I'm supposed to be studying for a final tomorrow and writing a final paper due Thursday, so naturally I decided to update my blog...

First, I'm going to post the pictures of the Military Museum that I promised at the end of the last blog post.

The car in which Franz Ferdinand was riding in Sarajevo in 1914.

His clothes from that day.

So that was last Tuesday.  On Wednesday we had class, like normal, but at night it was time for our last concert at the Musikverein!  We saw a brilliant performance of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto and Mahler's Symphony No. 5 by the Wiener Symphoniker.  It's safe to say that I'm going to miss that hall.  Wednesday was also Richard's 20th Birthday, so we all gathered in the flat after the concert and surprised him with a cake (that I baked, traversing strange Austrian ingredients and equipment - those are a few things I definitely WON'T miss).  It was a great way to end a great night.

Thursday we had the day "off" but I had my last lesson with my great teacher here in Vienna.  It was sad to say goodbye, but he's helped me find a new focus on my own solo playing that I definitely plan on continuing with back at Dartmouth.  After that lesson, the three of us went out for falafel lunch and gelato (at our favorite gelato shop - see the last blog post - which now has a wild strawberry gelato!  My teacher - who also thinks this shop is the best in the city - told us to try this flavor.  It's ridiculously expensive at 1.70 euro a scoop.  It usually costs 2.00 euro for a cone with 2-3 flavors.  But these strawberries only grow in a certain forest in Italy and are flown to Vienna from that forest.  The gelato is only available at certain times each year and it sells out really quickly.  Just delicious.)

Shannon and I then traveled to the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) in Vienna to see the composers' graves sections.  We paid homage to Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss (Johann), and Schubert the only way we knew how: we walked from grave to grave playing our favorite pieces written by that composer from our iTunes.  We videoed it, but the file is quite long and would take a while to upload to Youtube, so if you want to see it, ask me.

The Austrian National Library - we visited this on our way home from the cemetery.

This past weekend, we traveled as a group to Budapest, Hungary.  It was really interesting to be behind the iron curtain once again, and I saw much more of that post-communist recovery in Hungary than I did in Prague.  We had a free day, and I made it my mission to go to the House of Terror, the museum detailing life in Hungary under two terror regimes (Nazi and Soviet).  It was a great museum.  As it was housed in the old communist secret police headquarters, not only did we see all kinds of exhibits, but we also were taken down into the basement to see the cells where prisoners were locked up.  It was a somber experience, yet also very informative.

Heroes Square in Budapest

Beef goulash

The Franz Liszt Museum

A statue of Stalin without his head - probably from de-Stalinization in the early 60's

The interior of the House of Terror

Part of the Berlin Wall

As soon as we got back from Budapest, our friend Elizabeth was here to visit from Prague!  We had a whirlwind tour of Vienna (mostly a food tour....).  It was SO good to see her again!  The big highlight from that weekend was our trip to Grinzing, a tiny neighborhood on the outskirts of Vienna.  There we paid homage to Gustav Mahler's grave by sitting there for an hour and a half playing the DSO recording of Mahler 2 (on the one year anniversary of our concert, no less).  We had some weird stares, but most people seemed to really appreciate what we were doing, actually.  In fact, a blind woman walked by at one point, led by another woman.  We heard her from down the row asking where Mahler was, and then she heard the music and got all excited "Mahler!  Musique!"  It was so touching :)

A heurigen in Grinzing

Now this is probably my one of my last serious blog posts about my time here in Vienna.  One concert left, a final recital, final test in music history tomorrow, and a final paper due on Thursday.  That's all I have left (other than the eating and souvenir shopping, of course).  I head back to the States on Saturday!  How time has flown.  I'm going to try, though, to take videos and pictures of the everyday things that I have seen and done for the past three months (including my flat...yes I know I've been saying that for two months....) and I already have in mind what my last blog post will look like.  So until then, I leave you with this video of a bit of Austria.  We encountered them randomly on the street on Sunday.