It’s been two months since I lay on my bed, bags packed, wondering what on earth would happen to me in Austria, two months since my last Pret Sandwich at Heathrow Airport (a Hoisin Duck wrap, in case you’re wondering); two months since I set foot in Vienna. An awful lot has happened to me in that time, and while some of my stories are recorded on this blog, some of the more outlandish ones are waiting patiently for the travelogue my friends always joke I should write. I spent a fair deal of the first lockdown ploughing through such books, and even struck up a rather unlikely email correspondence with the author of one of them, which in turn led to quite the lunch invitation here in Vienna. Things however came to a head one afternoon in the rather dinghy basement of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille, where I was rather underwhelmed, to say the least, by the scale models of French villages which Simon Winder gushes about at length in Lotharingia. I suddenly realised that the vast majority of the books I’d read were written by middle-aged English men who would hop off to the continent to poke around regional museums, consume plenty of beers and sausages while they’re at it, and write up their adventures in the guise of European history or trivia. In short, there is a gap in the market which is almost asking to be filled.
Lille - not Vienna - an excellent holiday destination but unfortunate site of the aforementioned disappointment.
While I do love a good European city break myself, living abroad definitely offers you an experience which forty-eight hours comes nowhere close to. It’s the little things, like getting used to the grocery checkouts, where I finally feel like years of lacrosse training bear their fruit, quite literally, as I lunge to grab the bananas the cashier throws at me. But it’s also the intangible feelings and moments; experiencing how a city pulls together in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, watching the seasons change from your window, seeing how a government reacts to a global health crisis. The lockdown restrictions have actually changed since I started this blog post - guess you could say I need to start setting Kurz-er deadlines for myself – and we’re now a few days into a March-style national lockdown. Every time there’s a press conference it feels marginally apocalyptic, and my flatmates and I run through the pros and cons of staying put or going home, and then justify to our families (who I can’t help thinking just want us home because they miss us) our decision to remain in Vienna. I headed out to the main shopping area on Monday before the shops closed to pick up a few non-essential essentials (a pair of gloves and an Advent Calendar) and with the newly-installed winter lights and everyone scurrying about, it felt like the frantic shopping rush of Christmas Eve had arrived a month early. I even had a brief moment where I contemplated starting to buy my Christmas presents too, just in case, but managed to overcome the capitalist urge and got myself on the trusty Tram 41 back.
Graben area on Monday afternoon, pre-Lockdown.
The past two months have certainly had enough highs and lows to rival those magnificent rollercoasters at Europa Park (best part of the 2013 Offenburg school exchange, possibly the highlight of my German-learning career), and Billy Joel’s song ‘Vienna’ unsurprisingly captures my sentiments exactly. It starts with the line, ‘Slow down you crazy child, you’re too ambitious for a juvenile’, which, having spent the past 16 years surrounded by over-achievers excelling in every extra-curricular field and pitch, hits a little too close to home. It then waxes lyrically into the chorus, and the line, ‘When will you realise, Vienna waits for you?’. This rather pertinent and probing question reassured me throughout the first lockdown that I’d get to Vienna eventually, and in this second lockdown, reminds me that the restrictions will come to an end at some point, and when they do, there’ll be a delicious slice of Sachertorte, or maybe even Imperialtorte, waiting for me. The point I was trying to make, before I was side-tracked by cake, as I so often am, is that my Viennese experience has been in many respects very far from the Year Abroad 15-year-old Anna dreamed of when she first set her mind on studying languages at University.
A surreptitious shot of the cakes on offer at Café Central, I knew it would come in handy...
On Sunday evening I found myself feeling strangely emotional and close to tears at the last public Mass until December. I was in a place where those around me were no longer nameless faces but people who had welcomed me warmly, a place where I felt at peace and at home, and it seemed like the rug was suddenly being pulled out from under my feet – again. Just when I felt like I’d found my feet, worked out where on earth my lectures take place, and made the first steps towards friendship with my teammates and fellow students, we were back into lockdown and the trials and tribulations of online learning. Add to this delightful mixture the fact that I haven’t seen some of my university friends for eight months (‘See you at Amsterdam Centraal on Tuesday morning!’ being my famous last words to my dear friend Eve on the 13th of March), and a sprinkling of homesickness, it’s no wonder that I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the current situation. The good news, aside from The Good News, is that I’ve since realised the situation is not as drastic as it felt in that moment – I still have wonderful German-speaking flatmates, heaps of Dutch vocabulary, plenty of interesting Austrian literature, and even an oven and a loaf tin to keep me occupied. I’ve realised that taking one day, one hour, at a time, is a perfectly acceptable way of coping, and having a bit of a meltdown, eating Milka chocolate until everything seems better, and zooming a Cambridge friend to analyse our temperaments (sanguine-choleric, just for the record), and speaking English - heaven forbid! - is an entirely justifiable way to spend an evening of the Year Abroad.
So there we have it – my quest to find an apricot-filled doughy dumpling might have been temporarily suspended, but I’ve got to the end of a blog post without any cucurbitaceous mishaps and am just about still in Vienna and in one piece. At this point of 2020, I’m happy to consider that a riotous success.
Bis zum nächsten Mal,
Anna