Day 27 - A Full Circle Ending

Tonight we ended our time in Vienna (Although we actually have one more class tomorrow morning) the same way we began with a visit to the same heuriger we went to four weeks ago.  It's interesting to contrast the conversations four weeks ago when we were all strangers to the ones tonight where some of us have become friends, some have grown into little cliques, and still others have developed into full blown animosity.  My table consisted of Jill and her husband Matt; they are both music teachers (Jill is the institute participant her husband just joined her in Vienna a few days ago), Kathy; a German teacher and probably the person I feel the closest to here, Richard and Julane, the director of the institute and his wife, Thomas Froschel, a professor from the University of Vienna and me. These are some great people who I've come to admire.  Conversation wandered from The Magic Flute to sights around Vienna, to where we are going next week.  At our table I'm the only one going directly home.  (Dr. Froschel is going home, but that's because he's already there.)

My flight leaves at 6:30 am Friday morning.  I'm not going to stay up late tomorrow night to post a blog because I will need to get some sleep before facing the 25 hour travel back home.  I fly from Vienna to London to Dallas to Phoenix.  I'll arrive in Phoenix in the afternoon which makes the clock hours look like a flight time of only about 16 hours.  I guess I'll find that day I lost when I got here.

Roast Beef

Roast Chicken

Kartoffel Torte

Apfel Strudel mit Vanille Sauce

I don't have many cool photos today, but I do have dinner pictures.  Dinner was great!

Thanks to the internet I was able to spend a great deal of time keeping in touch with Jen and Jade. That made being apart a lot easier to cope with.  The other thing I've loved is hearing from so many of you who have followed this blog.  I hope you were able to take a little virtual tour of Vienna and have learned a little something about Mozart.  I will post one more blog once I get stateside just to let everyone know that I arrived home safely.

Thank you all for the encouragement and kind words, for the funny comments, for the hundreds of "likes" on Facebook and for the help in making this trip a reality.  I hope many of you will be able to make it to the concert next spring when all of this information about Mozart get's presented along with some of his music.  I don't know what the date is going to be yet, but I know it will be sometime in late February to early March.

Auf Wiedersehen!