First (Third?) Impressions

Like every child of the 1990s, I love Harry Potter. But several things about the books have always bothered me: (1) If Europe's Christians decided to make witches and wizards their bitter enemies for several hundred years, why does the (witchcraft and) wizarding world still celebrate Christmas? (2) Are Muggle-born children really ready to give up their entire culture at age 11 and never look back? (3) Dumbledore's explanation aside, isn't it immoral to not share the "technological" advances of wizards with the rest of the world? It's this last one that irks me the most, though. Not because 100 million people died from the Spanish flu, which a quick spell could have healed, but because every time I travel, I think to myself, "Damn, I really wish I could apparate."

This trip was no different. There weren't any specific problems to point to -- there was a brief moment of panic when I thought the baby behind me would cry during the entire seven-hour flight from New York to London, but her parents quickly subdued her. I just do not travel well. Arriving in Vienna after twenty hours of flying, I felt like a zombie.

But getting to the Vienna airport was the easy part of the trip; it was from the airport to my dorm that felt like an odyssey. I was able to carry my bags to the S-Bahn platform without incident, thanks to a very handy airport renovation that transformed the entrance from a staircase to a ramp (seriously, Flughafen Wien, ein herzliches Dankeschön, that was the best Umbau ever!). From the platform, I stared jealously at the business travelers taking the City-Airport-Train, who were just rolling their bags onto the car. Because I'm a (wannabe) Wienerin, dammit, and Wieners* save money by taking the S-Bahn. The S-Bahn with a very high set of steps that bags must be carried up in order to board.

After the S-Bahn, then you take the U-Bahn ... but not to bed. No, if you're staying in an ÖAD-Heim, and you arrive after noon, you have to first travel to the office of the friend who picked up your keys for you because the Büro wouldn't be open by the time you arrived. Because, obviously, people who are flying internationally to get to Wien, which is -- get this! -- EVERY KUNDE OF THE ÖAD, can easily make sure that they arrive early in the morning. Even when they have to catch multiple flights that day.

But I finally reached my dorm. It's in the 15. District, by the Gürtel. By day, it's a quiet, unobtrusive neighborhood made up mostly of immigrant families. At night, however, the street facing my window turns into a drag strip. At least every 15 minutes one of the cars stopped at the traffic light outside our Heim starts blasting that Gotye song, and really late, you hear the last snippets of someone's drunken night: couples fighting over who made a pass at whom at the bar that night,  that awkward moment when you try to get a girl to come up to your apartment and she refuses, and making sure your stumbling drunk friend, who's at the point where the only word she can say is "Oida," gets home safely. So far, it's been more amusing than annoying, but I can imagine that this might get old if I were staying here the entire year.

Luckily, however, I'm moving into a dorm that caters more toward Austrian students at the end of the month. Because this is my other issue with the ÖAD-Heim: No one speaks German. For everyone else, that's not a problem. I can certainly imagine if I were a Slovakian student (like my roommate), attending  a Slovak-speaking university with other Slovakians, it would be exciting to spend my Auslandssemester at a dorm with people from all over the world, speaking a world language like English. But I'm not. I don't need to go abroad to meet people from all over the world -- I went to one of the most diverse universities on the planet. And I've spoken English since the age of 2.

Till the end of the month, though, I'm going to make the best of it. And I do enjoy talking to the people in my Heim. Like last night, when I played a round of everyone's favorite game, "Listen to People from Non-Democratic Countries Describe Their Political Systems!" with my flatmate from Singapore.**

I also had a brief moment of panic when I thought our Heim didn't allow you to trenn your Müll (which is a fancy Austrian way of recycling). But then I found a garbage can with multiple compartments under the sink, and the world was as it should be once again.



* Yes, I know. It's funny at first; get over it.
** The best one is still from an Iranian, who told me: "Yeah, so we're a democracy. But the Supreme Leader can just change the laws whenever he wants."