I checked was my favorite in the city, Albertina museum. With a student discount one visit to Albertina costs about 8-9 euros and 13 euros for adults. However, if you sign up for a membership, Friends of Albertina, you only pay 30 euros per year (half year option is also available with 15 euros per 6 months) as students (under 26) and 60 euros for adults. These are the most basic membership options. As a member, you have free entries, 10% off at the shop, free checkroom, and discounts on many special events! The week I got mine, I went to the museum three times, so I think it already paid for itself.

The second meseum I checked was Belvedere, which provides even better deal! This membership gives basically free entries to all of the Belvedere family museums: Winterpalais, 21er Haus as well as Belvedere. If you are a student aged under 30, you only pay 30 euros for a year with free entries to all the Belvedere museums, free newsletter, and free use of Belvedere’s research center. With Belvedere’s membership, you can get discounted tickets to Kunsthistorishes museum and Salzburg’s modern museum. So today pick up your student ID and go get cultured!

Recently, I got a chace to go to Stockerau on weekly basis. If you do not know much about the areas outside Vienna. Stockerau is north of Vienna, requiring you to take an S-Bahn. I have already been frequenting south of Vienna, Modling because my boyfriend is from there. But Stockerau is further away from Vienna than Modling, making the trip more expensive.

So obviously, as a poor student, I began to look for a discount option: OBB’s Vorteilscard. Originally, I thought the card is only available to Austrians for some reason. But it turns out, anyone can get it! There are a few options of OBB’s Vorteilscard. With this card, you can get 50% discount on all OBB’s tickets and 25% on all abroad rail trips with Railplus. These are only some of many benefits of this card.

If you are younger than 26 years old, you can get the Vorteilscard Jugend for 19 euros a year. More importantly, you do not even have to be a student in Austria. If you are older than 26, Vorteilscard Classic is available for 99 euros per year. I think there is an Vorteilscard Family as an option as well.

Once you apply for your card, you can get it in the mail within two weeks, but you can also get OBB’s app to access your card immediately. So get your card now and go sledding or skiing in Semmering or go hiking in Salzburg or go out in Bratislava for half its price. Even better take a weekend train trip to Budapest!

Hi all! My name is Diana, and I will share my time in Vienna for the next four weeks. A few months ago, I started writing for this blog, and now I am back as a B1.2 student. I started at Deutsch Akademie back in August with A1.1 and have been learning at D. A. since then. Although I have been in Vienna for about half a year, but I am still finding new and exciting sides of the city/ country and tips on living in this city. I am excited to share some of my favorite running routes and some discount tips available to students (sorry under 26 usually) in Vienna.

My first visit in Vienna was about two and half years ago in 2014, and that is when I fell in love with the city. I made one more visit a little more than a year ago, and after I finished my university in Virginia, USA, I decided to take a gap year before I start graduate school in Seattle. So I moved to Vienna about seven months ago planning to spend the year here, and learning German was a little plus on the side! So far, I have done some traveling and obviously learning German and training for Vienna City Marathon in April.

Yesterday was the first day of B 2.1 and also is a first time in months I got a new teacher. Since A 2.1 in October, I have had the same teacher for four months. All the B level classes seem definitely more discussion oriented which I find most people want.

Well this is it! Two months of writing for this blog is coming to an end because this is my final post to Deutsch Akademie. It’s not that I am finished with learning German, except I actually plan to proceed until B.1 at least, but you can write two months worth of blogs maximum. In addition, writing blog posts here was actually a nice way to remember and organize my time in Vienna, so I am hoping to continue my writing in my personal blog in the future…

Actually the last day of my course was on Tuesday; Thursday’s course got cancelled. During the first half of the class on Tuesday, we reviewed all the grammar we learned this month, and the second half of the class started off with a end- of- the- course test. After the test, we all got together at a cafe near Deutcsh Akademie for coffee and cake and conversation hour, which I originally thought would be on Thursday. Looking back this course alone, my German skills enhanced a lot! I can express myself in different situations now that I can combine independent and dependent clauses. Even in class, towards the end, the whole class was able to speak with each other in German, slowly but surely though.

I will return to Deutsch Akadmie for the next level (A.2.2), but as I mentioned, no more blogs 🙁 Maybe in the near future, I will be able to write a blog in German! Until then, thank you for reading my posts so far!

The other day, I had a realization about how many students I have interacted with in Vienna, and I thought I wonder how much students are responsible for running the city. Think about it, there are so many university students in your class right? Historically, Vienna has been famous for its academic excellence, but in addition to that, there are few of the largest public universities in the country at the moment. University of Vienna alone has 94,000 students, and the technical university has about 28,000 students. With Vienna University of Economics and Business with a student body of 23,000, university students from these schools make up about 10% of Vienna’s population! I am not even sure how many private schools there are that I did not even count. Both directly and indirectly, students in Vienna are driving a big part of Vienna’s city life.

This is a picture of inside of WU’s library that looks like futuristic space ship.

I am not sure how accurate these numbers are, considering many young people here register themselves at public universities for free to enjoy some student benefits. Once I met a guy who has been „studying“ at University of Vienna for the tenth year. Vienna had some of the most famous philosophers and scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although universities in Vienna are not as highly ranked as once it used to be, it is still one of the largest university cities in the German speaking countries. So do you see now how the city can both be young and historical?

As many of you know (assuming none of you had class today), today was Austria’s national holiday, more specifically was its independence day. The traffic for part of the city was blocked for the parade and many people came out despite the gloomy weather to enjoy having this day off and to join the celebratory atmosphere. In addition, many of them enjoyed free entries to a number of museums across the city…

One of my classmates actually told me about the day of free musum entries yesterday. She emailed me a list of museums with free entries and with discounted entries. The list included applied art museum, architecture museum, military history museum obviously, and the national library. For it was a holiday, I appropriately started my day rather lazily, giving myself just enough time to go to one maybe two museums.

First, I decided to go to Prunksaal of Nationalbibliothek. Prunksaal is the central structure of the national museum and is beautifully decorated with Baroque style. The room was built in 1723, and since then, Prunksaal had been expanding its collection, reaching the number as many as 200,000. Obviously, the room does not hold the purpose of library anymore, but the room itself is now a museum. In honor of the 100th annivarsary of Austria’s last emperor’s death, Prunksaal also had pictures of him and other documents to commemorate him.

Normally, the ticket for Prunksaal costs about 11 euros, and they do not have any student discount available. The decor of the room and its significance was breathtaking, but I am happier it was free.

As Halloween is fast approaching, you probably have been thinking about your costume ideas. I know people here do not dress up as much or often, but honestly, I love Halloween. More specifically, I love the process of Halloween. Normally, I never really spend too much money on my costumes or buy those ready go set costumes because I am not about to spend that much money, and it is always more fun to make your own. Last year my friend and I went as feminist bookshop keepers from the TV show Portlandia. It was a big hit!

This year as I was searching for new costume ideas, I realized I need to find a source of my costume items: a quality second hand stores. Unlike the United States and other parts of Europe, Austria has not yet developed a second hand culture. To many people, second hand still means worn out with holes and unwearable. But one man’s trash may always be another man’s treasure. Previously I have posted about occasional Flohmarkt in various places in the city, but there are a couple standing stores selling second hand items, one of which is Humana. Don’t be confused with the shoe store. Anyway, this is a religious store where their profit goes to help those in need. In addition to helping others while shopping, you are helping the environment when you shop second hand by reducing the trash!

Just like any other second hand stores, when you go to Humana, you won’t always find just the right thing you wanted. But that’s also the beauty; you can be creative with cheap items and sometimes you can find really amazing pieces that would normally be 10 times of what you’d pay at the second hand store. I don’t wanna share my costume ideas here yet, but my boyfriend and I found all the items needed for our costumes and cost less than 20 euros!

My boyfriend started at Diplomatische Akademie a few weeks ago, and as an incoming student he participated in a number of welcoming events including a pub crawl. For the majority of the student body is from outside of Austria, many of them have no clue about the city and good places to eat and go for drinks. So you can see how this pub crawl can give good tips from local students to international students right? I was told that they went to some of the strangest and most expensive bars in town and managed to finish a pub crawl without going to a single pub. This incident inspired me to write this post. I want to introduce one of my favorite bar/restaurants in town.

Upon my first visit to Vienna more than a year ago, I found this cafe/ bar off Mariahilfestrasse on Zollergasse called Cafe Europa. For those who have been here for long enough are probably already familiar with this place. It is actually one of the most famous places in Vienna particularly among young people here due to its location and its atmosphere. I find its food and drinks are reasonably priced, not to mention their food is delicious. One of the things I like a lot about this place is that its kitchen is open until after midnight (might be later). The place opens at 9am and closes at 5am everyday. When you go there on weekends, it is likely you will not be able to find a seat without a reservation. Additionally, Cafe Europa also invites many DJs to play at the back of their restaurant, so if you want to celebrate finishing your class at the end of this week, why not make a visit to Cafe Europa!?

I know I made a couple posts on different art scenes in the city, but I swear, this is the last one! We all know about Belvedere, Albertina, and Kunsthistorisches, but Winterpalais is somewhere I think many overlook, well at least I did. Winterpalais is located near Stephansdom at Himmelpfortgasse. It is also known as a city palace because of its location, and the inside shows high Baroque style decor. As its name shows, it was a winter palace for Prince Eugene, who spent summers at Belvedere. For this reason, Winterpalais is part of Belvedere’s group of palaces/ museums along with 21er Haus.

Winterpalais mainly features installation art with occational sculpture exhibitions. Though now is finished, recently, Winterpalais had an exhibition called Sterling Ruby, which is the name of the artist. I initially thought the exhibition was featuring sterling silver and ruby as the main materials for the exhibition. How wrong of me… The theme or the main point of this exhibition is juxtaposition. Many pieces compared two opposing things such as time periods, asthetics, which is also noticeable through the choice of materials in her works.

For those who are interested in becoming a member of this group of museums, it is as simple and cheap as Albertina. In order to become a friend of Belvedere as a student under the age of 30, it costs 30 euros a year, whereas it costs 75 euros for adults. Once you become a member, you have a number of advantages such as free admission to both permenant and temporary exhibitions in Belvedere, Winterpalais, and 21er Haus and free use of Belvedere’s Research Center along with other benefits.