Friday-Vienna

Guten Abend!

Hi Everyone. We got home early tonight (11:00 PM)! Here's the recap of the day.

After breakfast this morning, we all went into town. Then the kids had free time do what they wanted to do. I needed to take care of buying tickets, getting money, etc. Rachel and Jessie went sightseeing and went to the opera house, the Naschmarkt (a flea market) and possibly some other places. The guys went to the palace Belvedere and saw an exhibit of Gustav Klimt (an artist) who Jon really likes.

I found out that the trip is really over, because after paying for the concert tickets tonight, I went to the bank to get out money off of the credit card. I have not been able to check the balance, so wasn't sure what was left. I had to adjust my amount of withdrawal several times until it was low enough to give us money. After giving everyone their food money for today and tomorrow, paying for the concert and the tour of the Jewish area, we have about 65 Euros left over.

We met at Stephensplatz at 12:45 and then walked to where our tour was starting. The tour was through the Jewish part of Vienna. The guide gave the tour in German and English. Most of the Jewish areas have been destroyed. Around the time Hitler came to power, there were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna (10% of the population). Today there are 17,000. While on the remembrance tour (called that because you see where certain places were), we saw a lot of Jewish people (they come from a lot of different countries). I learned today, that one of the musical Strauss had Jewish ancestry, but because he was a favorite of Hitler's, he didn't have any problems. Hitler had ALL of the paperwork destroyed that showed his Jewish heritage.

We came home for a brief hour. Then we left, had dinner at the Kurssalon, where we heard the concert. We choose a different place after consulting with the tourist info office this morning. it was fun and the program had a lot of Strauss and Mozart. The concert ended at about 10:15. We made our way home and I just checked to see if everyone is more or less packed for tomorrow morning's early departure.

I don't know when I will get pictures uploaded from today. Tomorrow we will travel all day and get to Darmstadt around 4:30 Pm and to our host families shortly thereafter.

Gute Nacht!