28 February 2008
Today we went to the Kunst Forum—one of the art museums in
The museum gift shop was really my favorite part of the museum. Modern art museums always have great funky gift shops. This one has a series of stuffed animals modeled after the shape of different microbes. For example, there was syphilis, gonorrhea, giardia, a neuron, the flu, Ebola, and so on. I thought that was just hysterical. Who would get anyone a stuffed representation of Ebola, complete with eyes? No one else in my group seemed to derive the same pleasure from it though.
Afterwards some friends and I went wandering around
Another discovery I have made adventuring around
There is also a lot of very detailed graffiti here. In
My last German class is tomorrow. My group has bonded together really well and I think we will continue to hang out after the class is over and we aren’t “forced” to see each other every day. We had our big test on Monday (a big test after just two weeks) and since then we’ve been doing more fun things and less learning, because our grade has really already been decided. The other day we’ve done German tongue twisters, talked about fairy tales in German, and today we sort of played “Simon Says” using the prepositions we’ve started to learn. Tomorrow I don’t think we’ll have class at all, just go out for coffee and try to speak in German as much as we can.
Auf Wiedersehen!
26 February 2008
I want to have clean clothes. Is that too much to ask for? Do Austrian people walk around all the time in dirty clothes because it’s so difficult to clean them?
Trying to get my laundry done has been a real pain, and another great example of Austrian bureaucracy.
1. I went to the ÖAD (housing office) to get a laundry card. Unfortunately the ÖAD is only open Monday Wednesday Friday from 9-12, and then Tuesday Thursday 10-12 and 2-4. I had to go to my class 3 hours before it started to get this laundry card.
2. The laundry card costs 7 euros, but it’s just a blank card without any money on it. I asked how I was supposed to put money on, and she mentioned something about going to the bank on the corner and handing them money.
3. I go to the bank on the corner, stand in line, and explain in my limited German what I want. Apparently that bank doesn’t load these Quick cards (though it’s hard to tell, as the teller spoke no English), and I have to go to a Bank Austria. I think I remember seeing one near the U-Bahn stop, so I go there.
4. I ask the guy at the greeting desk of the Bank Austria (because the Bank is very large, so I guess you have to have someone directing traffic). He tells me to go upstairs.
5. I go upstairs, stand in line, and explain what I want. He tells me (in German) that I need to go to a different line. Okay.
6. Go to the other line, explain what I want, and finally someone can help me. Of course, there is a 1 euro service charge. Fine. I have to spend 18 euros to get 10 euros on my laundry card.
7. I go to the store and buy laundry detergent. This is always a hassle since I can’t really read German, but on the up side I finally found some fabric-deoderizing Febreze.
8. I come back to the dorm, lug all of my dirty clothes downstairs, and fit about half of my clothes in the washing machine. I set the setting, put in the detergent, and try closing the door. It won’t really close. I push and push and put all my weight into it and it sort of closes but I’m not sure if it’s locked. Some of my other friends said their washing machine wouldn’t start if the door was open (which I think most washing machines do) so to test it out I pushed start. The water starts flooding in, and out of the door. My clothes are sopping wet, there’s water all over the floor, and I can’t figure out how to cancel the stupid thing. Finally I figure it out. I decide to transfer my clothes to another machine, but they are already soaked so I’m trying to hold them so I don’t get the clothes I’m wearing wet, and I get more water all over the floor. Finally, the clothes are in the washing machines, the other doors are closing, and life seems to be okay.
9. The dryers seem to be okay, but supposedly they take two hours to dry your clothes.
24 February 2008
The past couple of days have been different than I expected them to be.
On Thursday I went to Café Hawelka, which is one of the more famous Kaffeehäuser in Vienna. It’s pretty small, the interior is all dark wood, and the waiters are all in suits. It felt like a very Viennese place. This is just part of my ongoing café survey. So far, I have tried out maybe 15 cafes (most of the time my program will go out for coffee and conversation after seeing a museum or going to another bureaucratic requirement). I can tell you that some of the best hot chocolate in Vienna is at the café in the Westbahnhof train station or in Demel, and the best apfelstrudel has been in Café Central. Café Central is also one of the more touristy cafes in Vienna. It has a beautiful interior, with marble columns and large portraits of Austro-Hungarian royalty. It’s fairly pricy (as most touristy places are) but the apfelstrudel really is to die for. Plus, if you go between 4 and 7 pm there’s live classical music.
On Friday after my German class about 8 of us headed out for drinks somewhere near the Rathaus (town hall). We ended up staying there for about 5 hours, just having drinks and talking in our various languages. Later on some other people joined us and it got even more complicated. At several points, the Spanish guy would be trying to say something in English, and would ask the Slovakian girl in Spanish what a certain word was in English. She wouldn’t know, and would ask me in French what a certain word was in English. Sometimes I could help her out, sometimes not. Eventually, we managed to say most of the things we intended to, except for the unfortunate moment when I tried to repeat something in Spanish (turn the page) but I ended up saying something like “turn the vagina.” At least everyone else got a good laugh out of it.
On Saturday my group and I went to the Westbahnhof station to get these special train discount cards, and got to see Austrian bureaucracy at work yet again. First, you have to fill out an application for the discount card, and then you go to Westbahnhof with the application, a passport photo, and your passport. Then you stand in the ticket line, and give all of these things to the man behind the window, and he gives you a receipt (which you have to keep until you get your actual card in the mail, which won’t be for at least a month). Then when you’re buying tickets, the ticket machines only allow you to insert certain bills to pay for your ticket. For example, if your ticket costs 30 euro, you can’t put in a 50 or a 100 euro bill, just 20, 10, and 5. This might seem reasonable except that the ATMs here almost only ever give you 50 and 100 euro bills, not 20s. Crazy.
After the train station, a friend and I went wandering around the Innere Stadt. I got my first Wiener Wurst (I know, I’ve been here for almost 3 weeks and this was my first sausage). They have Wurstel stands around everywhere, and they are open almost all the time—to service the tourists during the day and the bar-hoppers at night. They take a great big roll of bread, and stick it on this hot spike, which hollows out a perfect space for the sausage inside the bread, and then slather on ketchup and mustard. Pretty awesome. Armed with our Wurstel, we made our way to a park right along side the Donau Canal (complete with a duck pond and playgrounds). I like the various green spaces in Vienna. In Paris, a park is more apt to be an open space with gravel instead of grass, but Vienna actually has grass in the city in several areas.
That night, I went out to dinner in the western part of the inner city with a friend. We went to this really incredible Beisl (which is to the Viennese what the pub is to London and the bistro is to Paris) that had a great atmosphere, a beautiful little courtyard that would be perfect to sit in come warmer weather. I really enjoyed it.
Today did not go as I planned at all. In the morning I went to the city center (right next to Stephansdom) and attended a Bible study in a wonderfully decorated café. Afterwards, I went to the Vienna Community Church (an English-speaking Christian church). After that, they had coffee hour, and I met quite a few interesting people. Then, someone said that one of the Viennese members of the congregation was going to lead a walking tour around the city. So, I set off with some newly acquired friends on this tour. We walked past the former imperial palace (the Hofburg) and the National Library. Today, there was a huge crowd of Serbians outside of the National Library protesting the independence of Kosovo. I find it incredible that I can actually see the aftermath of Kosovo proclaiming independence, whereas in the US I would probably only hear about it.
From the National Library we hopped on a bus, and rode it into the 16th district of the city (quite a ways from the inner city; to the northwest). We ended up in the hills outside of Vienna, and wandered around a pavilion hospital complex designed by Otto Wagner (a famous Viennese architect at the turn of the 19th century). We saw a monument commemorating the more than 700 children who were killed by the Nazis for being mentally disabled. I guess the surgeons kept their brains for study, because only their brains are buried by the monument.
We also saw the Kirche am Steinhof, at the top of this hill. It’s a beautiful church. I don’t think I’ve seen another church like that anywhere else in the world. It was built about 100 years ago, but the architecture is so modern it looks like it could have been built very recently.
From there we wandered around the park in the Viennese hills, which was just amazing. I loved being able to forget about the city for a couple of hours, even though it probably took us only 20 minutes to get there. The weather was beautiful today, and I could definitely see myself going back there for a picnic sometime. We walked to a big hill overlooking the city of Vienna, which was just breathtaking. It’s so beautiful.
Then we all went to this very old Villa for a drink and snack. It was overlooking Vienna, and had a very nice rural feel to it. I got a Topfenstrudel, which is like Apfelstrudel except made with sweet cheese curds instead of with apple. It was pretty tasty.
Funny. I left my apartment to go to church at 10 in the morning, and I didn’t come back until 6 at night. It was quite an adventure.
20 February 2008
I’ve fallen into the land of additions. Fully 50% of the Austrian population smokes, whereas I thought it was a lot in France and it’s only 25% there. In France, the problem of smelling smoke was mostly limited to bars and nightclubs, and occasionally restaurants and cafes. More often than not, restaurants would have separate areas for smokers or non-smokers. Now, they’ve instituted a smoking ban in all public places, and I hear that most people are paying attention to it. In Austria, it is not uncommon to see someone smoking next to a non-smoking sign, in every restaurant, etc. All classes over an half and a half or so go on a break so that the professor can have a cigarette. Going out to eat, anywhere, will make you smell like smoke. One U-Bahn station in particular seems to accumulate all of the smokers who think it’s too cold to smoke outside. Looking over the heads of the people in the underground station, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke is visible. I swear I will be the perfect candidate for a study on the effects of secondhand smoke by the time I get back home.
I have not succumbed to this addition. I have fallen into another debilitating habit however: Mozartkugeln. This is heaven. It’s a chocolate particular to Austria, and pushed very heavily on tourists by omnipresent Mozart Stores, but they are SO SO SO GOOD. It’s a little like a bonbon, with a chocolate truffle center, covered in coconut, covered in dark chocolate. I’ve died and gone to Salzburg (where I believe these chocolates are from).
Another addiction: continuously moving elevators. These are elevators that do not stop and have no doors. There used to be some in one of the university buildings, but they recently took it out—probably for safety reasons. However, I have found some in another office building, and they just add so much to the experience of going up or down. You stand at the door, holding on to these handles on either side of the open door, and wait for an open box (?) to come, and when it’s level with your floor you quickly hop into the elevator box, and then hop out onto the desired floor. Really quite fun. I’m definitely going to go back just to ride the elevators.
The cakes here are also addictive, but I’ve managed to do pretty well with them. The sweets are going to be a real issue for me. Well, staying away from them, rather.
18 February 2008
So the real reason for this avalanche of posts all at once is that when I get back from German class, I have maybe a half hour of work and then nothing else to do. The only English channel on my television is CNN, and my roommate is a fairly new addition to my routine so I just come back and eat dinner and write on my blog or keep up with emails.
In any case, I spent this morning at the Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum). Let me just say, I have never seen so many dead animals in such a beautiful building. The building itself is gorgeous; very Neoclassical and opulent, kind of like the Louvre. Half of the first floor is dedicated to rocks and minerals. That wasn’t the most interesting. The other half was fossils and prehistoric man-made tools. I like looking at fossils, but I much preferred the second floor. The entire thing was just dead animals. In the Natural history museum in Denver, there are displays of stuffed animals in their natural habitats, but there is just as great a focus on the habitat as there is on the animals. Not so here. There were just huge glass cases full of stuffed animals or pinned insects, or sometimes fish or reptiles in jars. There were three large rooms just for birds. I counted 18 species of squirrels. One room was just full of microscopes. It was pretty fascinating seeing the incredible diversity of the earth. Even better, there’s also a small aquarium/terrarium section, with fish, amphibians, reptiles, and even a couple of birds.
I kept wondering how children might react to the rooms and rooms of dead and preserved animals, but all of the school groups I saw seemed to be having a great time—maybe Americans just feel like they have to protect their children more. In fact, I saw a little old lady on the tram the other day, probably about 60 years all, reading the newspaper. On one page of the newspaper was a picture of a shirtless woman. This wasn’t even a classy black and white photograph or anything like that, but sort of one of those photos advertising a strip club or an adult store. The Europeans certainly seem to be more open to nudity, but it’s hard to tell if they are more open about their personal sexuality, because these aren’t the words I learn in French or German class.
In any case, I liked wandering around the museum; it was a great way to kill a couple of hours. My favorite moment was probably learning how to say hippopotamus in German—Flusspferd. Or, maybe it was seeing Maria Theresa’s stuffed lap dog (Maria Theresa ruled the Austrian Empire in the 1700’s).
17 February 2008
This has been a pretty good weekend. On Friday evening I had dinner in my dorm with my roommate and one of her friends from France, which I quite enjoyed.Friday night I went out with some other students to an Irish pub called Shamrock. My favorite part was the DJ’s table, which was actually a pulpit, like from a church. I found that quite cool. It was frighteningly cold outside though. Since we left the pub after midnight, we stood around—freezing—waiting for a night bus. Unfortunately, the bus came and went very quickly, leaving me and another friend behind. We spent about half an hour sitting on the floor of a telephone booth around 2:30 in the morning. It had to be one of my more memorable experiences here so far. I eventually got home though.
Then since I had such a late night Thursday and Friday, I just spent the entire day in my room on Saturday resting up. Saturday night some friends and I went out to dinner at Figl Mueller—a stereotypical Viennese restaurant. We had the most Viennese meal you could have: a glass of Grüner Veltliner (the white wine made in Austria), a Wiener Schnitzel that was bigger than my plate (!), an Erdäpfel-Vogerlsalat (this is potatoes with pumpkin seed oil dressing, and field lettuce). For anyone who knows German, Erdäpfel is the Austrian dialect word for potato, and Vogerl means “little bird.” There aren’t actually any little birds in the salad, so I’m not entirely sure where this name comes from. We were too full after the huge Wiener Schnitzel to finish the meal off with some Apfelstrudel or Sacher torte, but then we would have had the most Viennese meal possible.
Then today (Sunday) I met 4 other people (one Bosnian, one Australian, one Spaniard, and one Italian) and we went out to a café for lunch. Then one girl left and someone else from our German class (from Sierra Leone) met us at the Leopold Museum and we took about 2 and a half hours wandering around the museum. The Museum is chiefly known for its Schiele collection (an Austrian painter circa 1890’s through WWI). I liked quite a few of his things, especially his nude sketches. I also saw a couple of Klimt paintings (not the Kiss, but Life and Death). Then we walked towards Stephansdom and met another Spaniard from our class for drinks and cake. The Austrians have so many kinds of cake! I tried my first piece of Sacher torte (a chocolate cake with apricot jam) and enjoyed it thoroughly. Being in such an international group was a lot of fun; we talked about slang in our respective countries, about conceptions of personal space, the Spanish siesta, etc. I learned a lot of great Italian euphemisms for sex and taught everyone about the awkward turtle—because that’s the best part of American culture.
For the enjoyable experience of viewing pictures from Vienna, please click the link below.
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15 February 2008
Last couple of days have been interesting. We’ve almost gotten through all the bureaucracy required of us, and I registered for classes today—got all of my first choices. Yay! So far I have one class on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and one on Thursday. I’m looking forward to the semester.
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and while you could see a fair number of people walking around with flowers and there were some heart shaped cakes etc in the bakeries, the other stores certainly don’t commercialize it like in the US.
I got to find out a little bit more about my roommate—she’s from Paris, so I’ll get to keep up my French with her. I am quite pleased about that, especially since one of my courses is a philosophy course in French. It’s geared towards non-native French speakers, so I should be able to get through it, but it will still be nice to have her around. So far I think we get along okay but we’re not entirely sure how to act with one another. We got the food kitchen situation mostly straightened out, so hopefully we’ll learn to relax around each other a bit.
I’ve also been taking a lot of long exploratory walks around the city. On Wednesday I went to the southern part of Vienna, and saw the Belvedere—used to be a chateau type building, and now it’s an art museum. It’s a little bit like a mini-Versailles, because it’s a beautiful chateau with perfectly manicured gardens stretching out behind it. However, it has another chateau on the other side of the garden, which is an extension of the same art museum. Around the corner a little bit from them is the Schwartenburger (?) Palace (looks like some kind of government building now) and the Russian war memorial. I’m not sure whether or not the war memorial was built by the Viennese to honor the Russian soldiers who liberated Vienna at the end of World War II, or if the Russians built it for themselves in the years of occupation after the war. I’ll have to look that up at some point.
After that I got around to Karlskirche (a beautiful church which was fortunately under construction and the Technical University. From there you go just a little bit and you can get to the Oper (Opera). It’s a nice building, but nowhere near as beautiful as the Opera Garnier in Paris.
Yesterday I did more exploring with another student from my college, and we saw the Rathaus (don’t know what exactly this is, but it’s pretty), Parlement, and lots of other things I can’t even name. Vienna is just such a beautiful city, and I love the University. It doesn’t have a campus, at least not in the traditional American sense, but the main building used to be a great big hospital with a green space in the middle. It’s nice and quiet.
On Monday our group went to the MUMOK (can’t remember exactly what this stands for, but it holds the modern art). I’m afraid I just don’t feel modern art. It simply doesn’t feel like art to me. The third floor was fine, just a lot of Andy Warhol style stuff, but the first floor was beyond comprehension to me. Our program director explained to me that a lot of people were arrested for making some of this art, which is understandable, since there were videos of people being tarred and feathered, photographs of naked people binding and gagging themselves, something about gutting a dog. I didn’t stay down there for long, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be going back.
I hope to post some pictures soon. Auf Wiedersehen!
I am meeting all sorts of new people here in Vienna. Yesterday after German class the professor and almost all of the students went to a cafe and just hung out having coffee/beer. It’s great getting to meet people from everywhere, and I am especially lucky because English is the common language of choice (usually). I have German homework to finish up, but I also wanted to mention the early arrival of two new things: the snow, and my roommate. She’s finally here! Her name is Charlotte, and I don’t know anything else about her except that she doesn’t speak fluent German (she has to take German classes), she goes to one of the other universities here, not the university of Vienna, and…that’s all I know. She had to leave to go to a class and I was awoken by the sound of someone else coming into the apartment.
Back to the grind!
Just a couple of words before I start doing my German homework.
We started our intensive German classes on Monday. The other students in my program are all scattered about, so there is only one other person from my college in my class of 18. I am in beginner German (and rightfully so). Since Monday, I have learned how to ask what someone’s Zodiac sign is (which should be oh so useful). Don’t worry, I’ve learned other things to–we have class for 3 hours a day.
On Sunday I took a long walk all around my neck of the Viennese woods. I went up to see the Danube–pretty blue, but not overwhelmingly so–and the Millenium City–the area of town where the UN buildings and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) are. I also wandered around the Prater (right across the street from my dorm). The Prater is an amusement park as well as just a giant park. On a Sunday afternoon, it was pretty busy with families and couples and people with dogs just out walking and enjoying the nice weather.
The nice weather rolled out yesterday though. By the time it was night it was so foggy you couldn’t see more than a block ahead.
German homework calls!
