Servus Vienna!

We actually tried to plan a newyear’s party in Prague, the capital of Czech Republic. Unfortunately though, we started planning to late and the hostels were full.
Therefore, we again went to Vienna. On the other hand though, we were able to see some more attractions that we haven’t seen before, and not everybody participated the first time in 2014/2015 as well. Here, I only want to point out what was new, because the party had a lot of simmilarities with the first party.

This time, instead of 13 people, we ended up with 9 people. However, this didn’t take away the fun we had with 13 people; in fact, we were more likely able to spontaneously find a restaurant or café to stop by without having to worry about too less space.
The arrival and departure was also the same, at least for me, boarding the train in Hamburg and leaving in Vienna approximately 9 hours later; but I got accompany this time, because I traveled together with another person from near Hamburg to the party, as well as backwards to Hamburg on the day of departure..

Fortunately, just as last year, we happened to be half-blind half-partially sighted, so enough people were capable of helping or guiding the blindies.
As for the attractions and activities: we attended a guided tour through the ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk: Austrian television), where we saw a variety of studios and got informed about the ORFs objective and journalism in general. A musical museum was also on our agenda. Well, not everything was about music there; we also saw a lot of sound-stations. Because I am a passioned sound recorder using an Olympus LS14 mini-recorder with a pair of external binaural microphones, I was surprised to find headsets and a joystick lying around in order to stear a certain tone in a 360° field whilst wearing the headsets to produce the feeling of a binaural sound atmosphere.
The year before, we failed attending a guided city tour, so that’s what we did this time. We joined a group of German/English-speaking people with a tour guide and – after the tour – we got some extra tickets to board one of the so-called red-busses that tour the city. You could plug in headsets, choose your preferred language and listen to the information about different places whilst passing them, and occasionally there were possibilities to hopp off the bus, just to hopp on another red bus whenever you feel like it during the day the tickets were valid for. We left the bus at the Vienna Prater, an amusement park with a few rides, bars, candy shops, etc. One of our favorite rides was Black Mamba. There is one thing you should know about this one: take off your hat, glasses, or whatever lose objects that you carry around, unless you would like to watch any of those objects disappear in the wind Black Mamba causes. Anyway, it was a hell of a trip!

As for December 31st, a group of people went to the supermarket to get some groceries for newyear’s eve in the almighty conference room which we again rented for the night. After a walk on the market square of Vienna, we had our traditional dinner at Maredos Steakhouse, before we ended up in our conference room to celebrate the party.

The next morning, we slept a lot and finally decided to wake up in the afternoon to take a look at the newyear’s market. Obviously, however, Vienna has it’s own opinion for a so-called newyear’s market. Eitherway, we were a little surprised when we found the newyear’s market closed, almost gone. As a matter of fact, you know, the newyear’s market is considered to be an event taking place from somewhat before newyear’s eve until the end of the year. In other words, newyear’s eve would have been the last occasion to see the market opened an in action. Therefore, there was no other choice than killing some time with drinking coffee before the final dinner at Kolariks Luftburg took place.

As always, 5 days can pass by very quickly; but it was a great pleasure to be able to meet such a large number of ICC people from different nations again on events like these. Again, I can conclude that – no matter where you are – you will always have an awesome time when you put a group of ICC people together for a couple of days! And most importantly, this is not over! 😉