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!