Wiener Neustadt

Yesterday morning we arrive in Wiener Neustadt and it is absolutely amazing how sharply different towns 50 kilometers apart can be. I met some old friends from my time at Austrian Alpine School earlier this summer and some new cadets as well. They come from all over Austria and even though Austria is roughly the size of Tennessee, they all have different accents. The accent in combination with the outrageous speeds at which they speak and the way they replace German words with regional Austrian words makes understanding them extremely difficult sometimes (okay, most of the time). I'm hoping to improve quickly, but for now us four American cadets have been struggling to understand, only picking out words here or phrases there. I've also gotten myself into trouble a couple times by nodding and saying "Ja" when I didn't fully know what they were saying. This has forced me to come back and say things like, "Wait, no I don't play lacrosse." or "Oh hold on, I'm not going home on vacation while I'm here."
On the bright side, I have two buddies from Austrian Alpine in my squad for a 2-week field training exercise that starts on Monday. On the even brighter side, I finished my second essay in German, and I feel like it is extremely better. In my first essay, I struggled to make statements more complex than Subject-Verb sentences with the occasional Direct Object. This time, I tried to add some complexity to my writing, and I hope it works. We had to write about a military festival that we went to a week ago. It was pretty cool, but I think the most interesting thing that I saw was the Austrians selling wine and beer out of an old tank and calling it the "Panzer Bar".