East of West

My wonderful readers: I have some unfortunate news. I will be entering radio silence on this Thursday, and will be unable to post until the 1st of April at the earliest. We get two weeks of Easter break, and I am taking advantage of them to the fullest. I will be travelling to: Austria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and Poland. I’m already tired!

Bon voyage!

8 March 2008

Friday during the day I didn’t really do anything of interest. In the late afternoon I met my Austrian buddy, and she is really awesome. You can sign up to have an Austrian student be your buddy, and they are just supposed to orient you to life in Vienna. I haven’t gotten to meet my buddy before this because she was doing an internship in Germany, but we had coffee yesterday and she seems very cool. I’m excited about making my first Austrian friend! After that I went to the dinner with a friend (traditional Austrian fare) and had some really great pumpkin soup. Yummy. Then we went to the International Theatre and saw “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which was good but not great. The tickets were quite cheap though, so I think I got my money’s worth. Today I went to the flea market with a friend. It’s a smaller flea market than the one in Paris (which makes sense because the one in Paris is supposed to be one of the biggest in the world) but this flea market was a lot more like a garage sale. There was just junk everywhere, and you claw through it hoping to find the diamond in the rough. There was one stall devoted entirely to old buttons. I also saw a stuffed fawn, a ukulele, a VHS called Eaten Alive (which definitely looked pornographic), a military gas mask, traditional Austrian clothing, and a lot of UOs (as opposed to UFOs). This was only the “stuff” section too. The food section was probably at least twice as big. There was every kind of cheese you could want, a variety of strange fruits, lots of kebab and falafel stands, a surprising number of olive stands, lots of bread, meat, etc. Once you get near the end, there are a number of “world restaurants”—particularly Asian restaurants and Middle Eastern. Just the other night, I had a friend comment that she very rarely saw non-European restaurants. I guess they all just congregate near the flea market. Over the course of about 4 hours just wandering around I bought: a pastry filled with a poppy seed paste, goat cheese wrapped in prosciutto, a falafel sandwich, a little spoon that says “Colorado” on it, and a pair of Viennese opera glasses inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Oh trinkets. Is there any better way to spend a Saturday afternoon? Hardly. The only thing that was missing was a cup of hot chocolate, so my friend and I wandered around until I saw the name Café Sperl, which looked very familiar—I figured I had seen it in my guidebook at some point. I came to read: “Jungendstil fittings, a cosy appearance and a reputable menu (the highlight of which is the Sperltorte) make this one of the finest cafes in Vienna, and overshadows the fact that it was once Hitler’s regular haunt.” Huh. Well, I think it’s probably one of my favorite cafes in Vienna. It just has a great, homey atmosphere, plus NO SMOKING (gasp!). Also, the hot chocolate was pretty good, and there was a girl riding a unicycle around the café. Pretty awesome.

6 March 2008

            My first week of classes is over! I had no classes on Monday, and then on Tuesday I had one class with the program director and all of the other students here on my program. The first half of class we went on a tour of the Ringstrasse—a great big street which encircles the Innere Stadt. It was built in the 1860s, because Vienna still had city fortifications back then, and they were trying to modernize the city, among other things. If you walk along the Ringstrasse, you pass by the University, the Rathaus (city hall), Parlement, the theater, the Opera, and many other interesting and important buildings. Then we just discussed the reading we had been assigned.

            On Wednesday I went to my first real Univeristy of Vienna class with actual Austrian students! This particular course is a philosophy course taught in English by an Austrian. He speaks English quite well, and his accent isn’t difficult at all to understand. All of the other students in the class are Austrian, but have fairly good English (or they wouldn’t be in the class). The only other native English speaker is another American auditing the course because he’s actually studying music composition at another university. The strangest thing I found about the course was that the professor didn’t show up until 12:10, when the course was schedule 12-14 and his office is right down the hall. Then he told us that class would never begin until 12:15, and I gathered that that’s fairly common here. Usually, we will start at 12:15, go until 13, then take a 15 minute break, and go from 13:15 to 14. So, even though it looks like a 2 hour class, it ends up being only an hour and a half long. At my university in the States, we have 3 hour classes with only one 15 minute break. I guess things just aren’t as intense here. I like the idea of having real Austrian students in my classes with me, but it does make things awkward at break time because while the course is in English and everyone is near fluency, they all lapse back into German and I can’t understand what anyone is saying. There are 16 students, I believe, which I think is a great size for meeting other people and for discussion. It’s a little surprising to me that a university of 70,000 students can have classes that small, but I guess a philosophy course in a foreign language is a less desirable course than, saw, intro to psychology. At the end of the class, everyone knocked their fists against the tables, which I guess is a sign of appreciation for the teacher. I didn’t realize what was going on in time to join in though.

            My other class was this morning (Thursday) from 10-12, but again the professor told us he would not start until 10:15, and he also let us out at 11:40. Bizarre. This course is another philosophy course, but it’s conducted in French. My French is a tiny bit rusty, so I was a little nervous, but not too bad. It turns out that the professor is very intent on making sure that all 12 of his students understand what’s going on. For this reason, he constantly switched between speaking in French and in German. He would ask students to translate German phrases into French, and French into German. Trouble is, I am the only student in the class who doesn’t understand German. When we were introducing ourselves, I told him that I don’t really understand German, which I didn’t think would be a problem for a course in French, but he kept asking me things in German, or, worse yet, asking me to translate French into English, as though I were the sole representative English speaker. It’s true, I am the only native English speaker, but someone else must know some English, right? I just hope next class we do more discussion of what the texts are actually saying as opposed to what the individual words mean. And I hope we do more of it in French.

3 March 2008

It’s been a couple of days since I updated and I have a lot to say.

            Last Friday was my last day of German class. While I really enjoyed the teacher and the other students, the class was three hours long and at a really irritating time of day, so I’m kind of glad it’s over. I won’t have German again until the beginning of April, though, so it’s going to be a struggle to retain all of the German that I’ve learned until then, when I won’t have much practice.

            On Saturday I went to Graz (second largest city in Austria, in the southeast, near Slovenia and Hungary) with the other students from my school. It takes about 2 and a half hours to get there by train, so we left around 9 in the morning. We were all starving, so we went immediately to get something to eat. We went to a very typically Styrian place (Graz is in the province of Styria). Some typically Styrian dishes are anything with pumpkin (the squash, the seed, or the oil) or great big pretzels. I had a Schnitzel breaded with pumpkin seeds and Erdapfelsalat (which is definitely one of my favorite Austrian dishes). Yummy.

            Then we wandered through town a little bit. Graz is small but absolutely gorgeous. All of the buildings are quaint and covered with murals or plaster decorations, and red tile roofs. We went to the modern art museum, and saw some exhibition which didn’t impress me much—it was a bunch of wooden rectangles lit up with light. Is this art? I seem to be asking myself that question a lot here. There was, however, a photo exhibition I thought was really cool, so the museum wasn’t a total waste.

            Then we climbed to the top of the hill in the middle of Graz (260 steps), which allows for a beautiful panorama of the city. It’s located in the middle of pine tree covered hills, and is really very beautiful. The hill is pretty big, and you can walk all over it and see every angle of the city from above. There are also a fair number of cafes up there, and we sat on the edge of a sheer drop off and had drinks. I got an apfelsaft gespritz (which is basically apple juice with sparkling water). In Austria you can “gespritz” pretty much anything you want—apple juice, orange juice, white wine, etc. On top of the hill is also a very deep well, dug by the Styrians hundreds of years ago so that they could survive sieges by the Turks. We also saw some cannons that actually defended Graz from the Turks in the 1500 and 1600s.

            After that, we went back down into the city and got ice cream, and then got back on the train and came back to Vienna. The only complication was that we couldn’t get into Suedbahnhof (our train station) because the wind was so fierce that day that a giant construction crane got blown over onto the train tracks. Trees where also toppled all over the city. Vienna seems to be a quite windy city, even apart from Saturday. This poses a problem to my hair. Even if I brush it and make it all pretty before I leave the dorm, it will look like I just rolled out of bed by the time I get to wherever I’m going. So the choice comes down to having hat hair or wind hair.

            On Sunday I met some friends from German class and went to the Haus der Musik. It is definitely an alternative museum. There are probably about 4 floors, and the subjects range from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, some bizarre effects of sound, Vienna’s greatest composers, a room full of just sounds you can listen to, a room which recreates the sounds of being in the womb, a place where you can play with the sounds of human speech, and on and on. It’s a very interactive, and I thought it was fun getting to play all of these different sound games, but one of my friends absolutely hated it—said it freaked him out. So I guess it’s a love it or hate it museum.

            University classes start for me tomorrow, so I’m a little bit nervous about that. However, my main concern lately has been my Easter break. We have the last two weeks of March off of school, and I want to go traveling. Of course, I am the anal-have-everything-planned type and so I have spent so many hours online comparing airfares and trying to find which airlines fly to which places and when they are having low price specials. I’m literally driving myself crazy. I can’t really think about anything else. I just want to check and check I will continue to do so until I book something. I really need to chill out.