Wednesday Night (this deserves its own post)

When I finished blogging on Wednesday night, I asked the reception for help on getting to Wachau and they were really helpful and printed all of the timetables out and everything for me. I was all set to go. And then I came up to my room to find we had gotten a new roommate- Mary from Minnesota. She asked if I wanted to go grab a drink with her and some other people. Not one to turn down a drink, I said yes. But I was also under the impression this would be 1, maybe 2, drinks and then we’d be back at a reasonable time so I could still get up and go to Wachau. Spoiler alert: it was not just one drink. It was not an early night. We didn’t get back to the hostel until almost 4am! Whoops (seems to be a common theme of the trip so far, huh?)! Mary and I met up with Lara (from Sydney, is living in London as a paramedic) whom Mary had met in the lounge earlier. Then we walked to pick up Ciera (from Orange County) and them walked to pick up Brent (from New York), both of whom Mary had met while in Salzburg. The 5 of us went to a bar and grabbed a beer and just talked about home life and where we had traveled and where we were headed next. When that beer was gone they decided they wanted to check out the Travel Shack, which Mary had heard about and I confirmed it was fun. We ended up meeting a lot of other people there and of course played the hammer-a-nail-into-a-log game. I’ve now talked to several people from Vienna that say there is no name for this glorious game, which is really too bad. Turns out, having played it before really came in handy as I was really good at it this night! Lara was really good too and she and I got the most amount of nails in throughout the night.

Ciera (left) and Lara playing ; Mary and I playing (the red eye fixer messed up her glasses).

After that game was finished, we moved onto bierpong which was pretty entertaining to watch. We taught Lara and Hasan (from Istanbul) how to play as neither had played before. Hasan didn’t speak the greatest English so trying to teach him was especially entertaining. They got it more or less and came within 1 of beating 2 Austrian dudes who had clearly knew what they were doing. The best part though was that Ciera and Brent knew how to play GauchoBall (they called it slap stack, but since Ciera knew I went to UCSB she translated it to GauchoBall for me lol). Trying to teach an Aussie, Austrians and some Turks how to play GauchoBall has to be the most entertaining thing ever. No one understand the rules at first and everyone is just stacking cuts left and right with no real order. It’s hilarious. I highly recommend trying to teach this game while abroad. So worth your time. Anyway, it was a lot of drinking games (although we didn’t really drink during them, we just played with water as the bar is a little gross and I wouldn’t want to drink anything after that ball had been on the ground, even with a water cup) and meeting and talking to new people. It doesn’t sound like it was 4 hours of fun, but it was! Lara, Mary and I eventually headed home at 3:30ish and I was really glad I had a roommate to come home with so it wasn’t just me waking everyone up so late!