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Mass.

Yesterday, I attended a Catholic mass. I am not considering becoming Catholic (it doesn’t take attending a mass to convince me that Catholicism is not for me). I went because I wanted to experience a mass in St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna’s city center. Several of my friends here are Catholic, including my friend and bunkmate Scott. When the idea of attending mass on Sunday was brought up in conversation, I was initially turned off. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became. A Catholic mass in a cathedral in Vienna. It occurred to me that it did not necessarily have to be a religious experience—at least not in the way it was meant to be. One thing about Catholicism that interests me is its diminutive nature. Catholicism to me is basically one big self-imposed guilt trip. You are taught to feel small and inconsequential. God is all-powerful, God knows all the answers; man is fallible by his intrinsic nature, and responsible for the de...

Venezia.

We wake up and get to the train station. The ride is about 5 hours, and the route takes us through the Austrian and Italian Alps. There is an historic railway in Austria between Vienna and the border near Italy called the Semmering Pass Railway. It is considered one of the most beautiful railways in the world. The Alps tower above us, and we cross beautiful brick bridges over sweeping green and trees. We go in and out of mountains. We can’t take our eyes from the windows. We arrive in Venice early in the afternoon, crossing the lagoon, coming out of the train station to the Grand Canal. We make our way to the bus station across the Canal to ride the shuttle to our hostel. The bus takes us across the lagoon again, to a camp site about 15 minutes away. We check into our tents. Our first order of business is to find accomodations in the city center. Unable to find anything within our price range on the internet, we go back across the lagoon on the shuttle bus, which charges a fee af...

New links.

19 days 23 hours 23 minutes The days are passing. Less than three weeks. I posted some new links in the Links bar. MAK is a museum in Vienna that we will be visiting. Here is a mission statement. Bruce Mau Design is a studio that Tate talked up a lot during class. I visited an exhibition his studio put on at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto while returning from Noel's wedding. The exhibition is called MASSIVE CHANGE . There was a lot to take in (I spent two and half hours there and didn't get to see the whole thing), but the ideas that were presented were spectacular, if not a bit idealistic. The exhibition is an extension of the MASSIVE CHANGE project, which presents the idea of sustainability and shelter for the entire human race as a realistic design goal. I find the idea of sustainability to be very interesting. When you put aside the baggage that's associated with "greenies" and "hippies" and "tree-huggers", sustainability is a very...

summer in vienna

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