Weekends of wine, teaching English, and immer wieder Austrian adventures...

Many apologies for the severe communication gap between the last few blog entries… I guess that I have a lot to talk about, so I’ll just hop right in.

The last week in September, all English teaching assistants (English people/Americans/Scots/Isle of Manners) who were to be based in eastern Austria all converged together in the charmingly Baroque city of Graz. There were 140ish of us, and we stayed in a beautiful castle (Schloss St. Martin), where we learned how to be good teachers and the tricks to engaging students. Although that was interesting, it was much cooler to meet people from all corners of the English-speaking world… I enjoyed mocking the Brits for their accents, but they got me back: one day they asked why I always wore shorts, and I replied that Minnesota is geographically as far away from any ocean as the middle of Siberia, so I didn’t feel the need to start wearing pants till October or November. Well, they all gave me very funny looks, which I didn’t really understand until someone later informed me that in British English “pants” means “underwear.” .. which, consequently, probably was too much information for people that I had just met.

The week after the orientation, I started teaching at my school. Also, a very nice venue for people who like copious amounts of attention. My teachers are all very nice, and my kids are quite ridiculous: I teach ages 14 (just starting that nice hormonal rage that continues nicely on through a few more classes) through 18 (having just gotten over the 16-17 ages of being “too cool” to speak English in class). In reality, I always have a lot of fun with them, even if sometimes they are too shy to speak, or in some cases, just giggle uncontrollably any time I try to see how their writing progress is going. My first week was just introductions “hello, I’m Robert, yes I know it’s snowing out, no I am not cool in shorts and sandals, no I ‘don’t understand German’ [wink wink], no I don’t have a wife, (and right after that) no I don’t have kids.. etc etc.” They are most interested when I describe my family- it’s funny to see their faces when they understand “triplet” [whisper whisper, oh “DRILLING!”]- when I describe broomball, and when I talk about Minnesota (ice fishing, accents, bars). They are horrified and quite frankly look a little upset when I talk about University (here it’s free, so I shock them with the price tag of good ol’ CSB/SJU per year, and then remind them that I had 4 sisters who all went to similar private unis), and also that it was quote unquote “14 kilometres to the nearest town and at least 25 kilometres to the next largest city.” I also converted our lovely windchilled winter weather to Celsius, and I am quite sure they will never visit upon hearing that it can habitually reach minus 30 degrees Celcius and that we get meters and meters of snow each winter.

Besides school, I have been working very busy at cultivating a certain social life (yes yes, probably overcompensating for those sad, dreary, asocial days/months/decades of my younger years). My apartment is conveniently quite centrally located, which means that I have a nice stream of visitors stopping by to drink hot chocolate and wine, or to paint pictures and eat bell pepper and cheese sandwiches (yum yum!). We’ve had quite a few dinner parties at the ol’ Afro-Asianisches Institut (the AAI is the Studentheim where I live), and although I’ve hardly experimented from my days of pizzas and pastas and Mexican burrito extravaganzas, food seems to bring us all together: whether we’re eating Pakistani food at the local Diwan (eat as much as you like, pay what you want), or meeting in Kaffeehäuser for Wiener Schnitzel and Kartoffelsalat (feeling like TRUE Austrians, of course), it’s nice to know that our year abroad will not be one spent languishing away on a diet of poor student food.

And, believe it or not, food is not the ONLY venue for socialization. There’s also wine. Just kidding. But seriously, the best part about being here during the autumn is its serendipitous correspondence to the dangerously intoxicating Jahreszeit or ‘season’ for Sturm. Sturm is, for those who haven’t been privy to my ecstatic raves, a sickeningly sweet transitional beverage strategically marketed when grape juice has only partially fermented into wine, creating a uniquely innocent taste that seduces you into drinking litres of the stuff before you realize that your digestive tract cannot handle it. Or, so I’ve been told…

I don’t want you all to think that I’ve just been eating and drinking since I got here, although that’s probably 80% of my average day. What else is there, though? Well, I described the ballet I went to in my last blog, but we’ve also gone to see an actual opera, Puccini’s “La Bohème,” which was the model for a modern day musical you all know as “Rent.” Lots of Italian singing, and the best scene took place during winter, and the stage looked like MINNESOTA! We also went to the Musikverein, a lovely concert hall shimmering with blindingly golden walls and mirrors and Barock statues and architecture, in order to see a trifecta of magnificent musical melodies by the likes of Charlie Ives (I personally wasn’t impressed with this but the others seemed to find “The Unanswered Question” amazing, and I’m pretty sure that one Mr. Ben Burns Briese was obsessed with this piece after the CSB/SJU orchestra played it during my first séjour in Austria), a super impressive cello concerto by Shostakovich, and the pièce de résistance – Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (New World)- which is my all time FAVORITE piece of music! I was singing and dancing along with it, much to the amusement of fellow audience members… the best part about these events: they cost respectively 3 and 5 Euros ($4.50/$7.00) for Stehplätze “standing room,” because the state actually pays for 90% of the budget for these cultural venues. As Michael Zwinger was saying the other day, “it doesn’t matter that Austrian doesn’t have money for its school system, as long as Robert can afford to go to the opera.”

Speaking of the Musikverein, my greatest accomplishment to date is my discovery of an orchestra, with which I am now able to play. I first attempted to play with the Technisches Universitätsochester, which is performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony this semester. I showed up for the second rehearsal and was told quite nicely that they unfortunately didn’t have any more room in the orchestra for violin players (this was suspiciously after I had already sight-read some music with some other players in front of the director… so, yeah.. I guess I really didn’t make the cut). Anyway, a few weeks ago, after seeing Dvorak’s Symphony at the Musikverein, I discovered that there was a community orchestra called “Orchesterverein der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien” (roughly translated as the ‘Orchestral Association of the Society of Music Friends in Vienna’), and I was both FREAKED OUT and EXCITED to try and play in such lofty company. Long story short: I showed up for the rehearsal, was told they didn’t have room, used my adorable accent to explain that I was only in Vienna for the year and just really wanted to play in an orchestra [muffled sob], even if I couldn’t play in the concert, and VOiLà – they agreed that I should be able to play with them, and they subsequently gave me the music for first violin and told me to go home and practice a lot… anyway, rehearsals are nice but hard. My neighbor told me last lesson that he had been playing his violin for 60 years, originally getting it as a boy at the end of World War II when his mother traded food from their farm to buy it. Wowza!

This blog entry is getting ridiculously long, and although there is still much more to tell, I will just wrap things up with a funny little anecdote from a few weeks ago:

I was riding the subway to go visit a few friends, and after a few stops, a group of three “dudes” got on the S-Bahn and stood next to me. I started smirking when I heard their boisterous American accents, as I would, of course, NEVER let on that I was American or even show that I understood a single word that they were saying. Anyway, after a few seconds of bantering, one suddenly asked his friend what the HECK he was wearing. I snuck a look to see what he was talking about and was amazed to see one particular guy, who was otherwise dressed extremely “cool” with his jeans and polo shirt, sports coat and baseball cap, wearing a small, black-leather FANNY PACK! At this point I was desperately looking away as I smiled to myself, but I really almost lost it when he started defending his fanny pack decision with the phrase “oh yeah, guys… just imagine if we were in Morocco right now— people there just cut your pants and steal all your money.” Haha… now that I think about it, I’m sure the Austrians would do the same, if they had the chance… so yeah, please be sure to bring your fanny packs when you come to visit. Austria is a lot like Morocco.

Men in dresses, bubbles, dances moves from the eighties, mock beheadings, erotic sword dances… yep, the Opera was cool!

Hey friends and family- this is a very very short run-down of my first week, which I meant to post earlier. Therefore, there will be a second post right after this, and I apologize for the data overload...

Best experiences in the first week:

1)I’ve met the most AMAZING people—fellow Fulbrighters are an enthusiastic group of scholars who want to learn a lot here, love speaking German, and impress me thoroughly with their various arrays of humors, knowledges, and personalities… it’s like hanging out with my Doppelgängers
2)Taking a boat ride along the Danube, we stopped in a medieval town called Dürnstein, which has a rocky ruined castle on a hill above it where Richard the Lionhearted was captured and held for ransom while he was coming home from the Crusades. We took bottles of wine up to the ruins and had a spectacular view of the Wachau region (a famous wine-growing portion of Lower Austria, which had vineyards as far as the eye could see) just at the moment that the sun was setting…

L’opera

Going to the Opera was admittedly more of a “time filler” than something that I felt passionate about (although I still have fond memories of seeing “Barber of Seville” at the Opera house here three years ago). The first five minutes of the performance did nothing to chance such cynical behavior, as all I could think was ‘give me a beer and I’ll get up there and show you ballet.’ However, then something slightly more impressive occurred, and I realize that no amount of Stiegl would prepare me for a woman running up from behind me, using the back of my leg as a spring board and penduluming around my body with her thighs fastened tightly around my neck and swinging down to land gracefully at my feet. Wowza! That’s when things got interesting.

Things that made me laugh a lot
1)Went to the local flea market and saw wine for EU 3.00 and thought about it as the European equivalent as “Three Buck Chuck”
2)Got hugged by a drunken Iranian in my Studentheim when I offered him a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie
3)Went to Schönbrunn Palace on a picnic with a girl who’s also teaching English here (everyone else was sleeping off the evening before), and when we were taking to each other a Turkish student started talking with us. After explaining that we were studying/teaching in Vienna for the year, he asked us “are you lovers?”
4)Heard a story from my friend Matthew who biked from the east to west coat: apparently, while they were biking the MidWest, they called it MiddleEarth :) When I later mentioned something about “wanting to live in a cave” (implying like St.Benedict did), he asked if I wanted to be like Gollum…


TIMES I FELT AUSTRIAN
I ordered Weisswürste (a traditional sausage specialty), which came with a pretzel the size of my face and a decent-sized jar of mustard… why it didn’t just come with Lederhose and a polka band, I’ll never understand. I opted, however, NOT to eat it in the traditional manner, which involves slicing off one end of the natural casing and sucking out the soft sausage filling. Oh, Germans!

TIMES I FELT AMERICAN
I ordered Berner Würste (literally sausage from Bern) and it was actually just cooked hot dogs wrapped in bacon.