At some point over the many indistinguishable months of lockdown, a friend sent me a generic online personality quiz to see just how sanguine or phlegmatic I was feeling that day, and although the results proved inconclusive, I do remember being particularly struck by this question. As someone who was about to move to a new university in a German-speaking country in the midst of a pandemic with the potential of a no-deal Brexit lingering ominously overhead, I really wasn’t quite sure what to choose. Was I feeling energised about the future or stressed about the practicalities, or was I just preoccupied by the thought of a lay-over at the Moomin Café in Helsinki Airport which British Airways was offering me instead of a direct flight?
After ten days of strolling around Imperial Vienna in glorious sunshine, it looks like the weather has finally broken, and so I have ended up at a desk in the City Library. I am just as surprised as you are that my studious instincts have returned after their six-month sabbatical, yet perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that, despite swaddling the very rail tracks which cause my bed to tremble at regular intervals throughout the night, the only sounds to be heard are of students coming upstairs looking for a window seat. You can't help but feel inspired as you gaze out over the Viennese Woods at dusk and ponder important matters such as Freudian theories, Austrian literature, and what you might cobble together for dinner. I initially came here to register for a card, but instead found myself back on my hunt for a suitably niche but fascinating topic to work on for the dissertation I will write this year. When I first said I wanted to spend my year here in Vienna, my brother joked that I could write on ‘The Role of Kaffee und Kuchen in the Demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’, and I’d just like to note that I’ve got a book next to me titled ‘Kaffeehäuser als Menschenrecht’ (The Coffee House as a Human Right), which doesn’t make his flippant suggestion seem so flippant any more.
If you’re now expecting me to outline my plans for my ground-breaking contribution to academia, I’m afraid you’ll have to just wait another month (or ten), and instead make do with these rambling musings about my first impressions of the city. To return to the initial question, I wish I could tell you that unpredictable situations ‘always energise me and make me feel alive’, but let’s just say that when you’re trying to explain to an impatient cashier that you’re not a courgette thief but rather you couldn’t find the right button on the weighing scales and so went for Bio-Kürbis instead, hoping it was another word for courgette, you’d rather be dead in a ditch full of Austrian gourds than feeling ‘energised and alive’. The past week has certainly been full of such encounters which language learning in Britain leaves you feeling wholly unprepared for – I can tell you what I did last weekend, what I get up to on holiday and even run you through the pros and cons of German immigration policy, but I’m sorry, I just have no idea how to ask if there’s communal cling film in the kitchen. (I made up to my flatmate for this lengthy game of Articulate with a tray of brownies, baked on the greaseproof paper, which, unlike the cling film, is indeed communal.)
Brownies and organic pumpkin mishaps aside, I am relieved to say that all in all the Viennese life is going rather well. There is all the schnitzel and strudel you could want, but there are also Vegan Cafés and Vietnamese eateries dotted around the city. My flatmates come from all over the place (Bosnia, Georgia, Niederösterreich) but speak German to each other, and the Viennese dialect has so far stumped me only a few times – leiwand, as they would say here. The city is just as elegant as I had imagined it to be, and watching the sunset on banks of the Donau was about as year-abroad cliché as you can get, but nonetheless a tangible reminder of just how lucky I am to be here. Thankfully my university courses don’t start immediately, which means another few days for me to find my feet in this ‘hauntingly beautiful’ city and get to work on developing a personality and a witty sense of humour auf Deutsch, which will hopefully provide more than enough content for the next post. Bis dann!
View from my window, complete with the U6 trundling along to Floridsdorf.
Just as I stopped to take this photo I overheard a lady exclaim that one of her friends had tested positive for Covid; suffice to say, after looking rather alarmed, I quickly moved on.
Sunset watching on the Donauinsel.
Window seats at the Central Library of Vienna.