So far behind...

Very busy. Just had Vienna Weekend, with over 200 IAESTE members and fellow interns converging on Vienna for an amazing time. Fair bit of sunburn. However, to take things chronologically, I’ll try to get some more things down here from two weeks ago, and I still need to try to summarize the EURO championship experiences sooner or later.

So this goes all the way back to Monday the 23rd of June. I went to a play at the People’s Theater, a nice and fairly small theater located on the inner ring, a short walk downhill from my dorm.

Vienna is incredibly rich with culture, as can be seen by the numerous music halls and opera houses one inevitably stumbles across, and many famous musicians from Strauss to Mozart to Beethoven have made Vienna their home. Furthermore, because there is so much going on, and because of the generally common love of music and such culture, one can find rather inexpensive tickets to world-class performances of operas and symphonies. I was very much looking forward to experiencing this side of Vienna while staying here.

Unfortunately, the Viennese summers (which are a lot hotter and more humid than I would ever have otherwise imagined) just seem to be too much for the city’s artists, because virtually every cultural center takes a big break from the end of June until September. I was constantly confused as to why all the schedules I would read skipped over the months of July and August. There are a few summer series of performances of some sort going on, but generally, this function of the city is just shut down for the rest of my stay.

In the face of this, I realized that I needed to get in to one of the last available performances. I bought a ticket for the closing performance of Odon von Horvath’s Tales from the Viennese Woods, his most well-known theatrical piece, and an instrumental critique of the German-speaking culture (especially in Vienna and Austria generally) that was allowing the rise of the Nazi regime. I had no experience with the play beforehand, but the German class I was with three years ago studied Horvath a bit, allowing me to travel with the class to Stuttgart to see Faith Love Hope, one of his later pieces, and to read his book Youth Without God, another critique of the incoming Nazis. I enjoy his style greatly, and his content is incredible – when reading it, one has the impression that it was written retrospectively, right after the Nazi era, with a clear vision of what was done wrong and how it could have best been avoided. I was stunned to learn (some time after reading the book and seeing the first play) that his biggest works appeared in the early 1930s, in the midst of all the danger that would go along with such productions.

So despite not knowing anything about Tales from the Viennese Woods, I made sure to make it to get a cheap balcony seat for the final showing. The theater is fairly nice,

though I realized immediately that, like everything here, the seating was built for people slightly smaller than I.

It was also rather hot, but despite these discomforts, I was able to enjoy the piece. The stage was built with rolling hills made of wooden planks, which the actors used to great effect. In my experiences, German theater often makes use of jarring or shocking effects, and this show kept with that very much. I could understand most of what was going on, but it certainly deserves a closer reading at some point to pick up on some of the more subtle nuances.

On Tuesday morning I met Karolina Ostasz, the newly arrived Polish intern and third intern living in the dorm and also working at Eurofins-ofi, my place of employment. Because of this convenience, the folks from IAESTE asked me to help get her to and from work. We also happened to meet Jelena, our other coworker and the third of what has now become our little crew, on our way in, and we got to know her and showed her how to navigate the public transportation. Karolina speaks only a few phrases of German and her English is a bit shaky in conversation, so I generally have to be fairly slow and deliberate, though she can generally do well with Jelena.

She was accompanied by rather interesting weather, though strange weather isn’t entirely foreign to Vienna. I’ve heard of strange snowstorms, the early and unseasonable heat and humidity uncharacteristic for this latitude, and even a hurricane. All we got on Tuesday was a good dousing of blueberry-sized hail, which is pretty tame in comparison.

A friend of ours, a German named Philip who’s studying in Vienna and is only loosely associated with IAESTE, also told us about a party going on that night, and so we took our first trip to what would become a regular meeting point: the MuseumsQuartier.

The MQ is a section on the very western part of Vienna’s inner ring (the part closest to our student hostel) filled with museums, from the old and stately Natural History and Art History Museums to the Museum of Modern Art and another just called the Leopold Museum. These newer buildings enclose a large courtyard area with open-air restaurants and their tables, some fountains, and a whole ton of these strange heavy plastic-foam purple seat things all roped together so they can’t be carted off. This is apparently the place to be in Vienna, though, at least for the young people – or the people who think they’re still young – as it can be very busy even by seven or so on a weeknight. Groups or individuals will bring their (much more cheaply) store-bought alcohol in and just sit in the generally quiet and comfortable social atmosphere. Of course, as the evening progresses – especially on the weekends – things can become a little more interesting, people climb lampposts or become a bit belligerent or whatever, but its sheer existence is nonetheless startling to a non-legal American who won’t be able to drink on the street even at 21, such as I, as there could well be three to five thousand people gathered there at peak times, drinking and making merry quite openly in public.

After this, we went to the Donau (Vienna’s river, the Danube auf Englisch), which is a small, strange club not too far from where we’re staying. I got to know Karolina a little better, though not without difficulty. She is studying biotechnology in Poland, though from what I gather (and I really can’t verify that this is even what she said), students in the field only get to choose between either a focus in beer or one in DNA. She did, however, choose the former, which is a partial redemption for going into a biology-related field.

Another miscue came when we were talking about music. When she said she liked Soul and R & B, I asked who she liked to listen to, hoping for the long shot Michael Jackson response. Instead, she surprised me with “Stanley Kubrick.” I was utterly confounded.

“Especially Clockwork Orange,” she tried to help. Apparently, between the house music and the language barrier, she had translated, “What sort of R&B?” as “What sort of movies?” I suppose it’s valid enough.

It was late evening on a weeknight, so the Donau wasn’t especially hopping, and when Karolina noted, with her Polish sense of taste, that the beer was a bit light, even I was inclined to agree.

Wednesday was a very good day involving the Germany-Turkey soccer semifinal, but that is a tale for my next post: the EURO Soccer Championships, held in Vienna this June.

Cliffhanger!

It's Been A While

I've been a bit busy.

I mean extraordinarily busy. I've gotten less sleep per night this week than probably any stretch in my life, which includes road trips, finals weeks, weeks leading up to finals weeks (which in my case are always a lot worst, at least sleep-wise), and even the week of my play this year. That's the only one that comes close, but I think I have it beat.

Rest assured that it is a very, very good thing.

A lot of the students have been getting done with their studies so there have been all sorts of end of semester celebrations and going away parties, which have kept me out late every night, and work has kept me up early every morning.

I was drafting a blog post to attack about a week's worth of my absence, but it has strangely gone missing, and with it all of my work, so I will now post (with some embellishment and explanation for those less familiar) a recap of two weekends ago, when I was in Ludwigsburg, where I spent three months during summer 2005. (It comes almost directly from an e-mail I sent to my mother, so if it's a little disconnected or strangely personal and familiar in tone, you now know why.) This will hopefully kick off a series of (hopefully more common) shorter blog posts, which (why didn't I think of this before!) will be a lot more manageable for both author and reader alike.

It was the most comfortable weekend I've had in recent memory. I got in Friday afternoon and went right down to the school, where Geli and her friends were still gathered following a champagne reception in honor of their final tests being finished that same day. We went back to see the family and walked around the town for a little bit, and Geli had dance lessons in the evening, so I was able to sit and talk with the family, especially Manfred, Geli's dad, about all sorts of things. When Geli got back, we then spent the evening with a number of Geli's friends, most of whom I could remember, celebrating their effectual graduation and watching a crazy soccer game. The game went through half an hour of overtime and then penalty kicks thereafter, so it was almost midnight by the time they were done; we ended up scratching the plans we had to go to a club in Stuttgart afterwards when everyone appeared fairly drowsy by that time, not the least of which was I, who had left Vienna shortly before 7 that morning for 8 hours on the train.

Saturday we slept in a bit, then met up with Simon, Geli's boyfriend of a couple years, and a couple of her friends from the night before to drive out to a mountain where there was a high ropes course. While telling me on Friday about the plans, Geli described the ropes and platforms high up in the trees, where you're dangling fifty feet in the air with just a harness to support you, when she turns to me and says, "You don't have a fear of hens, do you?"

I was a bit confused and asked, "Is that even a fear?"

She just kind of looked at me blankly and said, "Yeah, for sure."

We were both kind of confused. I could only imagine how hens figured into the high ropes course. I saw a bunch of people with helmets and harnesses swinging through trees and running around on the forest floor being chased by crazy German chickens. "Fear of hens?" I asked her again.

She laughed out loud. "No," she explained, "fear of heights." The word for fear of heights (Höhenfurcht) is very similar to the made-up word for fear of hens (Hühnerfurcht). So it kind of loses a bit in translation, but she and her friends kept making wisecracks about it the whole afternoon, so it was pretty memorable.

I had done a few crazy things on a high ropes course for the LeaderQuest program at the U, so once I was reassured of the security of my harness and carabiners, I was again free of any latent fear of heights I may have adopted from my dad. It was pretty fun once we got up to the more challenging courses. The course was pleasent in the shade and not extraordinarily tiring, though some of the stations could be strenuous, both physically and, despite my confidence, in coping with the heights. The most difficult station was one where you had to clip your harness to a rope, swing down and grab another rope, hang there and transfer your clips to the second rope, and then swing over to the opposite platform. I was luckily the last of the five of us, so I had the opportunity to learn from everyone else's mistakes.

We accidentally stayed too long, not having our cell phones for clocks up in the trees, and ended up having to scramble to try to get in the rest of our plans for the evening. Geli, Simon, and I went to meet up with even more of her friends I had known from '05 at a Biergarten where we had gone on my second day in Ludwigsburg (I still remember it very clearly) and we just visited and watched the soccer game, another upset in overtime. When ordering one of my drinks, the barkeep gave me a scratch-off game coaster, with which I won another half liter free. I ended up talking with Nico, one of the guys we had gone to Munich with right at the end of school, about his CAD work for Mercedes. He said he's going to do a little bit of training at their plant in Tuscaloosa and I couldn't come up with where that was. I took some pictures and we headed out for the night.

From back and left to front and right, Simon, Winnie (a student who spent a year in Michigan), Geli, and Nico

Sunday morning Geli had tennis so we said our goodbyes a bit early, then Marina and Manfred took me into church (which had been rennovated since I was there last, the pews replaced with seats and the walls pulled in a bit to make the whole space a lot smaller, though it is now shoulder-to-shoulder instead of being sparsely half-filled) and through the palace gardens. Marina incidentally made my favorite Swabian dish (Maultaschen) for lunch, and I also gave them the bottle of Viennese wine I had brought as a gift. It didn't come close to making up for their generosity, though, since besides putting me up and feeding me they paid for my public transportation, the admission to the ropes course and palace gardens, drove me around and back to down to Stuttgart that afternoon, and paid for anything else that they could. I had told them that I was disappointed to find there were no Laugen-bread rolls in Vienna and Marina said that was because they were a Swabian specialty, and that she would buy me some to take with for the ride back. After walking around the pedestrian center of Stuttgart for a little bit, they took me to the train depot, and when I tried to wave off Marina's offer of buying me the rolls, she insisted, and so I asked her to just buy a couple. She just shook her head and brought back seven, so they lasted me until Tuesday. Not that I minded...

Plans are to cook something mysterious but sweet with our IAESTE reception officers tomorrow night, but I'm hoping to update everyone on how my very busy last week went within the next couple days, and I still have some general posts on the soccer championship (which Spain unfortunately won over Germany on Sunday) and the work I'm doing here. Not to mention that I have a lot of traveling planned for July, and Vienna Weekend (with over 200 IAESTE affiliates from around the world signed up) will be taking place this upcoming weekend.

Thank you for all the comments, e-mails, and Facebook notes I'm receiving. I do my best to stay up with private correspondence first and foremost, and I'd really love to hear from all of you, even just to drop in a note every once and a while.

Bis dann!

Oh What A Night

In direct contrast to my first weekend in Vienna, my second was overflowing with human contact. You may want to consider going at this post in episodes, because I make little effort to keep it concise. I suppose it’s to make up for my very infrequent posting.

The weekend started with a going-away party for one of Boku’s members, Alois. I was e-mailed directions to a recreational area on the western outskirts of town and met the group congregated there around six, shortly after getting off work. Just as I showed up, it started raining enough to warrant us putting up two canopies before it let up. We pulled picnic tables around underneath them and set up a grill.

Gülin was already there, and it wasn’t too long before another visitor showed up. Marc (“Bobby”) McDonald comes from Northern Ireland and has an internship in Groß-Siegharts, a tiny village up by the Czech Repbulic in an area called Lower Austria. He had replied to the mass e-mail I sent wondering if anyone wanted to travel, and was looking for an opportunity to meet up with other people in Vienna, since he is quite all by himself up in the village without any English-speaking co-workers or fellow interns and doesn’t speak German himself. I told him about our plans for the weekend and took the liberty of extending an invitation to the weekend’s activities, which he very thankfully accepted.

The conversation had kind of stilted back and forth between English and German as it tends to do, but after Bobby showed up, everyone closeby spoke almost solely English. The language situation puts me rather in a bind, because I try to speak as much German as I can (my whole workday is in German) to work on my own skills, but Germans have the same attitude toward English; this can result in some interesting back-and-forth conversations, which I touched on when describing my roommate. However, when we are with interns, who generally do not speak German at all, the second strike against my efforts warrants the switch to English, though I try occasionally to still get by in German when it’s not too offensive or confusing to my cohorts.

This is not to say that English can’t be confusing enough, especially with Bobby’s accent. There were a few times when even I just kind of blinked and said, “Er, one more time?” Not to mention the misinterpretations, which could be quite comic:

“Hey, well it’s about half sex and I haven’t eaten.”
“… it’s… what?”
“Woll, it’s about sex-thurty or so, an’ I haven’t eaten since dinner. I was wonnerin if we could throw something on the grell.”
“Oh. Right.”

But the misinterpretations flowed just as readily back the other way:

“We’ll wrap up some potatoes and put them in the coals. Just what we like to eat, potatoes. Though I suppose you have plenty of them in Ireland, huh?”
“Er, plenty o’ wot?”
“Potatoes… right?”
“Um. Oh, you mean spods? Yeah.”
“Yeah, spuds. Sorry. Didn’t mean to confuse you.”

So I might be learning two languages while I’m here. Indeed, I find that my convictions that language is highly idiomatic and based in clichés and parroting highly supported in that my English subconsciously changes when I’m listening to his. I start saying things like “bloke” when I mean “guy,” “boot” when I mean “vomit,” and “football” when I mean “soccer.” He stayed at my place Saturday night and, when I left earlyish the next morning to go to Mass, I left him a note that started, “Top o’ the mornin’!” Which I guess might have been a bit much, and wasn’t entirely an unconscious decision either.

The party proved itself to be truly European as about twelve of us migrated to the soccer pitch, and proved itself as truly Austrian when we divided into two teams: those holding beers and those not holding beers. My team of teetotalers (at least for the hour and a half or so the game went on) managed to pull out a comeback victory, which may or may not have been independent of the fact that our opponents had beers in their hands the whole game. They took an early and significant lead, largely due to our two defensemen being an American and a girl, but we declared “golden goal” (sudden death) in a 4-8 deficit and our hard-fought efforts were rewarded when the ball flew past Bobby’s reach into the corner of the goal.

Though Bobby left early that night to get the house of the IAESTE Vienna contact he had arranged to stay with (“I don’t wanna ring ‘im too late”) I stuck around until we took down the tents and packed everything up. There was a light drizzle while we waited for the bus that would take us back to the subway, but now only among Austrians, I was free to speak German, and my pleasant buzz made it even easier to do so.

Saturday morning was late, pleasant, warm, and slow, which was what I needed after a week of work. After getting an e-mail regarding the plans for the evening, I occupied my afternoon at the Rathaus.


As you can see, the place, like most of Vienna’s Inner Ring, has undergone drastic changes for the EURO 2008 European Soccer Championships. Streets are cordoned off for pedestrian zones, and these giant screens have been put up all over the place. Tents and stands selling their highly overpriced wares are all around, and during game times – especially for the teams popular among locals, like Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Croatia – soccer fans will pack into every available square foot. That Saturday afternoon, a free concert was given by some big acts for the Opening Ceremonies before the beginning of the Switzerland-Czech Republic game you can see being counted down to on the big screen. However, I have a number of pictures from the event and it would make this post a lot longer than it already is, so I am planning on combining it with an upcoming post about the soccer championship experience.

Getting back to my place briefly to upload my pictures to my computer, I found an e-mail from Bobby wondering if I wanted to hang around for the afternoon. When we eventually did meet up with two of our Summer Reception coordinators (both named Sophie) and a couple of their friends, he told me he had basically just been hoofing it all over the city since half-ten. (How to Speak Irish 101: Half-ten means half PAST ten, or 10:30. This can be extremely confusing in a German-speaking country, because in German half-ten (“halb zehn”) means half OF ten o’clock, or nine-thirty.)

We wandered around the very middle of the city (an area called “Stephansplatz” after the humongous St. Stephen’s Cathedral located there), buying beer at McDonald’s and skirting the crowds of chanting Turks who were rallying for their team set to play that night, and keeping a safe distance from the crowds of singing Croats, who were already pre-gaming for their team’s opening match on Sunday. We eventually found our way over to the Museumsquartier, an area not too far away from my dorm holding three of the city’s largest museums and a couple of opera houses. We went into a courtyard area of the Museum of Modern Art and hung out for a while, talking and drinking, hoping the sky wouldn’t open up on us and wondering what we were going to do with the rest of the night.

Beyond Bobby, we also had Keira along, who, with a freckled face, red hair, and even a Kelly green shirt was undeniably even more Irish than the former. Sophie K had lived with Keira for some time in Ireland, and now Keira has come to stay for the summer. She is, however, without a job, so finding a lead on somewhere she could earn some money was one objective for the evening. Another girl along, Anna, apparently knew some people who knew some people, so we headed off to meet them at a party boat located up on the Danube.

We stopped by the boat briefly to eat some pretzel sticks, watch Portugal finish off Turkey in the second game of the night, and drink some overpriced beer before leaving and heading down the waterfront to one of Vienna’s most popular nightclubs, Flex:


Unfortunately, admission was 11 Euros, which none of us were willing to pay for bad techno. Fortunately, a lot of other people felt the same way, so we were perfectly content to sit outside by the bar on a bench, talking to passersby and amongst ourselves for a couple hours. At one point, Anna apprehended the bullhorn one of them was using to cheer for Sweden (who wasn’t even playing until Tuesday):


Keira and Bobby:


Apparently on a lead of where her friend was headed, Anna decided it was time to head back to the party boat, and we obliged all too happily.


A very unflattering picture of Bobby, Sophie K, and Sophie G:


I was later sitting in the spot where you see Bobby, taking a break from the dance floor, when a man selling roses came around. I accidentally made eye contact with me and he sidled up to me in the smoky closed up boat interior, throbbing with trance beats and strobe lights. He offered me a rose for five Euros.
“No, I can’t do that. Thanks.”
He shrugged. “Maybe that is a bit much. Two Euros.”
“Nah, man, I don’t have anyone to give it to. You’re not going to sell me this.”
He drew back resignedly and looked over to the side, where there were some very tasteless pastry rolls and a red-colored but equally tasteless strudel laid out on a table. He looked back at me.
“You want some of that food, man?” I had had a few drinks that evening, so I was already quite fraternal with the rose solicitor.
“Is it free?”
“Yeah, man, definitely! Go ahead!” I was a lot more encouraging than the situation really required.
He gave his trademark shrug again and set the flowers off to the side on the table. Then, cutting off a slice of strudel, held it up and asked, “Is there alcohol in this?”
I gave him a shrug in return. “No idea.” I didn’t even know that was a valid question for strudel. Learn something new every day, I guess.
Bobby was almost laughing himself into somersaults as the man picked up his flowers again and left.
“Wot did you say to ‘im?”
“I just told him I didn’t want a rose. He wanted some food instead.”
“Wha…?” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t even construct a sentence until he calmed himself down. “I’ve never seen one o’ those blokes with the flowers just set ‘em down so easy.”
Later in the night, Bobby also had a lot of fun convincing me that one of the people on the dance floor was actually a cross-dresser. In the smoky and flashing light, with boots to his knees and a denim skirt, I was content to believe him to be just a rather masculine-looking girl, but the photographic evidence says otherwise:


For all the fun, nothing good happens after two o’clock. (I’ve heard this statement a few times with a number of different times as the watershed, but we were past all of them by the time we stopped.) Sophie K and Bobby had gone ashore to get a breath of fresh air and Sophie was falling asleep, so we decided we had to get moving. Sophie G had already left, but Anna and Keira were back in the boat, supposedly still waiting for Anna’s friend to show. I therefore became the go-between, trying to convince one of them to go to the other and resolve our issue while Sophie literally fell asleep in Bobby’s lap and Anna obstinately sat behind a table in the smoke-filled room, munching on pretzel sticks and making demands like Don Corleone. I had also reverted to my Deutsch, so Bobby was really out of the loop and Keira, who can speak pretty good German, only confused by the situation. Eventually my silver tongue saved the day, and we made our way back toward the subway station as the sky was getting light.

It hadn’t really occurred to us that the subways certainly wouldn’t be running when the sky was getting light, and we found ourselves locked out of the subway station, banished to a small though probably highly profitable fast food stand still open and catering to a fairly steady flow of customers. We learned that the trains wouldn’t run for another hour, but Sophie needed to get home, so we hailed a cab for her. The three girls left and Bobby and I started on our trek through Vienna back to my place, where I had told him many hours before that he could crash so that he could stay out later and not have to bother the guy he was staying with. His legs were about to give out though, having walked all day and danced all night, so we finally made our way down into a subway station and waited about half an hour for the 5 a.m. train.

We were so exhausted by this point that, needing to go two stops before catching a connecting train, we both actually fell asleep after the first stop. All I remember is suddenly awakening and seeing the doors open and the sign for our transfer stop outside of them, reaching across and punching Bobby in the chest saying, “We’ve got to get off here!” and rushing out the door. We made the rest of the trip back to my place and were asleep before our heads hit the pillows.

Sunday morning came all too early, as I had to get to Mass at 11 at the Votivkirche, which I think I have incorrectly called the Schottentor in previous posts. (Apparently the actual Schottentor was a gate in the old Vienna city walls that was torn down in 1860, though the name still continues to this day.) I made it there and even had enough presence of mind to bring my camera along:


It is a beautiful neo-Gothic church built on the site of an attempted assassination of the Emperor Franz Joseph by a Hungarian nationalist. It was meant basically as a thank-you offering to God, hence the name “Votive church.” It was ravaged during World War II but rebuilt, and now has some of the most bright and vivid stained glass depictions I’ve ever seen. It also offers an English-speaking Mass, which I wanted to check out. My first Sunday here I had visited a nice church very close to where I’m living, but the pastor seemed to do his best to make me fall asleep at the 8AM, there was a guy in front of me who seemed to be grinding his teeth for the entire service, and not knowing the order of Mass in German made it rather difficult to participate. Nonetheless, I think it is a place worth going back to, and will probably do so next week.

I met Bobby on my way back, as he was leaving to get his stuff and catch a ride back to Groß-Siegharts, and I spent the rest of my afternoon tidying up a bit and taking care of a bit of correspondence. I left later on to watch the soccer matches, Austria vs. Croatia and Germany vs. Poland at the apartment of one of the IAESTE members. The first match was pretty tense, as Croatia went up 1:0 before I even showed up five minutes late, but the home team was on the attack most of the game. A number of chances arose late in the second half for them to score, but they were never able to convert, and put themselves in the hole to start the tournament. This was not really all that unexpected, because they apparently rank 30-somethingth in Europe, the only “real country” behind them being Estonia, while the rest of the slots are Monaco and Lichtenstein and the like. Germany, on the other hand, is favored to win the tournament, and really showed it in their game against Poland. The second game was much more skillfully played in general, but more lopsided as Deutschland came away with a 2:0 victory.

Watching the game, we had some beer and a delicious tort that Sophie K had made earlier. She wasn’t feeling the greatest and left after the first game, but her tort was good. Six of us not having eaten yet, we decided to order in a sushi platter that one of the guys there was really talking up. I’ve had a bit of sushi and was definitely hungry enough by that point, so I went in on it with the other five. Unfortunately, the sushi platter brought together the Fast Eating Principle and the Sushi Principle to devastating effect.

To my readers less familiar with these, I will give a brief overview of both principles, concluding in the reason that their combination is so inevitably negative. The Fast Eating Principle is a simple extension of supply and demand for a scarce supply of goods: namely, that everyone, having paid nigh on $20 without really realizing it at the time, and now faced with a platter of sushi considerably smaller than those wildest imaginations which led to the payment of said cash in the first place, now attempts to elbow out his or her neighbor and claim the biggest or tastiest or most morsels of sushi for him- or herself. On the other hand, the Sushi Principle is, concisely stated, “Hey Dummy, Sushi is raw fish.” Between the two of these and the delayed effects of digestion, the six of us shortly found ourselves packed (“to the gills,” if you will excuse the rather incongruous cliché) but not really sure if the state of satiety we now found ourselves in was really that preferable to hunger after all.

Nonetheless, it was a good evening altogether, and since I had gotten little sleep the night before, I had no trouble getting to sleep the next day to be up for work on Monday.

Things are hectic and busy with so much soccer, so I’m going to try to write a post about the soccer tournament so far. I also need to touch on my job, and I’ll be traveling to the Stuttgart area to visit my exchange family from ’05 next weekend, so there will definitely be a post on that. The weekend after, I’m looking at going to Venice and Trieste. Please keep in touch and let me know how everything is going!

Business in the Biergarten

The program I am here with is called the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience, or IAESTE for short. It is (as the name would imply) and international association with member clubs (called Local Committees or LCs) at universities all over the world. Some 80-plus countries have participated in the intern exchange program over its 60 year history. The job of the local committees is basically to raise interest in IAESTE among employers and donors in the university and nearby commercial community, and if possible to secure a job offer for an intern from abroad so as to trade this offer and, in turn, be able to send an intern abroad that summer. Our program back home is pretty modest, with maybe about ten active members in the group, and as next year’s President I’m hoping to push us to a higher level of activity and commitment to the group and to achieve some more aggressive goals set in job- and fundraising. I’ve found a great model for doing just that over here in Vienna.

European clubs in general seem to be a lot better put-together than the American clubs I met at the National Conference in Baltimore this year, but this is especially the case in Vienna. Both the University of Vienna and a different university (called Bodenkultur, Boku for short, which focuses on agriculture/natural resource sciences, and which is actually the LC I was traded with) have LCs here, and they collaborate on a number of things, from putting up interns to holding a Summer Reception event in Vienna. There will be over 150 people coming in for the first weekend in July for some activities and parties that will be part of the Vienna weekend, and I’m really looking forward to it. That Friday is the Fourth, and as (I’m pretty sure) the only intern from America, I’ll be touting my American pride. (You know that shirt I have, the one with the kittens and the American flag?)

Boku held a meeting on Wednesday to talk over some of the financial details of planning the weekend with a representative from Vienna, and the three Boku interns already here were invited along. One, whose name is something like Ilena, is from Croatia, has been here a while already, and works on the same floor as I do at my internship, though she works in Chemistry while I work in Chromatography. She had made other plans and was unable to come Wednesday night. The other, Gülin, just arrived on Monday and was at the get-together.

Public transportation in Vienna is extraordinarily manageable; I don’t know if I’ve ever been in another city with a better infrastructure. The subway (U-Bahn) extends pretty far, the setup of lines is very easy to navigate, and the stations are very clearly marked to get you where you need to go. The streetcars and busses are also tied into this system, which you can access for a pretty cheap monthly pass, and there are also two or three train stations that run out to the countryside and to the airport.

However, as with any resource, the utility of this transit net depends largely upon the user’s ability. While it’s a very simple matter for me to get to work (take a subway line to the second stop from the end, jump on the streetcar from there for two more stops, and walk down the street), the trains can only be so helpful if I don’t know exactly where I’m going.

Such was the case Wednesday night. I received an e-mail earlier in the week (my phone situation is still unsettled, and grieves me to no end) giving me vague directions to a Biergarten where the meeting would be held, but the key was for me to meet one of the member at the station at about a quarter to seven, and he would take me and whomever else showed up back with him. However, I underestimated how long the trek would take and showed up fifteen minutes which, despite having RSVPed, was apparently sufficient time to warrant my guide’s supposition that I had decided not to come. I wandered around the station for a little bit trying to find him (this was a larger station with some stores and food stands) before realizing it was in vain. Fuming, at him, at myself, at the situation in general, I wandered vaguely out into the neighborhood, asking a few people if there was a Biergarten in the area, trying myself to remember the name that had been in the e-mail. I came up with “Schönbrunner Biergarten,” but given that the area I was in was Schonbrunn, it didn’t seem to be too immediately helpful.

At any rate, Schonbrunn is a very pleasant part of town, home to a large royal palace and a slough of antiquated architectural styles bedecking its houses and shopfronts, with the quickly-running Wienfluß (Vienna River) running through it some three stories below street level. It also holds a considerable amount of foliage in comparison to the part of town where I live, though in its defense, I am not too far away from the inner ring, which includes a good number of trees and parks and a lot more open green space than one would find in any other modern city. I was able to find a couple of parks in my short jaunt, but it seemed like most of the greenery was stuffed somewhat unceremoniously into the nooks and crannies of the urban setting. It reminded me of my week-long stay in Hanover; I remember the impression that the small New England town’s relation to the wilderness left on me. It was quite reminiscent of Brainerd in a few ways, but in others it had a distinctly New England feel – I felt like I was in some sort of movie – in how bushes and shrubs seemed to be so forcefully integrated into the “downtown” strip of town. After giving it a little thought, I decided that it may just be the fact that the comparable plants back home seem so docile and domesticated that these miniature jungles of unruly branches and dark leaves strike me as overdriven attempts at disguising the harsh artificiality of a nature conquered and subjugated.

After considerable wandering and duress, I decided to head back to the station. It was on the way, then, that I managed to stumble upon a “Schönbrunner Biergarten,” along with a very welcoming hanging sign:

Franziskaner is a wheat beer (a Hefeweizen, more specifically) that is popular in Bavaria and especially in Munich, where it is brewed. I’ll never forget coming out of the Munich Cathedral (where Cardinal Ratzinger served as bishop for five years in the late ‘70s) into a little square and seeing a life-sized wooden statue of the pleasant monk pictured above, inviting me to a beer.

Basically, the beer was an additional mark of comfort and familiarity in the growing dusk, and I was relieved to find my party around back on the Veranda. Stephan had met Gülin and they said they had waited fifteen minutes before finally leaving, which I figured was fair enough. There were probably twenty people there to discuss the Vienna Weekend, all of them from Boku except one, who was representing Vienna. The atmosphere was pretty relaxed, with small conversations going on all over the place while the official business was being done. Stephan, who is (or at least is supposed to be) the secretary was sitting down at the far end of the table from the business, chatting with us in English, with his neighbors in German, occasionally shouting something down the table, picking food off a few plates around him, and occasionally scribbling something utterly illegible in the margins of his notebook. The first round of drinks was on the club (I graciously accepted a half liter of Franziskaner) but since I hadn’t had dinner yet, I also ordered a dish of chicken and potatoes (which were called “Erdäpfeln” or “earth-apples” on the menu, which I was able to figure out but double-checked with one of the Boku guys all the same) (I didn’t want my chicken to have some sort of grubby dirt-applesauce on it, you know?) which turned out to be filling enough but rather bland and forgettable for something declared a house specialty.

The party went on rather quietly into the night, and Gülin and I started nodding off. After the meeting officially ended (it went on for quite some time, but the issues at hand were resolved) some of the guys stuck around for another round, but, though they offered to buy me in on it, I was about to fall asleep in my seat, so I left with Gülin to be able to get a good night’s sleep for work the next morning.

Since schools in America generally get out earlier than those everywhere else do (the semester is still in session here, and in most German states at least the high school runs long into July), most interns are yet to be coming. Luckily, however, IAESTE Austria established a contact list for all those that will be in the area, and I have already gotten ahold of a good number of people interested in traveling. My first trip will be a jaunt back to my old stomping grounds in Ludwigsburg to visit my exchange family and hopefully some friends and former teachers, of whom some were responsible for the striking the spark that ignited my passion for chemistry and put me back where I am today. I am also looking at trips later in the summer to Budapest, Bratislava, somewhere in northern Germany, Vienna and Trieste, and hopefully a longer weekend in Rome with Assisi and Siena tossed in. Please leave your comments about these plans, since they’re still pretty indefinite and I will take all the advice I can get!

I’ve been very busy lately, but I will keep up with this blog and also with all the individual correspondences you all send pretty regularly. At the moment, I’ve got to go off to a party to watch Austria’s first game (against Croatia; they’re doomed) in the European Soccer Championships, which just started with opening ceremonies yesterday – but that’s a post for another time.

Tschüß!

Little Jason in the Big City

In the whirlwind of things coming together that was me arriving in Austria, I must admit that a few more things went wrong than just my jetlag. I was picked up at the station and basically dropped off at my room, with Stefan saying, “Here’s where you sleep. Bye!” My roommate, Robert, was also a little helpful when he arrived but left Friday morning before I could get too much information out of him.

He’s in his second year of studying Economics at the University of Vienna and is from Linz, a city in the north-middle of Austria. He’s a pretty nice guy but mostly sticks around the dorm, since he’s nearing the end of his term and his studies are now focused on “book and computer” as he says rather than going to the optional lectures. Our conversations are horribly mangled conglomerations of bits and pieces of English and German as each of us tries to work on our second tongue but will inevitably end up reverting to our mother tongue to be more clear about a point, or if we are just tired and feel that it’s easier, or sometimes he’ll be talking and I’ll just be fine with continuing the conversation in English rather than diving into some sort of insinuated right-of-conquest struggle of who can speak the other’s language better, except that my English will awkwardly stumble out in a faux-British accent with phrasing that makes me sound like a German speaker performing a stilted and too-literal translation into English… but we’re able to communicate nonetheless. I would post a picture but he spends a good portion of his time just in his boxers because of the unseasonable heat and lack of air conditioning, and this is a family blog.

Coming in, I had expected my roommate to be a fellow IAESTE intern, but it turns out that the vast majority of people here (and in retrospect this is only common sense, but how often do I say that to myself?) are, like Robert, students in Vienna from outside the city. Going from bits and pieces of what I’ve been able to pick up, the University doesn’t provide dorms (or *ahem* residence halls to you Gophers) like you would find at our old-fashioned heartland American colleges, but instead private hostel owners are subsidized for providing affordable housing to students and, apparently, good-looking young American interns like myself. Generally, though, the two different ways of doing it seem pretty comparable, in that laundry and internet are cheap/free, the floor has shared bathrooms, and two people split a room of fairly decent size:


One big difference is that board is not an option here; everyone is given access to a communal kitchen and left to fend for themselves. This includes (as I found out for certain just today) dishes and materials to clean them with. One girl was nice enough to lend me a knife to cut my rolls over the weekend, but finding a modest table setting (and who knows about cookware) have recently become priorities.

Another somewhat clear difference is the social aspect. People here are friendly enough (everyone you pass in the halls will greet you with a “Hi,” “Morgen” (in the morning), or a traditional Austrian “Servus!” or “Grüß Gott!”) but the place definitely lacks the vivacious and at times rambunctious social atmosphere of college dormitories. People are genial but I think generally more mature and more focused on their studies, which is all well and good in its own right but a bit of a change. And it was also rather quiet over the weekend.

This was one of the things that went more or less wrong. The others were technological; my roommate told me before leaving that I would need to attend a session Tuesday night in order to register my computer for internet access. I later found this out to be false (there is simply a help session tonight, registration can take place anytime), but only when I checked the time of the session Monday morning at the front desk. Furthermore, the cell phone that my friend Tay had bought during his time in Germany was basically out of order due to the misfunctioning charger cord. The cord still works, but only with a proper combination of applied pressure and twisting and turning it just into place in the wall socket, and you basically have to sit the pushing it in or it will stop charging. I visited a cell phone store the first morning in town and a man there basically told me that the model was obsolete, and that no more accessories for my model were to be found. Without a functioning charger, I decided there was no way I was going to buy a SIM card and monthly plan, so I was essentially stuck with a fancy timepiece that’s a pain in the butt to charge. Moreover, I was stuck without a source of communication.

Throwing all these things together – no internet, no phone, no roommate, sparse dormmates, jetlag, and a still-present language barrier – I was pretty isolated.

As an introvert, I’m normally a very self-motivated and consistent person, without any extraordinary need to draw my energy from other people around me. I found that as I became busier and busier with school I naturally spent more and more time with more and more people in my varieties of activities and studies, but I definitely still valued my alone time and would generally take advantage of the opportunities I had to pull away from the world for a little bit.

Of course, being alone in Austria without any outside communication is a bit of an extreme case of this. Maybe it was just having gotten used to being around a lot of people a lot of the time, but welling up inside of me there a constant expectation of going to meet someone in an hour or by chance bumping into a good friend when going around the corner, a hopeful invention of something to look forward to. And then this would suddenly be quashed as I realized that I was thousands of miles from my nearest contacts, that no plans had been made and nobody would be visiting, and that aside from exploring the city alone and trying to experience a bit of the culture alone, I didn’t actually have anything to look forward to. The realization built into a persistent hollowness; for the first time in a very long time, I felt utterly and horribly alone.

Things did progress, of course, as they always do. My jetlag left me in strange moods all the time and I was never short of wonderment at some of the curiosities of Austrian culture. There was a street fair held a very short way from my dorm on Friday and Saturday that I perused for hours. I was kept busy trying to get a number of things in order, going shopping, wandering the city. I had my first Austrian beer (supposedly “Österreichs Bestes Bier,” though I drank it warm and out of a can) and took naps, found a lot of solace in a couple of great cathedrals, at one of which I attended Sunday Mass. And along with the rational realization that founded my loneliness came (although in a delayed stroke) the rational realization that it would pass, that my roommate and dormmates would come back, that I would start work and meet a lot of new people, that I would be able to get in touch with my family and friends again. And, as expected, that all did happen just as planned. I’ve been connecting and re-connecting with all ton of people both from home and now a number of people here, both fellow interns and non, and have the confidence in myself and faith in things greater than myself that the experience will garner me new relationships, skills, and technical and social abilities to be applied to my future as well as rich memories to fill a past I’ll have a lifetime to look back on.

So, this post was a little bit more about me than necessarily my Austrian trip, but don’t by any means take it as a cry for help. Things are back to going great right now and I can again truly say that I wouldn’t trade my spot for anything in the world. The loneliness I felt was just so unique to me, so singular that I felt I had to write it down. If anything, take it as an exhortation to be thankful for your situation and for all your friends and loved ones that are around you every day making your life as wonderful as it is. I know that I am truly blessed to have the friends and family that I have, and to know that they are by my side day in and day out.

I think my new problem will be finding the time to balance it all and still try to keep in touch with the people that matter most. But then again, that’s hardly a new problem for me. ;)

Goodnight, Neverland.

Another long expository post, but with pictures

On Friday, I made two sizeable mistakes.

The first of these was that, having awakened around midnight and not gotten very good rest after that, I set down to take a nap around two o’clock in the afternoon. I awoke pretty well-rested around eight and realized that the night would again be problematic. I don’t know that I am going to buy a pillow, just because anything of mentionable quality is rather expensive (especially in Euros) and my sleeping bag really works just as well, but I’m not used to sleeping on it. Also, the window (which we must keep open for lack of air conditioning) opens onto a back street:


This street is pretty lightly traveled, though mostly by delivery and service trucks. It is also apparently much too long for those drivers, because they tend to share a need to gun their engines when cruising through at four in the morning in order to get to the other end that much more quickly.

Realizing I would need some help to get me to sleep, I made my second big mistake.

One thing I wanted to commit myself to over the summer was getting back to working out. During the spring of my freshman year, I was going to the Rec four times a week, basically running 5Ks two or three times a week and biking besides. I still kind of shake my head sometimes to think of how devoted I was. This habit fell off over that next summer as I worked 50 hours a week and decided not to do the triathlon I had been preparing for, and my commitments sophomore year left me no extra time for physical fitness. I found this unfortunate, because I liked working out and am no longer nearly as fit as I was.

To address this, I plotted out a rough route of maybe 5 kilometers, maybe a few more through the inner ring of Vienna, over to the Schottentor, a great cathedral on the northwestern side of the old city.


I stretched and pulled on my iPod armband for the first time since the first week of school this year and headed out, running through the twilight and the beginnings of the city’s nightlife.

I made it just past the church when I decided to walk for a break. I would continue do so intermittently until I reached the base of the hill to climb the Mariahilferstraße, at which I basically gave up altogether. In retrospect, the route I took was nearly 7km and, not having run that much in almost a year, the whole idea was rotten to begin with. I did some half-hearted cool-down stretches, took a shower, and tucked in by midnight for a restless five hours of tossing and turning.

The strangest thing about it is that I’ve adopted some sort of perverted anti-jet lag, since I’m on neither Vienna time nor home time. I get tired here in the early afternoon, which corresponds to morning in the States.

Regardless, I was up at 5:30, and had the great idea of walking back halfway across the city at that early hour. I’m reading a book about Sigmund Freud (most of his life a denizen of Vienna and eventually professor at the University) and was somewhat surprised to find, on my run the night before, the quiet little Sigmund Freud Park right out in front of the Schottentor.


I found, in my sleepless delirium, the opportunity to read my book in this park to be too poetic to pass up, and made my way down there to read a few chapters among the bums and litter. I was fortunate enough to time my return precisely with the opening of the grocery store where I had found the shaving cream, and made my first food purchases.


Although I would have preferred freshly baked bread (there are bakeries all over the place, and I am completely enchanted by the romantic notion of buying fresh bread every morning) my budget is a little tight and also somewhat unsure due to some credit card concerns, so I bought the wrapped Semmel rolls instead. I also bought a link of Leberwurst. I discovered my love of leberwurst during my German stay and, having gone without for the last three years of American diet, it was at the top of my list.

And now that I think of it, the claim that these are my first food purchases is, actually, a lie. My first food purchase was the Thursday afternoon I came in; I bought a Döner Kebap, a delicious treat brought in by Turkish immigrants consisting of succulent veal/chicken meat with lettuce, tomatoes, and a tangy sauce on pita bread. It is similar to a gyro, but definitely distinct, and I haven’t found an appropriate substitute stateside yet. Unfortunately, this Austrian variant (I bought just what was labeled a “Kebap,” but I have also seen them labeled as “Durüm”) had too much of a chicken taste to it, and, though tasty and filling, just didn’t quite fulfill my expectations.

Anyway, on my walk back from the Freud park, I saw an advertisement for a Blasmusikfest – marching band festival – which would be starting at the Rathaus at three that afternoon.


(The city hall isn’t normally so festive, but Austria is preparing to host the European soccer championships, so I suppose a bit of nationality is allowed.) I made plans to attend the band festival and, after breakfasting, grabbed a book and went out to find a shady spot in a city park to sit and read. As it were, basically every public space in the old city is cordoned off and being transformed into a “Fan Zone” for the championships, and it was back at Freud Park that I first found an open spot of grass.

The consequences of my bad decisions then came fully to the forefront, as I lethargically passed the afternoon alternatively sidling around the surrounding area to find a drinking fountain or to visit the Schottentor and napping here and there around the park. Shortly before three, I got up to go to the Rathaus, but since the only open spots were in the sun, I made my way down the street the bands were approaching from to the Parlament.


As far as I can tell, this was once the governing seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a very large and dominant political force in pre-World War I Europe. I crawled up the balustrade and lay in the early afternoon shade with a few other people gathered at that vantage point, reading Of Mice and Men and watching the highly overdressed marching bands go past dressed in Lederhosen and bright blue woolen socks, playing mostly traditional marching beats, though one band also threw in an American medley of “When The Saints Go Marching In,” “Down By The Riverside,” and a Sousa piece of which I’ve forgotten the name. As the last few bands trickled by I napped and realized just how sore my quads were. It took me a few tries to get back up the hill to my dorm for the night.

Much more to come.

Willkommen

Welcome to my blog! I am hoping to utilize this as a way of keeping in touch with people over the summer. I’m also hoping to use it as a journal of sorts as I work in my internship and hopefully get an opportunity to travel, so I hope to post a good number of pictures as well.

I did this during my foreign exchange trip in 2005 (the link to that blog is over on the right) and it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, my English started degrading over the summer as I got more and more used to going about my everyday life in German. Since I’ve already started with that here, I anticipate my writing will become less than eloquent rather quickly.

I got into Vienna yesterday afternoon after a six and a half hour flight from Boston to Amsterdam, an hour and a half layover and then an hour and a half flight to Vienna. I stayed awake the whole flight across the Atlantic, reading my book and watching a little of the programming they had on.

In my experience, nerves or anxiety about long-term travel have never been a problem for me as I work up to traveling, planning, packing my bags, etc. I think in the rush and hubbub of it all I just become too busy and monomaniacal to worry about being nervous. I do, however, have an acute memory of being in the airport in New York in May of 2005, having come with my Economics Challenge team which, after taking third place at nationals, was all headed back to Brainerd. We split off at the terminal and it finally hit me that I was going – alone – to Germany for the summer. I had similar experiences, both leaving my father at the airport in Minneapolis and then sitting in the terminal in Boston getting ready to board.

My nerves were especially heightened on the latter flight as I overheard one of my co-passengers talking to one of his associates. Having spoken with a few people about my trip to Vienna, I came into it very concerned about the dialect spoken here. German has, in general, a broad variety of spoken dialects, and while most speakers of German adhere to the same rules of the written language (Hochdeutsch), it is possible, even probable, that a person from Berlin and a person from Bavaria would have a hard time understanding the other person speaking. My fears about the dialect seemed to be confirmed when I could only pick out a few isolated words or intentions in the man’s speech. Now, I hadn’t been conversing directly with this person, so I thought I might be able to stand a chance in day-to-day life, but I was anticipating just being lost when hearing advertisements or public announcements or what have you.

In Amsterdam, we made our connection, and, when I didn’t see him at the terminal, I very suddenly made the realization that he had been speak Dutch or Danish or some other Germanic language, but not Viennese. I was extremely relieved. And actually, I’ve found that the dialect isn’t all that bad.

Just like in 2005, I couldn’t manage to stay awake through the second flight, and was kind of in and out the whole time. It was raining lightly in Amsterdam and most of Germany seemed to be covered by clouds, so we had a bit of turbulence in the small plane. Even without this nausea-inducing shaking, the food was not very good, and I also had the window seat on this puddle jumper of a plane, so comfort wasn’t exactly maximized. Luckily I was too tired to care. I was picked up at the airport by Stefan Hofbauer, one of the members of the Boku club here. He brought me in and gave me the run-down, including giving the upcoming schedule for starting work, getting me a transportation pass, and giving me instructions on registering at the hostel and with the government. I was able to take care of both of those things this morning.

More immediately a concern to me were the few things I was lacking, namely shaving cream and a pillow. I hadn’t packed either, figuring they would be more a hassle than it was worth to take them from home and that I would just buy them here. My dorm is located on a side street just off the Mariahilferstraße, the main shopping street in Vienna, where I was assured I could find anything I needed to buy. I was beginning to doubt whether “anything” included pillows and shaving cream by the time I managed to come across both. I found a bedding store, but the pillows there were all egregiously more expensive than I was willing to put out, so I skipped over it for the time being.

The shaving cream was a little bit more of a hassle. Mind you, after a week visiting my friend Tay in Hanover, NH (also without shaving cream) I was definitely in need of it. At this point in my travels, I probably looked like the walking dead, what with a week’s worth of growth on my face and, having slept only sparsely in the last 48 hours, mangy and tousled hair and eyes that gave me the appearance of having just been beaten up by two raccoons. I can only imagine the comic appropriateness my situation imparted to my request. I first tried to find it at a grocery store close by, but there was none to be found. My instincts then led me to an Apotheke or drugstore. However, basically everything there is behind the counter, so it was the wrong place to go for shaving cream; I was recommended to a grocery store. I grumpily trudged back to the grocery store and discovered a shelf of toiletries and cleaning supplies which I had missed before. However, there was still no shaving cream to be found, even after I asked a boy working there, and I eventually had to wander off to succeed on my fourth attempt at a different grocery store.

That evening around seven, I eventually crashed while trying to read my book, which was a little earlier than I had intended. My body decided it wanted to wake up five hours later at midnight, and despite the fact that I needed a few more than five hours of sleep, it was ready to go. This was not how I had hoped to overcome my jetlag. I ended up actually getting into bed at that point, and unfurled my sleeping bag in lieu of a pillow.

I’ve had an industrious (although jetlagged) first couple of days but am going to spread the content out a bit more to make it more manageable for all parties involved. I look forward to reading your comments and questions and hope you’ll continue to check in every so often.