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.