It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and written a general Year Abroad update, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps I thought that dabbling in student journalism and writing for Varsity would give me the sense that I was still a part of the Cambridge bubble – a feeling that I have somewhat missed over the past few months, or that musing about my afternoon in the Freud Museum would remind me of the more intellectual elements of my Viennese adventure – elements which are admittedly all too often neglected for a spot of coffee and cake.
I’m delighted to report that the Kaffeehäuser are indeed finally open, as are all museums, galleries, libraries, and EU borders. A negative test result from the last 48 hours is however needed to enter any of the above (unless you’re vaccinated or recently recovered from Covid-19), and so rather frustratingly, I have spent an inordinate amount of time going through the testing lanes of the Stadthalle (City Stadium) this week. I dream of the day when I will return to Vienna and hear AustroPop as opposed to Public Health announcements blasting through the speakers, when someone will check my concert ticket and not shove a swab up my nostril. They’ve even started asking “left or right?”, as if a polite question will make up for the momentary discomfort they are about to inflict. I find the question just as baffling as the same one asked by the optician as he flicks over those lenses - “do you see better with number one… or with number two?”. Both are normally met by my increasingly exasperated answer, “it's about the same?!”.
A slice of Sachertorte at Café Eiles to celebrate a return to normality
I suppose the bad news, dear reader of the adventurelog, is that your chance of sampling some schnitzel, or if you’re vegetarian, strudel, while I’m here in Vienna is now very slight indeed. Austria decided last night that it’s essentially ‘nul points’ to Blighty, and as long as there is any Indian Variant lurking around Hounslow and Bolton, there shall be no direct flights between the plagued Kingdom and this Alpine idyll. In other news, I recently learned that the association of Austria with the Alps was a fairly modern development; for centuries Austria had prided itself and shaped much of its identity not around its mountainous regions, but around the River Danube. It got me thinking about the essay I wrote in Second Year entitled ‘Waterscapes are a site of cultural anxiety [in 19th Century German Literature and Art]’ – which sounds so pretentious I’m almost squirming just even typing that out.
Before I take a detour down the Donau (title of another future travel novel?), I shall return to the present day and those pesky emotions of mine. Everything opening up has been rather overwhelming. One fellow Erasmus student rather aptly captured it with her exclamation, “I don’t know what to do with so much freedom?!”, and indeed, how is one meant to choose a museum or café from the plethora on offer? With just less than two months of the Viennese life, I also feel a self-imposed pressure to make the most of every minute here and have spent a good part of the past week reminding myself that I can’t possibly see a whole country or continent in seven weeks. That’s not to say though that I’m not going to give it my best shot! A Year Abroad friend (from the Other Place) is preparing to bid Auf Wiedersehen to Austria in just a matter of weeks, and yet I feel like there is still so much more to do together – more Stadtwanderwege to get lost on, more beautiful photos to spam everyone with (you can find some of them over on tortoisetravelling), and plenty more crazy stories to exchange. To quote yet another Year Abroad student (can you tell we’re all having simultaneous crises?), who in turn quoted the ABBA song, time is indeed ‘slipping through my fingers’.
A view over to Schneeberg from a hike from Bad Vöslau
To find yourself as a Year Abroad student during an unforeseeable pandemic is to be plunged head first into a foreign culture, fully immersed in a new language and community. It is to thrash about wildly at the beginning – to do everything you can to stay afloat through the bureaucratic blizzard and the choppy waters of the first weeks of the semester. And it is then to eventually find a steady pace and settle into a new rhythm and way of life, to find friends who will cheer you on from the side as you navigate through online university and the troublesome supermarket checkouts. Yet to be a Year Abroad student is also to hear the sharp whistle telling you to get out of the pool but pretending to ignore it - knowing that you have just got into your zone and have finally picked up speed, but that you must speedily clamber out before the time’s up.
There’s a sense of living in limbo - your university experience, friends, and memories split between two very different worlds – and an acute sense that everything here is fleeting and transient. While I know I can return for holidays and even potentially for longer (if my residency permit ever arrives, that is), there is still a sense of tragic inevitability which lingers overhead, reminding you that come mid-July, these adventures and encounters will just be stories scribbled on the back of postcards, amusing blog updates to look back on, and not a daily reality to wake up to each day.
I promise I didn’t intend for this to turn out so dramatic, and I hoped this would just be the preamble before I regaled you with tales of a spontaneous day trip to Bratislava, the unexpected kangaroo park up a hill in Bad Vöslau or even our four-hour rainy hike from Rodaun in which we saw only one sign for the elusive Stadtwanderweg 6 which we were supposedly following. But I think I’ll save those stories for another time and place and end this ramble here. For even the most poorly-signposted of rambles will lead you back to the tram stop in Rodaun – where the adventure all begins.
An assortment of Slovakian snaps from a quick hop over the border on Monday...
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