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.