What I Did During My Summer Vacation

The Harvard Office of International Programs wanted me to write a final grant report detailing what I learned during my summer abroad. (They seem less interested in more concrete things, such as receipts to prove I actually went to Austria.) I've posted it in all its thanks-for-the-money glory after the jump.

Verabschiedung

Wie fühle ich mich bezüglich meiner Heimreise? Letztes Mal habe ich immer „gemischte Gefühle“ gesagt, obwohl die ehrliche Antwort war, dass ich einen Panikanfall gekriegt habe, jedes Mal ich daran gedacht habe. Diesmal habe ich mich nicht so gefühlt. Vielleicht geht es darum, dass ich das erste Mal unsicher war, ob ich ja mal im Leben zurückkommen würde. Und ich habe es nach knapp 4 Monaten geschafft, was mir gezeigt hat, dass ich ja zu jeder Zeit in Österreich wohnen könnte, wenn das mir mal am wichtigsten wäre. Und deswegen habe ich diesmal keine Panik gehabt. Ich habe einen Absicht in Amerika: Mein Studium fertig zu machen, damit ich als qualifizierte Arbeitskraft nach Österreich kommen dürfte. Ich habe einen Plan und eine Auswahl; ich bin nicht für immer gegen meinen Willen in Amerika exiliert. Und daher fühlte ich mich lockerer.

Dachte ich.

Prater in Pictures

On Monday, the student assistants at my work took what is quickly becoming an annual trip to Prater, an amusement park in Wien, to celebrate the end of the semester. We rode the amusement park rides -- which were pretty comparable to Kennywood, with the exception of a distinct lack of large roller coasters -- and then ate dinner at Schweizerhaus, a restaurant in Prater known for its Stelze.

That Other Place Where They Speak German

Daan, a friend of mine from Harvard by way of the Netherlands, is spending the summer in Frankfurt, Germany, working for Deutsche Bank and invited me to visit him during the first weekend in July. My expectations were kind of low -- Frankfurt was rebuilt after WWII to look new, rather than old, meaning that the entire city has a kind of 1950s-drab aesthetic. And when I told people in Vienna that I was going to Frankfurt, they gave me strange looks. (That could have just been the look they give everyone who suggests leaving Austria to go to the land of the Scheiß Piefkes, but I'd like to think Austrians are a bit more discerning in their hatred of Germans.)

But I found a lot to like in Frankfurt and in Hessen, even if the German German did start to grate at my ears after 24 hours.* 

Dreams Do Come True

Tracht -- traditional costumes (think Dirndls, Lederhosen, and the funny hats you wear while yodeling) --- is a huge point of social division in Austria. As my work colleague Marlene explained to me, "You either wear a Dirndl all the time, or you've never worn one."

And there are indeed people who wear Tracht just because they feel like it. My favorite example of this was at Donauinselfest, where I saw a teenager wearing a Slipknot t-shirt and a Lederhose. I just cannot fathom what went through his mind as he ruffled through his closet that morning: "Ok, so I'm going to a concert. I'll wear my heavy metal T-shirt, of course, but what should I wear on the bottom? Oh, right, my Lederhose! Great idea!" But such thoughts occur in the minds of Austrians more commonly than one would think, and I find that simply hilarious.

When I realized that Tracht has not disappeared from everyday life in Austria, it became my secret dream to see someone I knew in the traditional costume. My hopes were not very high: Sometimes a friend of mine from the dorm would come back from a weekend in their village with tagged photos of them on Facebook at some Dorffest in a Dirndl or Lederhose. But someone I knew, in Tracht, in the flesh? As my work colleague Andreas told me, "Wrong Bundesland." Tracht is conservative, traditional, rural -- everything Austrians are trying to avoid when they come to study in the Big City.

Bei ana Grüllarei san olle Leit dabei*

After Christmas, when the Christkindlmärkte packed up their wooden stands and disappeared from the city, I never thought I would find an Austrian activity to rival the Punschstände. But lo and behold, I just needed to wait a few months for the warmer weather, and with it, the beginning of grill season.

What's My Name Again?

In my original study abroad application, I wrote that I hoped experiencing life abroad would help me to better relate to the experiences of immigrants to the United States. And it has.* But I had always assumed I would never know what it was like to be not white in the United States, because white people are generally honored - not ridiculed - in Asian and African countries.

What I Did During Donauinselfest

The line up at the SJ-Bühne, where I spent a good deal of my time

What exactly is Donauinselfest? It's a free three-day music festival on the Donauinsel (as the name suggests, an island in the middle of the Danube) held over the Corpus Christi holiday weekend and one of the major events in town during the year. The Straßenbahn lines run late into the night, the U-Bahn comes more frequently, and it can feel like everyone in the city comes out for the party. Here's what I did:

Why I Broke my Promise

I recently spoke with an American who decided to attend the Uni Wien for his undergraduate studies. We had known each other cursorily last semester, having a few mutual friends and having one class together, and when I saw him again, I asked him how he had been doing. In English. Which surprised him.

Learning German: die Heimat

In a conversation with an Austrian girl at a party recently, she described Minnesota, where she had spent an exchange year during high school, as her "zweite (second) Heimat." And that struck me as strange, because a lot of times I don't feel like I have any Heimat at all.

Mother's Milk

Pretty much every post on this blog mentions Dialekt in some way. I’m fascinated by it – the way in which an entire country can speak counterhegemonically. This isn’t the German you learn in German class, or on TV or in films. It exists solely in the mouths and media of the people who speak it, who aren’t exactly well-known the world over. Had I not come to Austria, I probably wouldn’t even know that Austrian dialect exists. And Schwiizerdüütsch – the dialect spoken in Switzerland – still remains the stuff of legend for me. I’ve heard Austrians attempt to mimic it, which is where my knowledge of the word “Schwiizerdüütsch” (Hochdeutsch would be Schweizerdeutsch) comes from, but I’ve never heard it spoken by an actual Schweizer. (I did, however, hear a guest lecture by a Swiss person attempting to speak Hochdeutsch last week, and that was enough to convince me that Schweizerdeutsch is indeed an entirely different animal.)

Yes, Dialekt is something special, and it’s something that, as the expression goes, really needs to be passed on with the mother’s milk for perfect mastery. But there’s one group of Austrians that doesn’t speak Dialekt with the same fluency as everyone else. And oddly enough, they’re the ones for whom the sacred rite of Dialekt-through-breastfeeding occurred in the not-so-distant past. I’m talking about toddlers.

Ode to Österreich

The first time I went abroad, my answer to "Why did you decide to come to Austria?" was simple. It was the result of a set of coincidences: I took German because I didn't like the Spanish teacher (and then fell in love with the language) and went to Austria because the German academic calendar didn't mesh with Harvard's (and then fell in love with the country.) But I could have gone anywhere this summer, and I chose to come back.  And that requires explanation. I was actually asked three times this week why I love Austria so much, and I think I mumbled something about Dirndls and Dialekt. But here's the real answer, my ode to Österreich in five movements. (I tried to select things that everyone can appreciate about Austria. There are of course other, smaller things that I have fallen in love with but that I realize are very subjective. For a list of those, see this post -- written in January but not published until now!)

There are many paths to development. Some of them are for bikes.

One of my goals for this summer is to finally get around to visiting some of the museums that I didn't during my last trip to Vienna. At the time, I told myself this was because I had decided to concentrate on meeting Austrians more than "seeing" Austria. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I spent more time on Facebook than was probably necessary. On many occasions, I wasn't doing anything but was simply too lazy to get bundled up and leave my dorm to go do something. Today, though, was sunny and not overly warm, so I had no excuses. I decided to visit the Museum für Völkerkunde (anthropology). And I would bike there.

Prater Unser

Das Grätzl – your neighborhood or community, a smaller and less top-down way of dividing up the city than the Bezirk system – is incredibly important to Austrians. It’s one way of making a city of 1.8 million people feel smaller and less anomic, and it’s rare for Austrians to move out of their district to another, more foreign part of the city. 

Genau!

I was searching Google for an explanation of why Austrians put corn on their pizza when I found this simply hilarious blog about living as an American in the German-speaking world. Although I've found that Austrians actually eat slower than Americans, I still found the following post about sharing meals with German speakers to really hit the nail on the head.

Bist du ein Native Speaker?

There was a Dutch psychologist visiting our Institut last week, which gave me a chance to experience another aspect of European work culture, namely its largely international flavor. Europe is really pouring its heart into the whole European Union thing, by and large, and I'm constantly amazed by the large diversity of Europe-wide initiatives. ERASMUS, the student exchange program and general network of European universities, is an excellent example of this, and meeting students from all over the continent during an ERASMUS semester is quickly becoming a rite of passage for European students (it even has its own cult film!)

Yours, Formally

German, like many other languages around the world but unlike English, has two ways of saying you: "du" (informal) and "Sie" (formal).* In your first-level language class, you complain about having to learn the extra conjugation, but this is only a minor annoyance, you think, in a language with many major ones. Then you start living in the German-speaking world, and you realize that even though you can conjugate both forms, you don't have the foggiest idea of how to use them.

Riding the Waves

My first night in Wien was simply spectacular. I needed to pick up my room key from a friend who's here with Central College Abroad for a year directly upon my arrival, and so I sat outside the Westbahnhof U-Bahn-Station for twenty minutes. The weather was gorgeous, there were pleasant smells wafting from cafe across the sidewalk from me, and I kept hearing snippets of conversations in the beautiful, lilting Austrian Dialekt I've come to know and love. I was also glad to (finally!) unpack my suitcase after 10 days of traveling. And that night, I met up with Marshall, another Central College student I knew from last semester, for döner kebab and a beer at a park near our Wohnheim. As we walked through the gorgeous, familiarn side streets of the 6. Bezirk (district), I wanted to scream "Wien! Ich bin wieder da!" at the top of my lungs. I couldn't believe I was finally back.

Thoughts on the Plane

Ich hab im Flughafen ein Schild für einen Flug nach Dallas-Fort Worth gesehen, und plötzlich ist es mir eingefallen, dass ich eine große Menge Zeit im Ausland vor mir habe, bevor ich heimfliege. Und ich habe plötzlich Angst. Nicht die gute aufregende Angst, die man hat, bevor ein neues Abenteuer anfängt, sondern richtige ernsthafte Angst. War es wirklich eine gute Idee, den Sommer hier in Österreich zu verbringen, bloß weil ich im Jänner nicht bereit war, ein neues Semester an Harvard anzufangen? Weil ich mein wunderschönes spannendes Auslandssemester nicht beenden wollte? Ich war endlich wieder in Amerika eingelebt. Ich habe da Freunde, die mich wirklich lieb haben, und ich habe ein ganzes Leben da gebaut. Was hab ich in Österreich? Einige gute Erinnerungen, einige leere Bierdosen, einige Bekannte aus meinem Studentenheim. In Wirklichkeit ganz und gar nichts. Was suche ich in der Ferne? Wieso bin ich überhaupt auf der Suche? Ich habe gar keine Ahnung, was diesen Sommer passieren wird, und das stört mich.

Photo Journal of France

After London, I spent a wonderful week in France with two of my good friends from Harvard, Eunice and Marion. We stayed at Marion's family home in Villeneuve-les-Bordes, in the province of Ile-de-France, a small village about an hour away from Paris.

The central courtyard of Marion's house. Whereas American houses are compact and then have yards to the outside, European houses are square-shaped and have inner courtyards, which allow for more privacy.

The Charmed Life

This year, the stars aligned perfectly for a European vacation with my friends from Harvard. Marion had a polo match against Oxford (the men’s team – yes, she is that legit!) over the weekend, and then planned to spend a week at her home in France before heading back to Boston for a physics internship, while Mariam was expecting to spend a week in London with her best friend from Georgia (the country) who just completed a journalism program there. Because I would be in Austria for the summer anyway, it just made sense for me to join them. And when Eunice heard that a trip to London and Paris was being planned, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So, before fulfilling January’s promise to myself and returning to the country of my dreams, I spent the weekend in London with my friends.

Inspiration, Round 2

I'm already counting down the days (24 at the moment) until my triumphant return to Europe. Often, as my boots clack against the Harvard Square cobblestones on my way to class, lines from this song -- a half-remembered anthem of my parents' youth -- start running through my head. A fitting epigraph to a period of expectancy:

Well she was an American girl, raised on promises.
She couldn't help thinking that there was a little more to life somewhere else. 

In just a few weeks, I'll again be in pursuit of whatever it is I think I'm missing.

Grüß di ... But how?

Greetings are awkward. First of all, the customs are different in Austria and America: Americans hug, while Austrians do the double-cheek kiss. But that's just the start of the problems. As an American, my normal response would be to hug. But I know that Austrians find it weird to get body-shoved into someone, so I don't wanna do that. The Austrian I'm greeting would normally go for the bussi-bussi, but knows I don't like to put my lips on people unless I'm trying to crawl in bed with them. So neither of us makes the first move, trying not to make the other one uncomfortable. And we just end up feeling unsatisfied, as if we actually don't give a shit about each other, even though that's not true at all.

It's Not Goodbye, It's Auf Wiedersehen.

Because we have to see each other again. We just have to.

My semester abroad is over. During my last weeks in Austria, I was asked many times whether I was happy to leaving or not. "I have mixed feelings" was always my answer. And now that I'm back at Harvard, my mixed feelings are even stronger. I'm happy to be in the company of my friends, of people who care about me, social justice, and overly-intellectualized radicalism; excited about my classes (even if I'm not excited about the amount of reading); and loving the perks of campus life, like a gorgeous, spacious single bedroom and a chocolate fountain for Sunday brunch. But at the same time, I miss the Austrian customs to which I've grown accustomed. I greet everyone I pass by in Kirkland House. I make eye contact with strangers on the street -- especially important as we both try to navigate the very tiny paths between the four-foot piles of snow covering the streets of Boston this week. I really just like eating grilled vegetables. When entering a room, I immediately take off my shoes and put on Hausschuhe. I go to bed at midnight and wake up at eight.

On Saturday night, I was explaining how I felt like I prioritized relationships during my semester in Austria, and that I was able to lead a more balanced and fulfilling life there because I wasn't so damn busy all the time. "Well," she asked me, "how are you going to bring Austria back to Harvard?" And that's the question. I do feel that I've grown a lot as a person during my semester abroad, and I want to transfer those lessons back to my life here. I don't want to be the college freshman who slept until 11am, then threw on sweatpants before running to class, and stayed up half the night finishing her papers. I want to lead a more balanced life here at Harvard, too. Let's see if it's possible.

I Do, Indeed, Finally Fit In

In the middle of November, I wrote a blog post which unfortunately was lost to the depths of the Web when my Internet connection went dead. In it, I remember opining that I would probably first feel totally at home in Austria at my goodbye party, when I would realize that I actually was a valued member of Haus Salzburg for the short time I was there. I'm not quite ready to take my leave yet, but it is true that I both feel totally at home here and finally feel like the Austrians I know see me as someone who belongs here. A few vignettes from the weekend will show you what I mean.

Things that I Will Miss about Austria

1. Prickelndes Mineralwasser
2. The U-Bahn runs all night on Friday and Saturday
3. The man in the U-Bahn that says "Umsteigen zu den Linien U1, U3, 4, 5, 59A, sowie zu Lokalbahn nach Baden"
4. Eating slowly
5. Dialekt!
6. "geil"
7. Hearing German music when I go out
8. Gösser / Ottakringer / European beer
9. Getting made fun of for embarrassing things about America
10. Cooking my own meals (and going grocery shopping)
11. Four-hour dinners
12. Buying alcohol in a supermarket
13. Milka Schokolade
14. Getting to drop the H-Bomb in a new language

Re-Evaluation of My Goals for the Semester

Because I will be unable to attend the final discussion for the required Central College Abroad course next week (I have a final for another class), I was asked to write a response paper re-evaluating the goals I had made at the beginning of the semester and reflecting upon my experience in Wien overall. Again, I'll try to post a translation when I have time.

Migration / Integration

I wrote this as a reflection paper for one of my classes (Penetrating Ethnic Communities) after we visited a mosque and speaking with some of its leaders about what it's like to be Turkish and/or Muslim in Austria. Writing it really helped me to clarify a lot of my thoughts on integration and xenophobia (Ausländerfeindlichkeit) in Austria. It's in German right now (I'll try to post a translation later), but I wanted to post it here anyway, both because I think it's important to understanding what I've learned here and because I want documentation of my German skills at this specific moment -- no matter if I advance or regress after this semester is over, I'll know that at one point, I could write semi-fluently.

It's the Final Countdown

January 27. The day I leave Austria with no pre-determined date of return. The day that's been looming in my mind ever since I returned last Thursday. Everytime I look at a calendar, I get a panicked feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don't want this experience to end.

Reflections upon Coming Back

I was giddy with joy (and from exhaustion after a 30-hour trip) when I first stepped onto Austrian soil after two weeks in America for Christmas. I was once again confronted with everything that I had missed during break --- sparkling water (from Vöslauer, with the purple cap), Mülltrennung (garbage separation), the woman in the U-Bahn who announces "Zug fährt ab"--- and yet, it seemed different somehow. Normal. Alltäglich. I no longer added "... in Austria" in my head everytime I did something. I think I annoyed my family whenever I talked about Austria as "home" during the break, but it was only when I came back to Austria that I first realized how home-y it has become. And home is always a little boring -- it's the comfort of the familiar rather than the excitement of the new.