SALZBURG, Austria – A lot has happened this past week. The most moving experience was touring the Mauthausen concentration camp. I toured the camp with a Mauthausen native, whose great-grandfather had prisoners from the camp working in his shop. Not only was it chilling to hear stories from my friend about the camp and his family, but the documentation and exhibits inside one of the buildings in the camp are superb, providing a much more stirring picture of what happened than what the Sachsenhausen camp I toured in November offered. Without any warning, the exhibit leads you into a room with the crematoriums. The furnaces and walls are decorated with memorials to people who died at the camp. That room led you to the gas chamber then to a room where medical experiments took place. This led to another crematorium and finally the exit. It was hard being there, especially in the gas chamber, because the pipes with sprinklers were still lining the room. It was impressive to see the number of memorials there. Outside the camp, on the path to the quarry where the prisoners worked, were memorials of all kinds. Every year on May 5 there is a celebration marking the anniversary of the camp’s liberation. On a lighter note, I finally went snowboarding in Austria. My adventure didn’t take place in the Alps like I hoped but instead at a resort near the German and Czech borders. The experience was incredible. I’d never before snowboarded somewhere with such long lifts and high slopes. My ears were popping while riding the lifts. The hardest part of the day was a certain style of lift. The regular seat lifts weren’t a problem, but the other style was. A t-bar extended from the overhead cable, and you had to properly position yourself on the hat of the t and allow it to pull you up the hill. I had never seen a lift like this before, let alone rode one, so I had to be taught how to use it. It was slightly disastrous, and the lift operator had to stop the lift for me twice. I felt like the preschoolers learning how to ski for the first time. Oh well. After a day of recovering from snowboarding, school began again. I’m glad to be back to a routine, but my schedule isn’t too full yet so life isn’t as organized as I would like it to be. I’ll have more classes next week and homework will start to pick up, though I already have a couple of assignments. The most exciting part of the school week was definitely my fencing class, though it began with multiple frustrations. First, I couldn’t find the street I needed to get to the school where the fencing hall is located. I had directions, but the street I needed turned out to be a path rather than a street, so I originally walked past it. Then I couldn’t find the fencing hall within the school. I asked five different people and no one knew its location. Finally, I found another girl also searching for the room, and we managed to find it. For over two hours, I talked a lot and only in German. She never tried speaking in English with me, which was fantastic. She helped me out with past participles and asked me lots of questions. She even ended up living near me, so we were able to ride the bus back to our neighborhood together. After roll call, the teacher asked if I could understand him, because I conveniently have a name that will always signify me as a non-native German speaker. I told him I could understand him, and I generally could. Throughout the class, I could almost always understand what was going on, and if I couldn’t, all I had to do was watch the 20 other students in class. We spent most of the class on footwork and how to stand and hold the ‘eacute;p’eacute;e, one of three fencing swords. The only moment of disappointment was that we’ll use the command ‘bereit’ rather than ‘en guard.’ But I’ll get over that. I mean, I’m learning to fence, and there’s nothing to complain about that.