Thanksgiving in Wien

I’ve always been the type of person who lives in the moment, and so I’ve never really had much of a problem with homesickness. I did get a little sad, though, when I Skyped my family on Thanksgiving and heard about their holiday plans, and so I was especially glad that Central College organizes a Thanksgiving Party “for us,” in that we the exchange students are the ones who need this feast the most, but also “by us,” in that we’re also responsible for cooking the foods and sharing our tradition with our Austrian guests (our roommates and friends as well as the Central College Abroad professors).

I ♥ My Uni

Universitätshauptgebäude (main building)

Learning German: der Heurige

Heurigen are wine taverns directly on the property of the vineyards whose wine they serve. They exist throughout the Eastern Austrian wine-producing region, and have become a veritable institution since Kaiser Josef II permitted vintners to begin selling their own wines in 1784. Today, there are two types of Heurigen: touristy places reachable by the tour buses full of Germans who come down to sample Austrian wine, and more rustic accommodations that often require a hike up a meandering mountain path that's too steep for the tour buses to travel. On the last day of my Mom's visit, I wanted to show her one of the latter. With a recommendation from Marie, the assistant director of my program, and a printed map from Wiener Linien (Wien's equivalent of the MBTA), we were ready to go.

Doing it Aurally

I like music for the same reason I like sports -- as a form of collectivism and communal experience. There's nothing inherently exciting to me about banging on a piece of metal in a regular fashion, or blowing gusts of wind through a wooden cylinder; I enjoy listening to music for its ability to connect me to (sub)cultures. As I youngster, I was embarrassed about living in a middle-class household in a working-class district, so I got into punk. Maybe I couldn't be a throwaway youth -- someone who has decided to burn out rather than grow up because earning a good living is not really possible -- but I could listen to their music and get angry just the same. I feel as if I can bore my way into the minds of a specific group of people by listening to the music they do. For example, I named my blog last summer "Crack in Chelsea" because I would always listen to a certain Dropkick Murphys song on my way home from work, "as I put on my most bad-ass face and dodge through the crowds at Grand Central Station," as I wrote at the time. I was a New York bad-ass, and bad-ass New Yorkers listen to hard-edged skinhead music. So I did the same.

That's why I knew that my early-2000s American rock collection was not going to cut it in Austria. I tried listening to almost everything in the U-Bahn during my first few weeks here (rap, ska, indie, punk, folk), but it always felt a bit wrong, as if I was disappearing into an American world between my ears and letting Austria pass me by. Interestingly enough, international pop hits like Airplanes seemed to work well, but I can't ignore my American socialization, which tells me that those songs can only be occasional guilty pleasures, long enough for them to serve as a sustainable solution to my dilemma. Since I still wanted to listen to music on the trains, I needed to amp up my German-speaking music collection. Here's some of what I've found so far:

Innsbruck

November 1 (All Saints Day / Alle Heiligen) and November 2 (All Souls Day / Alle Seelen) were university holidays in Austria, so my mom and I took a short trip to Innsbruck, the capital city of the province of Tirol.