I spent half of spring break in London sleeping in and going to bars, but the latter half I spent in Austria with my good friend Aziz. Aziz is studying abroad in Vienna right now at an opera program, so I decided to go visit him and go snowboarding with my one week off. I was supposed to catch a flight Thursday morning and be in Vienna by lunchtime, but due to a delayed train and some frustrating WizzAir employees, I missed my flight. Note to future BADA students- public transport in London is usually good, but trains and tubes can randomly get stopped for uncertain amounts of time, so if you need to get somewhere important, I recommend taking an Uber. Also, NEVER fly WizzAir! So, I spent the entire day in the Gatwick Airport, reading my script and listening to music. 11 hours… And when I finally made it to Vienna, at midnight, my hostel was closed. Lost over $100 on that hostel cause I couldn’t check in. The journey started as quite a train wreck. Got 3 hours of sleep, then got on a train to Salzburg to go snowboarding in a rural town across the country. I had no phone service, only train tickets screenshotted on my phone. Aziz assured me that everyone in Austria spoke English, and this was the case in Vienna, but not in rural Austria. Most people on the west side of the country did not speak English, which made navigating very interesting. But somehow, I made it. I snowboarded for 4 hours, got food and drinks, and narrowly made it back to the station in time for my return train. This was the only time I’ve experienced culture shock while being in Europe. Having everything written in German, and being entirely alone with no way to contact anyone I knew was a terrifying but also thrilling experience. There was a cat at one of the lodges on the mountain though were I got lunch after snowboarding, and it made my entire day! There are no stray cats in London and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed cats! After spending that entire day travelling across the country, I went out for drinks with Aziz. Got my first Negroni Spagliato at a dive bar in Vienna. It was fun to use Euros instead of Pounds for a couple days. They’re much more papery than British pounds but still not regular paper like US dollars. Only got to have one real day in Vienna, but it was a big one. Aziz took me to a lot of historical buildings and I saw a gigantic and gorgeous Catholic church. 16 year old’s can go to clubs in Vienna, which was a very strange experience being one of the OLDEST people in a bar… It felt like if an American high school party was legally serving alcohol. Definitely one of the fastest moving weekends of my life. Probably got a total of 10 hours of sleep the whole time I was there. Made my plane home though and got caught up on sleep the next day. Please learn from my mistakes and don’t fly WizzAir, also don’t pull out Euros in a panic at the airport and spend 100$ on the conversation rate. Best of luck to yall in your future travels and may they not be as chaotic as mine were!