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."

Americans Have No Culture

Because it's basically an ERASMUS-Heim, my dorm seems to be built on the principle of cultural exchange in a way that I've never experienced before. Sure, I had plenty of international friends at Harvard. But at Harvard, the specific countries where my friends came from were not that salient to their public identities. We talked about sex in Georgia, transportation in France, educational philosophy in Nepal, etc. whenever it came up, but because we were all trying to fit into the cosmopolitan culture of Harvardland, national identities were not a huge part of our daily reality.

Here, it's altogether different. I've already talked about how this represents the first time many of the students here have gotten the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. And part and parcel of that is a kind of "food and festivals" multiculturalism that seems to be pretty common in the Heim.

What if this wasn't just for a year?

When I told my roommate that I had already lived in Austria on two separate occasions, and was coming back for a third time, the first question she asked was, "Would you ever consider staying here long-term?"

It's a valid question, and one, I'll admit, I've given a lot of thought over the past year or so. Because I am getting into the meat of my twenties, and more and more of my friends are meeting people they could see themselves settling down with. And so the question of location takes on added importance.

Guess I Got My Swagger Back

Although I tried to maintain a positive outlook, my first few days in Austria did not go well. The problems started in the airport, when a lady asked me where the Gleis was for the S-Bahn, and I could barely get out the words for "down the steps there." When I went to pick up my roomkey from Martin's colleague, I was up to full phrases -- but only one at a time. When I tried to put together a two-phrase sentence, I ended up just trailing off halfway through. And then a girl around my age offered to help me with my baggage, but I just stared blankly at her because it took me like 30 seconds to figure out what she was saying.

Ok, I thought, I'll chalk that up to the fact that I haven't slept for 20 hours and am feeling the first stirrings of a horrific cold. But even after sleeping for ten hours, my attempt to introduce myself to my roommate auf Deutsch did not go as well as planned. Shit, I thought, have I forgotten how to speak this language? That could make things interesting.

But in the past few days, things have definitely been looking up. Finally able to get out of bed after a week-long Erkältung (cold), I've begun interacting with people, and I've found that my Deutsch skills are not as degraded as I had feared. In fact, I think I'm getting my Vienna swagger back:

Austrians are Funny #1

In the grocery store on Saturday, next to the cartons of tomato, carrot, and apple juice, I found sauerkraut juice. It's supposedly part of "Wellness für den Darm," which in English means "it gives you the runs like crazy." This is apparently a good thing.

Hey, at least it's organic!

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."

Inspiration, Round 3

It's become something of a tradition for me to express my thoughts about my imminent departure in the form of a song lyric I can't get out of my head. This summer is no exception, as I've been haunted by the first lines of a song from, of all things, Pocahontas--the most American of Disney movies. It comes to me as I flip through GRE vocabulary flash cards, as my feet pound the track of my former high school on a run, as I slowly but surely fill my suitcases with clothes, books, and other items I can't bear to leave behind:

What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice
The water's always changing, always flowing

I wanted to return to Austria partly because I feel comfortable there. I know that train tickets are much cheaper when you have a VORTEILScard (although it has always been unclear to me why it couldn't just be called a Vorteilskarte), that you have to move it in the grocery store checkout line if you don't want the customers behind you flashing you increasingly dirty looks, that almost anything can be found somewhere along Mariahilferstraße, and that THERE IS NO FUCKING U5 (seriously, oida, what the fuck?).

But you can't step in the same river twice. Austria will have changed in the thirteen months since I've been there, and more importantly, I've changed as well. A lot of times I feel like I'm in a relationship with Austria. Well, we've been on hiatus for over a year now, and now I've decided to try to rekindle things. But there's no way of knowing whether sparks will fly this time as they have in the past. I've met plenty of expats in Austria who absolutely hate the place, and I don't want to become one of them. I have loved Austria, and I want to believe I will love it again. But a part of me--the part of me that doesn't even believe in love--wonders whether that's even possible.