Keeley McBride: The Vienna Experience


I’m going to start out by saying leaving my friends, family and boyfriend for 6 months was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. There were plenty of tears at the airport and unfortunately, those tears followed me to Vienna. I’ll be honest; this experience is tough at the beginning. You are leaving something so comfortable to experience something so foreign and in the first few days it’s easy to think “was this the right choice?” But after being here for a month, I can now confidently say that it was.
 
Over the few weeks that I have been here, I have had the opportunity to be able to learn so much about another culture. Living here, you really get hands on look at the European lifestyle and what it entails. I mean, it’s one thing to visit, but to completely immerse yourself and live amongst it gives you a whole new outlook. I’ve been able to combine being a tourist with being a resident and because of that I have already seen so much.
 


 
So far I have walked around the Schonbrunn Palace Gardens, witnessed the actual height of St. Stephens Cathedral, shopped along the famous Mariahstrabe, drank a beer in Schwedenzplatz, ate traditional Sacher-Torte Cake and schnitzel, visited some amazing museums, snowboarded in the alps, walked to the top of the Citadel in Budapest, wandered the tiny town of Bratislava and pretended to know all the German chants in the Vienna Football Derby game all within the first month!

Now everyday I look forward to the next adventure that awaits me and I look back and wonder why I ever had those tears! 


 
Keeley is a Bachelor of Business Administration program at Capilano University. Keeley studied abroad  at FH Wien University in Vienna, Austria.

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