I had the recent opportunity to visit our daughter, Kim, in
Austria. Kim is spending this semester
in Gaming, Austria as part of Franciscan University’s study abroad
program.
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| Kim in her dorm room. The students live in a former Carthusian Monastery. I learned that when the Russians were here they turned the church into a horse barn. |
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| Kim is majoring in education. This is a school that she goes to once a week to help teach an elementary English class. |
Last fall Steve and I
had discussed visiting Kim during Parents Week.
At the time we only had one full-time employee and knew it would be
impossible for either of us to be gone for a week. Fortunately for me we added a new employee in
April. I shared with Steve that Kim was
asking if I was coming to visit and he was open to discussing the idea of me
going to Austria. Everything fell into
place and within a couple of weeks I was off to Austria.
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| Kim and I spent a day in Vienna before arriving in Gaming. This was on my table in my hotel room. The hotel is part of the monastery grounds. |
The Parents Week package included day trips to nearby
churches and a concentration camp. There
were many components to my experience that touched me spiritually, emotionally
and academically.
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| It's hard to capture the beauty of Melk Monastery as well as other churches we were in. Even more difficult is the ability to share the spiritual experiences I was blessed with. |
Our group traveled in a small bus each day to the different
towns and then back to Gaming each night.
We were able to admire the countryside from the bus’s large windows. The rolling hills were breath taking with the
foot high wheat fields, perfectly trimmed hedges and flowering Pear trees. Every farm was neatly kept as well as the yards
in each town we went through. Another
parent and I started to wonder if there were any Austrian’s with a messy yard
or a junk pile in the trees.
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| My best window shot from the bus. I am hoping to get more pictures from other parents that were on the trip. |
We also saw numerous rows of stacked wood and they were
perfectly straight. Kim informed me
later that the students were told never to take wood from those stacked piles
as they belonged to someone else.
I asked a few locals about the tidiness whenever I could. The response was the same, “it’s an Austrian
thing”. In Austria the people take great
pride in keeping their yards and farms neat.
A young woman from Vienna shared with me that the junk is sometimes be
stored inside the barn as well as the cows and machinery. She looked surprised when I commented that I
didn’t ever see a tractor or implement sitting outside.
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| I love taking pictures of food. This was an excellent dinner of braised beef in vegetable-root-cream and bread dumpling with homemade cranberries. |
The cleanliness of Austria really hit me again when our 4-H
Club was picking up trash along a highway near Dodge. Every year we gather trash on a total of four
miles of highway. We usually collect at
least a dozen very large garbage bags of trash.
Most of the trash consists of
aluminum beer cans. I wonder why we can’t
have an American thing of respecting our environment enough to stop
littering.
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| Our highway clean up crew! |
Our own hills in Nebraska are alive with green grass,
flowering ornamental trees and flowering spring bulbs. It is important to me that we each do what we
can to leave the world better than we found it.
When it comes to something as simple as littering maybe we can utilize
the popularity of owl décor we can bring back the slogan “Give a hoot, don’t
pollute”.
