Graduation Festivities Part I

Graduation was planned for Sunday morning, so Webster hosted a dinner on Saturday night for all the globals and their families who came to Vienna for the big day. I was impressed at the number of family members that came over from the States to celebrate (including people who had aunts, uncles, etc. rather than just parents and siblings) but I took home the prize for having the most attendees….it’s handy to have Austrian friends. My entourage included my parents, Erika & Richard, Hermann & Jutta, and Othmar & Edith….all business friends of my dad’s.

The event was held at….take a guess….a HEURIGER in an old section of Vienna, near a house that Beethoven (or was it Mozart?) used to live in, which sounds cool, but I feel like these composers each lived in about 30 houses during their lives so I wasn’t that impressed. This heuriger as my favorite of any I went to during Vienna, because it had a garden like feel with lots of pretty flowers and plants surrounding us. We had a private section in the back of the building and in addition to the globals and their families were Webster staff and teachers from all of the locations we studied at, including the president of Webster and the dean of the business school who had come from St. Louis.

The dinner was nice, with lots of wine and good German food, and it was fun to meet everyone’s families for the first time (some parents I had met along the way when they came to visit, but most I did not meet). My mom kept saying it was funny to see everyone as living, breathing human beings, because for a year she had just been looking at static pictures on Facebook. Kyle’s mom said the same thing to me….she said she felt like she already knew me from Kyle’s pictures and stories he had told her about the group. I think a lot of families felt that way. The evening consisted of visiting with old teachers, getting to know each other’s families, and drinking lots of wine! It was a nice night and my entourage, Cas’ entourage, and Molly M. closed down the joint.

Side note: I had red wine spilt on me not once, not twice, but THREE times that night. Luckily I had on a pink dress that just soaked it right up you couldn’t even notice.