Life of Hardin Special No. 2

Flashback from Vienna

Monday, June 9, 2003

Last night we took a walk around "the ring." It's the road that runs along the outskirts of the old city. The current road is built on the site of the old Roman wall that surrounded Vienna. The Hofburg is there, which was the Austian Emperor's palace. It has five adjoining arches that lead into it. The Emperor would only use the middle one. Guess which one we used. There is also the State Opera house and the Stephansdom, which is st. Stephen's church. It was pretty large, and grandiose, and lots of penance money went in to build it, I'm sure. That's inside the ring rather than on its circumference. We also passed by the Parlament (that's how they spell it), the Maria am Gestaade, (which is some sort of church and looks cool with its spires all squeezed in between two buildings) and several museums, although we haven't gone into any of them yet. After about three miles of this our feet abandoned us and went on back home, leaving us to crawl. We had scuffed knees by the time we got back and found our feet soaking in epsom salts.

We started classes today. Everything seemed to go well. Corey told the story of how he failed the star basketball player at Lambuth for cheating, so I doubt he'll have any trouble with that. His class has 37 students in it. Mine and Perry's have about six each.

Today I covered Ontological arguments for God and blew the minds of my class. I let them know it was all downhill from there.

Several people, including some students and one of the Dean's Assistants, thought Perry was me all day long. I guess he looks more like me than I do.

Other than that it was pretty slow. Today was a holiday in Vienna. Pentecost Monday. They apparently take lots of useless holidays. We start teaching English tomorrow. Well, that's about it for this day in our "fahrt." Oh, I forgot. "Fahrt" means "trip" in German. We have "einfahrts," "ausfahrts," "turisfahrts," and just plain old "fahrts." It sure is a gassy country.

Oh, one more thing. We found out today that due to the water supply of Vienna, which comes from natural springs in the mountains, the water here is some of the purest in the world.