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!