Sturm Graz is a CS meeting to find new friends; to get to know the city of Graz; to find out about culinary specials in the surroundings; and of course to have a great time!

Well, okay, it sounds like your typical CS meeting. But CS is all about cultural exchange and making friendships all over the world, so why not in Graz?

Sturm Graz, as Sounds of Salzburg, was inspired by Vienna Calling. In October 2010, Kersy, Thomas and Tom and some 100 couchsurfers met up to have pub crawls, pick nicks, city tours and a great night out at a Buschenschank in the outskirts of the city.

The program for Sturm Graz 2011 has been announced only in early September, and it looks great. Unfortunately, I will have to make some decisions, like: do I prefer chocolate over a guided tour through Graz’s underground? Will I do a City Rallye, or a City Walk? And – most of all – what the hell should be my late-birthday-and-thanks-for-hosting-us-present for Kerstin?

I am dearly looking forward to this 🙂

I already talked about Couchsurfing besides surfing couches here.

But hey, there’s more!

For example, with lots of expats and linguistically highly motivated people around, the Vienna Language Exchange is a pretty active bunch of people. The most active sub-group is the German Conversation Group. They meet every week to improve their levels of speaking German, and everybody is welcome: beginners, intermediates, experts and (of course!) native speakers.

Nearly the same applies to the French Conversation Meeting. It only started (again) two weeks ago, and the group is pretty small still, but we are happy about everybody joining the meetings. To me, it is big fun to see how fast speaking a language improves your speaking skills. Last week, I had a really tough time speaking about me leaving work and starting to study, and this week, talking about Geocaching, it was way easier already.

If you need further information, have a look at the Vienna CS Group once in a while. Events will be announced there some days in advance.

As Bettina had to leave the flat at 8.30 in the morning, Georg and I were sent out into the city, too. We had known before, so I posted on the Salzburg group if anybody wanted to join us for breakfast. No one came, so it was only the two of us. Before breakfast, we even found time to do some really necessary shopping: a belt for him, a new pair of short trousers for me.

At 10, we met with a group of couchsurfers for the announced city hike. It took us ages (1.5 hrs) to do a walk that could easily be done within half an hour. A pity, but next time we’ll just do the sight seeing on our own 🙂

After the city walk, we made for the train station. We were meeting there to leave for Hallein/Bad Dürrnstein to go tobogganing on Salzburg’s longest summer toboggan. I’m not sure if the label “toboggan” is right, because you’re going down in a toboggan, but on rails … well, never mind. It is a 30-45 minutes drive by car to go there, and we had more than enough rides to share. Georg and I went with Jacquie, who lives in Bavaria, and her couchsurfer Akis from Greece.

Some people decided to go up by foot – according to the signs and information panel, this should be a 2 hrs walk, but they made it in little more than 1. The bigger part of the group went up in the chair lift. It took us some time to get the tickets, because we wanted to get the group discount, but had to collect the money and pay in one go in order to do so. The ride up was fun: we could watch some people riding down already, and at one point we spotted the other group, hiking their way up.

After arriving on top, we made for the mountain’s peak, which is on the other side of the austrian-german border. This border-crossing caused some laughter and funny pictures; more than the peak itself, which did not even provide a nice sight of the surrounding, as there was trees all around.

After the hikers’ group arrived at the restaurant at the top station, we enjoyed a good meal and then made for the descent. At first I had not been sure if I really wanted to do that, but sometimes, one must do something in spite of oneself. And I’m happy I did, because it was great fun!

After me (and the two following on my heels), there was a huge gap, caused by Jacqui who had already announced that, being a scaredy-pants, she would be descenting really slowly. After her, Akis came down, trying to film his ride with his camcorder. Everybody who was down already cheered at everybody coming down, even if they were no couchsurfers – it was great 🙂

Unfortunately, Akis’ camcorder did not record the whole ride. In fact, it did not record any of it. After some minutes of considering, he shyly asked, if it would be a trouble to anyone if he would do the whole thing again. It wasn’t – and Georg even joined him for a second ride.

In the evening, we were meeting at Augustiner Bräu; as Bettina was visiting her parents, we could not get into the flat, so we went there directly with Jacqui and Akis (who was very happy having his second ride recorded 100%).  The day had been very exhausting, so we were the first ones to leave again, after only 2 beers and some Schweinsbraten.

So in the end we did not have to go to Salzburg without a couch fixed. As said before, I received a message asking if I still had need of a place to stay, and if I would stay with Bettina. I did like to, and as she even had enough room to host the two of us, we were very relaxed on our way to Salzburg.

Arriving there, we got in contact with Bettina, to drop off our stuff before heading to the first event: dinner at Paul Stubm. We were a bit late for the dinner itself, but just in time for a beer (or three) after. As always, we met some already familiar faces there, some from last year’s SOS, some from this year’s Vienna Calling. And, of course, there were some new people around, like Iris from Bavaria and her boyfriend Manuel from Hamburg, with whom we had a great time and some really funny talks, e.g. “How can I calculate how often a group of >n< people will have to clink their glasses until everybody clinked everybody’s glass once?”. All of us had learned that once, but forgotten, so we still had parts of the formula in our heads and “only” had to recover it.

This happened in the last pub we went to, and only at 1 in the morning. Shortly after, Bettina, Georg and I decided to go home and catch some sleep in order to survive the next day’s programme: furniture shopping for Bettina, and sight seeing and tobogganing for Georg and me.

Vienna Calling did not only mean having a good time to many Couchsurfers all over Austria. It also inspired them to creating and organising their own, usually slightly smaller, international Couchsurfing meetings.

One of them is SOS (Sounds of Salzburg). First edition took place last year in September. Georg and I did not have much time to spend there, because we already had accepted an invitation for a housewarming party in Innsbruck. Still, we spend one evening with the group, went for dinner and afterwards for some drinks with them. We did not couchsurf, but stayed at a friend’s place in the surroundings of the city.

SOS will happen again this weekend, so September 2nd – 4th. Our plan, as we did not succeed in finding a host by writing requests, was to just go there and wear a sign saying “I need a couch”. And then, all of a sudden, I received a message of a girl from Salzburg saying she’d like to host people during the weekend, and if I would like to stay at her place. She already asked another couchsurfer if she still needed a couch, so together with Georg we will be 4 people, and it might be a bit cosy, but who cares! It’s a CS event – sleeping is overestimated!

After meeting for the first time one year ago, and meeting many times since, Kerstin has become a dear friend of mine. She is, obviously, a Couchsurfer, and is one of the most active members of the Graz community.

When she left to spend the whole summer, nearly 4 months, to tour through North America, Georg and I of course came to say good-bye. It was a great weekend, ending in an amazing, unexpected (at least by Kerstin) farewell-scene at Graz airport.

And when Kerstin sent a message saying she was planning a welcome home party in Carinthia, we of course made all arrangements necessary to go there!

So again, we spent the last weekend in Carinthia, this time at Falkertsee, in a lovely little house, talking, laughing, relaxing. We walked around Falkertsee, we played Minigolf and Pit-Pat, we had a delicious Brettljause, chocolate cake, Linzer Torte, Limoncello, Weißwurstfrühstück, and – in my opinion best of all – home made Zirbenschnaps. Together with 10 others – family and friends, people we already knew and people we did not meet before – we had a great time.

Thanks a lot again for the invitation, Kersy, and see you at Sturm Graz 🙂

Monday afternoon, I received a last-minute request for Monday night only. The message was really nice, and the profile looked fine, too. Bjarte seemed to be a good surfer and host so far, so I accepted his request.

In the early evening, after work, he met me and some fellow Couchsurfers at Rathausplatz. It is a great place to be, as there is always something going on: Film Festivals, Food Festivals, Sports Events, …

At the moment, there is a Film Festival with lots of Food Stands of different restaurants. They are open already from 11 a.m., so you can have your lunch there.

After having some great food, Bjarte headed back to his car to pick up his stuff. He had a GPS with him, so he would find our place without problems. It took him some time, though, to arrive, as he arranged some more things concerning his car and so on.

We went to Kino am Dach with some friends that night. In Summer, Vienna is full with open air cinemas. Kino am Dach is one of them, situated atop the main library of the city of Vienna. We watched “True Romance” and afterwards went for a beer.

The next day, after some sightseeing with Georg, he went on to Bratislava and then to Budapest. A short stay it was, but I enjoyed it very much and we had a good time 🙂

Long weekend short:

app. 750 km traveled
8 geocaches searched – 8 geocaches found
app. 5 castles visited
one night camping in the wild
one night in a hotel because of bad weather
3 sunny days, on rain during any day
a bunch of pictures

As soon as I got my pictures from my phone and the other guy uploaded all of his, I’ll post them. And in the meantime, I’ll try to write something longer and more detailed 😉

We did not find a host, so we did not go to Prague. Instead, we’re going to Slovakia with a Couchsurfer, to see some castles and find some geocaches 🙂

Have a nice (long) weekend!