Week 3 and 4

        Life became slower once I had settled into my new home.  My roommates finally arrived toward the end of the week.  I took some time to get to know them.  David is an architecture student in the bachelors program.  He is from near Freiburg, Germany.  Alexandra is from the Netherlands.  She is the youngest of our group, just now going into her first year of business management.  She told me that she decided to come here because she loves the mountains.  I think David came for the same reasons.

Last Wednesday we got together and cooked a meal; pumpkin curry soup, a potato salad, and weinerschnitzel.  Weinerschnitzel is a piece of flat thin meat, breaded over (like milanesa) and fried.  I put Lemon juice on mine, and ate it with some cranberry sauce.  It felt slightly like we were having a miniature version of Thanksgiving.  I don’t think my roommates considered that though. 

I purchased a bike from a bike store.  I got a decent mountain bike so I could go riding around trails nearby, or to nearby villages.  Riding a bike is actually very exhilarating and risky.  Innsbruck is relatively dense for its size.  It has bike lanes along the sides of roads, and along alleyways behind buildings.  The way to my school luckily has a nice alleyway to ride along at least half of the way there.  The other half is along a relatively calm road.  The only real traffic along it are busses that pull over for bus stops.  I pull into the back of the Technical Faculty to arrive at school and I lock my bike up underneath a cantilevered building.  I walk up some stairs that enter in next to two small lecture halls and the large studio space where students work on their projects.  The lecture halls hold not only architecture classes but computer programming and mathematic courses.  In the basement is a huge computer lab, or rather 5 computer labs, each designated to different fields of study.  As I walk into the basement area I turn to the left where the architecture lab is located. 

I sat down the other day in the computer lab to use Photoshop to work on my portfolio.  One of my hopes is to find some intern work in the area.  I began to get a hang of the school system.  Essentially the main course is the Entwerfen, or studio design course.  Along with it can be taken some lighter electives in theory, or doing a smaller project.  Some of the electives can last the whole semester, and some are only a two week intensive block.  Studio meets once a week, which seems nice.  I’m still not in the throw of things so I have yet to see how it works out for me, but I can say that in comparison to how studio is run in Texas where we meet three times a week, it might be more fruitful to meet only once a week.  The issue for me is that it’s not always possible to complete something new, or make a significant development in a project in two days, however, given a week to work out details, issues, and actually make something that is somewhat presentable it may be better.  It certainly has a bit more freedom to it. 

I went to see some presentations on what studios were offered for the semester.  The were very interesting and strange on many levels.  This was the first lottery I had for studios, and it was difficult to choose from all the interesting choices.  I think my main problem was that I don’t yet have a sense for how the school works.

There are several “institutes” in the school.  Each institute somewhat specializes in a particular methodology for architecture.  One, the Hochbau institute focuses on generating detail rich designs, a neo-baroque sort of style.  Another focuses on urban design, while yet another is interested in dealing with existing historical buildings, and respectfully adding on to them. 

Since the institutes approach different issues and have different methodologies for working on architecture, each institute also has its own character and pace.  Some institutes are extremely demanding, while others are more conceptual.  I wanted to choose an institute that would challenge me yet also allow me to have a unique experience while I’m here.  I had to put my top three preferences; I will not know what I ended up in until next week.  

My roommate had his twenty second birthday party this weekend.  He invited around 30 people to the party.  It was hard at first because everyone was speaking in German.  I must have seemed like an idiot sitting off to the side nodding my head.  I did try to say a few things, but my German vocabulary is so small at this point that I always run into obstacles expressing an idea, and so I have to revert to English.  It’s simply easier for me to generally communicate with people in English at this point. 

My German has improved greatly since I arrived, but it is disconcerting when I am actually trying to have a conversation and I can only proceed up until the point where I’ve finished introducing myself and explaining what I am doing here.  It was ok though, eventually people seemed to loosen up and I was speaking with people, even though it was in English.

As I spoke to people I began to realize that many students come to study here because it is cheap, and its near access to the mountain sport culture.  My roommate David has two bikes.  One he uses for around town, cheap and replaceable.  His second bike is the mountain bike he uses maybe once a week.

The day after the party we went on a hike up into the mountains.  My apartment building is on the foot of the “northern wall” so the mountain trails are literally at my doorstep.  We hiked for two hours up to a small cabin in the mountain that serves food and beer to the mountain climbers.  It was great, and I think I see the motivation for people who climb the mountain after trying the food.  I also wondered how they get supplied up to the cabin because the drop is so steep there are no roads going there, only foot trails and bike trails. 

The view of Innsbruck was beautiful.   It was my first time getting a good look at the whole valley.  There are many small villages outside of Innsbruck not too far away, but higher up in the hills from Innsbruck.  Seeing it from so high up also gave new meaning to the area.  The people here have existed climbing up and down the mountains for generations.  Mountain activities are part of life here, and I’m sure at one point they were a necessity.

As we walked back down the mountain through another route, I saw many old fountains that taped into mountain streams.  I wondered how old they were.  Some even had carved statues of saints that watched over the fountains.  It was great to take a drink from fresh ice water flowing down from the tips covered in snow.