Orientation Live Blog*

Oh, the joys of Fulbright Orientation. You wake up at an ungodly hour, traipse to the Fulbright office in Museumsquartier, and sit down to listen to nuggets of wisdom like this:

"This is Jürgen. He's one of the five nice people in Vienna."

"All in all, being occupied by the United States was a really good thing for Austria. That's really the start of the Austrian political system."

"You might not notice that many cultural differences between the US and Austria--not as many as you would if you were going to spend a year among the cannibals in Papua New Guinea who run around naked."

"Austria totally defies everything we know about neoliberalism. You'll be here for a year, so in your interactions with 'The Natives,' try to figure out if you can why Austria is so prosperous despite having high taxes and a redistributive [rolls eyes] welfare state. It makes no sense."

"This is a picture of the first group of Austrian Fulbrighters. They were about to go to the Promised Land. The first American Fulbrighters to Austria, on the other hand, were going to a hellhole."

"In the United States, we have a Protestant work ethic. But in Catholic countries, people don't believe that you can know based on your life here on Earth whether you're going to heaven. I mean really -- people actually believe this. So they live this lifestyle where they just enjoy life and let heaven take care of itself. Austria is almost more Italian in this respect than similar to Protestant Northern Germany. It's a Mediterranean thing. [Pause] But actually, the Austrians are more productive than the Germans when you look at the statistics."

"People in Catholic countries are a lot of talk and no action. Like, for example, in the 1990s, people in Austria talked a lot about how much they hated foreigners. But they didn't burn down houses of asylum--that was the Protestants in Northern Germany."

"The people of central Europe have fond memories of Franz Josef. Even Edward Said said that he wasn't sure if a Habsburg-style empire was as bad for the colonized people as the regimes the British and French set up in Africa and Asia. But really, I never really bought his whole thing."

"This chart is from Albert Kohl. We have the full article for you on USB. Now, this was written twenty years ago, and people have now decided that his methodology was very flawed and that he's essentialist or whatever. But they're always complaining about something. Anyway, on the one side of your paper you see the cultural attributes of the United States. On the other side, you see the cultural attributes of the rest of the world--Latin, Latin American, European, Oriental, you know."

Part of me would love to refute each statement line by line. But mostly, I just want to scream. This is what Fulbright is all about? Where's the mutual understanding? Where's the understanding, period?

And as if to add insult to injury, this is to a group where at least 70% of us have already lived for some amount of time in Austria. One person is even a dual Austrian-American citizen. And it's a good thing, too -- I would never want to interact with Austrians if this had been my first introduction. But as it is, I'm trying to just bite my tongue and take it all in stride for two more days. After all, the Fulbright Commission is paying me to live in Austria for the next year, something I really am excited about. And Fulbright isn't a program in the traditional sense--I don't need to see the staff ever really, after next week.

In other news, after two days of "orientation," I still know very little about day-to-day survival tips on life in Austria--and I had really been looking forward to the refresher, so that things I'd forgotten about wouldn't take me by surprise.

*Note: These are not exact quotes; I was not actually liveblogging orientation. But they capture the gist of things that were actually said and that I found problematic.