Together, 46 students (16-18 years old) from partner schools in Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Austria spent an unforgettable week in Vienna as part of ERASMUS+.
After initial guest visits to Italy and Spain during the last school year, all partners of the project Orientados al patrimonio cultural y la inclusión desde una mirada europea ( OPTIME for short) came together in Vienna at the end of September. Friendly with their host siblings, they all set off together to explore Vienna and its special cultural heritage. A lovingly put together program, as varied as it was dense, provided rich insights into the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of our beautiful city. To begin with, the guests gathered their first impressions of Vienna’s historical building culture during an evening stroll through the city center; a visit to the Museumsquartier made it clear just how closely old and new are intertwined in Vienna. The artistic splendor amazed our guests in the Kunsthistorisches Museum as well as in the Albertina, in the Redouten halls of the Vienna Hofburg and, of course, especially in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Guests were able to enjoy the fact that the Viennese know how to sing and dance by listening to the school choir and experiencing it for themselves by learning the Viennese waltz. During the visit to the dance school, the final quadrille dance was particularly enjoyable. The Viennese and their guests proved that they can also have fun and be quite spontaneous in everyday life when solving various tasks in the Photo Olympics, which also took the project participants on the trail of Mozart: as the widely traveled artist is not only revered in Vienna, but above all in his native city of Salzburg, we invited our guests on a trip to the city of Mozart, Salzburg. A visit to the birthplace in Getreidegasse proved to be particularly rewarding; whether in the cafés, with their famous desserts, or at classical concerts, the name Mozart is omnipresent here. The fact that the Viennese coffee house culture is officially listed as an intangible cultural heritage also shows how attached the Viennese are to their coffee houses; our guests naturally also enjoyed Sachertorte and coffee. Everyone enjoyed the typical Viennese menu cooked and baked at the neighboring school. Other special features of the school were the career guidance activities, the peer mediation program, the ‘OneWeek a Book‘ project and the ‘FlippedClassroom‘ teaching method. Finally, a joint visit to the Wiener Wies’n (Viennese Oktoberfest) provided the opportunity to get to know Austrian folk music and its folk dance movement, the latter of which is on the list of Vienna’s intangible cultural heritage. And because classical horsemanship and the high school of the Spanish Riding School are also part of Vienna’s famous cultural heritage, a visit to the Lipizzaner horses in Vienna was also a must. United in friendship and full of new impressions, everyone finally said goodbye to each other after an incredible week – in the knowledge that they would be able to meet up again in Sofia at the beginning of May.
Markus Kraushofer
Athanasia Siegl-Hadjiioannou
