Wednesday August 8^th 18:34

I have finally arrived in Austria. After over 2 years of desire and hard work, I have achieved my goal. The trip here was long; the flight from Seattle to Frankfurt was 9.5 hours of sitting and watching a screen. In Frankfurt, I met the 6 other exchange students going to Austria. I fell asleep at the gate in Frankfurt and then slept through the 1hr flight on the way to Zürich. Once there I found my bags and met Agnes and Ernst Thurnher for the first time. They helped me with my bags and drove me to my new home. Not only is Schwarzach possibly the most beautiful place I have visited, but also my host family is terrific. Tomorrow I will go run errands with my host mom and brother, but for now I am hanging out in my new room, nearly asleep. As of now, 6:30pm local time or 10:30am Bozeman time, I have been awake for 30 hours. I took a tour of the house, which is truly stunning, then got my camera out to document it. It may not really be that cool, but one of my favorite things is that the window shades have control switches to pull them up and down. I head to my language camp on the 12^th which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it will be in an amazing place and will help me a lot with my German. But on the other I just settled into my room, house, and life and then I leave right away. Also, I don’t know what use learning proper German will be because Schwarzach has such an intense dialect I cannot recognize a word anyone says except “Wirklich”. My host family has been speaking to me in English (all of them are fluent except for the youngest boy Jakob). Speaking of which, here is a picture of my host family. My host my mom Agnes and my dad Ernst are pictured here sitting at their table, then Clara (18) Jakob (8) and Beni (15) are standing in the back yard. Overall, this trip is shaping up to be stunning.