Day 9

  Vienna, Austria
Saturday, February 2, 2008

Saturday, Professor Diercks offered to bring us to the Naschmarket if we wanted to go. I've decided that I am going to take every opportunity to see anything that is offered to me so I got up to go. It unfortunately started raining right after we left. The Naschmarket was quite impressive. It was this large marketplace which I guess is opened all week long and there is a flea market on Saturdays. There were so many people selling fresh food, meat, vegetables etc. There were also people selling clothing. One of the first vendors we stopped at was selling soccer jerseys for only 12 euro. They had a Thiery Henry, Arsenal jersey and I had to get it because he's my favorite soccer player, and I love the Arsenal team (thanks to my little brother).
   I couldn't get over how many people were selling olives. They were all different kinds of olives too, stuffed with various things. We came to this one vendor who must have been able to tell that we were Americans. He was like hey you guys should come here and try out the craisons. He was wearing a Yankees hat and had a strong New York accent. He was one of those obnoxious New Yorkers though.  He told us how he was born here in Vienna but grew up in New York and then moved back here to take care of his mother. Professor Diercks bought some stuff from him. His mother gave me a sample of an olive stuffed with sharp cheese, it was soo good! We looked a little at the stuff in the flea-market, it was basically just a huge lawn-sale.
   This market place was quite phenomenal. If I lived in Vienna I would certainly go there to by most of my produce because it's fresh and relatively well priced.
   That evening we were invited by "Tony" who is a professor at the school to go to a mass at a church called Pfarre Maria Geburt. Tony is the choir master at the church and they were going to perform a Josef Haydn mass. Obviously I went, I love seeing new churches and I love music masses. We took the U-bahn and the Strassen-bahn to get there although it really wasn't that far away.
    The church was small but beautiful as usual. This was a very unusual mass, I wasn't all too sure what was going on at first because we were given candles when we came in, so I assumed it was going to be a candle light vigil and then the priests processed in with the little altar servers and stopped in front of this beautiful creche that was on the right side of the church. He said some prayers and then everyone in the church lit their candles and we processed around the church while singing a nice German version of Ave Maria. (There were nice isles around the perimeter of the church that we processed on). After that the mass began but we kept our candles lit until the homily. It was a very nice mass. I could tell the priest was not a native German speaker he had kind of an English accent in his German. I found out later from Tony that he is a new priest from India. At the end of mass they did the St. Blaize blessing which was really nice. We all processed up to the priests and they blessed our throats, they just said a prayer and made a cross on our foreheads, while holding two candles in the shape of an X on their chests.