Wurst, Semmel und Sauerkraut

Greetings from Austria! At the time I’m studying in University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria as exchange student and life here is going well. As a country Austria does not difference so much from Finland although the weather is much warmer here in Austria. Still in daily life it does not difference much from Finland and when you travel with a train trough the woods it even looks like Finland some times.

To be more accurate I live and study in Wels, which is located in the middle of Austria approximately 200 kilometres west from Vienna. The studying in here is not so time-consuming as it is in Finland, but usually the subjects are harder to study so sometimes I have to sacrifice my own time pretty much for the studies. Still there is plenty enough leisure time to travel and see places.

Here it is easy to travel with train and there is plenty to see in Austria even though it is a small country. You can find beautiful lakes and plenty of mountains (The Alps) from here and there is many beautiful cities pretty close Wels in which you can visit. For example train to Salzburg takes 1 hour and train to Vienna takes 2 hours. Also there are many big cities around Austria that are easy to visit from here e.g. München, Bratislava, Passau, Brno and Prague.

Wels it self is not so big city (only around 50 000 inhabitants), but it’s the Outlet City of Upper Austria, as they call it here, so at the weekends you can find plenty of people from the city centre and it’s also easy to get rid of your money by shopping in here.

The people in Austria are very friendly and it is easy to manage here with only English. Usually if you try to stumble out something in German people change immediately to English when they realise that you are a foreigner.