Innsbruck

Since I'm only here one more week, I'd better hurry up and describe this amazing town!

Innsbruck might well be the prettiest place I've ever been. It's surrounded by dramatic mountains, so that there's really nowhere you can go that doesn't have a great view. The mountains also inspire lots of outdoors activities. For example, they force Innsbruck residents to live in a very compact area, so everywhere is easily bikeable. I've been lucky enough to borrow a bike so far, which is amazingly convenient given the bike lanes all over town. Even from Dani and Lydia's to their church, which are really on opposite ends of town, takes just over 30 minutes with a bike. (It keeps me in shape too!)

But Innsbruck residents go for much more extreme sports than a leisurely bike ride through town. People I've met are into rock climbing, mountain biking, horseback riding (very typical among kids at the Montessori school) and even paragliding. Hiking is almost the default social activity around here, and people are already swimming in all the mountain lakes, despite their frigid temperatures.

People here are very proud of their region, Tirol (Tyrol in English), which borders Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. It's the westernmost region and mostly rural; even Innsbruck has just over 100,000 residents. Tirol is known for its thick dialect...I studied up on Austrian German before I got here, and I can figure out a lot of things when they're slower, but the pronunciation really is quite different. One example:

English - I don't know either.
Standard German - Das weiss ich auch nicht.
Tiroler German - Des wuos i a nit.

Most differences are audible but spelled the same; there are also a number of Austrian expressions, as well as vocabulary words that are officially part of Austrian German, like the words for "apricot" and "January." Tirol's dialect is thicker than most; Bavaria, Germany (where Munich is located) is about as bad, but they at least share many of their eccentricities. People tease me about studying German in places where the language isn't really German. But I actually understand more than I expected, even when native speakers talk amongst themselves, which is really nice.

Tourists love Innsbruck, and so do foreign students: they recently instituted a rule that the at least 50% of the students enrolled in the medicine program at the university had to be Austrian. (Germans love the school of medicine because its admissions standards are lower than those at German med schools.) A lot of German students come for the mountains and the outdoors sports. I appreciate their presence, because it seems to be easier to understand students' conversations when not everyone is from Tirol.