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!