Today, my exchange family mostly relaxed, especially due to the inclement weather during the first half or so of the day. When the rain died down a bit, most of the family traveled to the Puch museum. Johann Puch was an engineer in Austria who famously made bikes originally made for the mountains. The bikes were designed so that they had pedals to start up the bike, but the bike would assist with a battery in going up mountains. His brand, though, eventually merged with Steyr, and they produce a lot of automobiles too. The museum catalogued this, and also showed the interesting insides of a lot of the cars. After that, I went with Matthew to some other Graz museums. We started at the Kunsthaus Graz, which is the modern art museum. What seems to be universal about modern art, regardless of country or continent, is that I don’t really understand a lot of it. A lot of the paintings were really cool, although I didn’t really get some of the sculptures. There was also a short film about snakes historically, or at least that’s what I got from the film, because it only showed random pieces of footage with really disconcerting music. I think that the point of this modern art, though, was that it was universal, regardless of language, country of origin, or background. In addition, we visited the science museum, too, and looked at frogs and turtles, studied snakes, and used a typewriter a lot. We finished off the afternoon by going to a relatively old cafe (especially by American standards) and had some great things. Matthew got the best Sacherwürfel in Graz I’m pretty sure, and I had a fantastic hot chocolate that tasted like the essence of chocolate itself. It was really nice overall, and the day was relaxing. ~Danny
