Learning new things each day

I am learning new things each day that I am here in Austria and I just wanted to share what I learned today.

For those of you who do not know, Europe, in general, tries to conserve energy, recycle, etc. more than we do in the United States. In an effort to help out the cause, some products that come in bottles require you to pay a deposit in addition to the shelf price of the item. For example, a six pack of beer (3 Liters total), requires you to pay 0,54 extra, or 0,09 per bottle. When you are finished with a bottle you have a few options. You can throw the bottle away, but then you do not get your deposit back and you feel bad for being wasteful. Your second option is to recycle. This option is a good one, but you still miss out on your deposit. The third option, which is also the best option, is to take the bottles back to the supermarket to get your deposit back.

I learned about the bottle deposit system when I was back in Athens, but today I finally figured out where I can take my bottles in order to get my deposit money back. There is a back hallway in Spar (one of the supermarkets here) where you can take your bottles to. There is a nifty machine with a screen and a turntable built into the wall in the hallway. You just put your bottles on the turntable, and then the turntable starts to spin and take your bottles around to a room in the back. If a bottle is accepted, it goes to a back room, you get credit for the bottle, and then the bottles are shipped back out to a brewery where it can be washed and reused. A bottle that is not accepted will stay on the turntable and come back to the opening so that you can take it back and recycle it yourself. After you place all of your bottles on the turntable and the credit for the bottles shows up on the screen you press a green button and receive a receipt. The receipt has the amount of credit that you received and it acts as credit to be used in the store.

I was excited to learn this because I was able to figure all of this out today by only asking questions in German and the people at the store were able to understand me (also, that I could understand them). In my opinion, this system is a great idea since it gives people an incentive to recycle and to be less wasteful. Also, it's nice to know how to get the deposit back, since I will no longer have to pay the deposit when I go to the store. Instead, I can take my bottles back, print out another receipt, and then use the receipt right after I print it in order cover the cost of the deposit (Pfand, in German. A Pfandflasche is a bottle that you must pay Pfand for). Another nice thing is that if there are people who are going to just throw their bottles away you can take them to the store and get the deposit that they paid. It's a great way to earn a few extra cents.

Some more exciting news is that today I bought the board game Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan). I'm incredibly excited too! I read the entire instruction booklet and I was able to understand all of the rules (it helped that I already knew the rules to the game, but I was still excited that I could understand what I was reading). I am going to try to get a group of people to play it later on tonight either in the lobby or in my room. They have so many amazing board games and expansion packs here. I have to be careful that I don't go out and spend too much money on them. If I have extra money at the end of the trip, I might buy one or two more games/expansion packs. We'll see how that ends up going later on though.

Yesterday we had our second "official" class tour around Salzburg with Bärbel (like Bare-bel, our professor/program director from OU) and Herr Lochmann (our history professor from Salzburg). We covered a pretty decent amount of the Altstadt and we learned quite a lot of history as we stopped at each location. One of our main stops on the tour was at Stift Nonnberg Monastery, which you might recognize from the Sound of Music. It is the oldest monastery in the world which has existed as a monastery without interruptions. The church there was beautiful and the choir there is supposed to be amazing to listen to. We also stopped at the Neue Residenz, the Alter Markt, Mozartplatz, and saw the building where the first synagogue in Salzburg used to be. We made other small stops along the way too. After the tour we went to a brewery/restaurant called Die Weisse (w sounds like a v, ei as in Einstein and not Spielberg). I tried a small (0,03 L) dark beer and it was one of the best beers that I tried since I've been here. It's made me realize that I do like beer, I just don't like cheap beer. The beer (Bier) at Die Weisse almost tasted like you were eating a delicious loaf of bread (in liquid form, but not like soggy bread).

This weekend is another free weekend and then next weekend we travel to Cologne. I'm incredibly excited for that trip. I'll finally get to meet my pen pal, and she will be able to show me around the city along with other students from OU and some other students from Cologne. We're leaving for the trip next Thursday morning, which means that we will have a shortened school week in order to give us time to pack and travel.

Also, my email address should now show up over to the right of the screen for anyone who needs it. And once again, thank you for all of the comments that you all have been leaving. I smile every time that I see that someone has left me a new comment. That's all that I have for now. Keep checking back for more updates in the near future. I'll try to write again soon.