Study Abroad, the American Way

Although I've only been here for about a week and a half, I've met a lot of great and welcoming people so far. The introductory questions are generally the same: where are you from, what are you studying, where in Vienna do you live, etc. One less frequent question that I have nevertheless received multiple times, however, is: did you live at home while you were studying at Notre Dame? The first time I received this question it made me laugh a little, if for no other reason than that it brought forth images of me commuting to and from school every day by plane. After a couple of times, however, someone asked me a follow-up question: did you go home often on the weekends? When I answered negatively, she asked how far away Notre Dame was from my hometown. I explained the process: one two to three hour bus to Chicago, a flight from Chicago to Denver, and then another flight from Denver to Grand Junction--almost 12 hours total in travel time. I then went on to point out that there was a two-hour time difference between my hometown and Notre Dame, which I had to account for whenever I spoke to my parents on the phone. In comparison to Europe, which has one time zone outside of the UK (who don't really like to think of themselves as European anyway), this seems absurd. With this realization, I think I can feel justified in saying that Austria was actually the second country in which I studied abroad--the first was Indiana.

Me in front of Stift Melk, a Benedictine monastery we visited on our last day of the Fulbright orientation.

View of Stift Melk from below.

Vienna, At Last

After twenty-three hours of long flights and layovers, I am finally in Vienna. It's amazing to me how familiar everything is, even after a year--I almost feel as if I had never left the city!

Just setting foot outside my apartment door was enough to trigger a host of memories. A small Straßenfest, or "street festival" was taking place outside our building, and booths lined the streets offering Wurst, Leberkäse, and Semmelbrot. Across the street, the traditional green and red colors announced a Spar grocery store, and further up the road a small Turkish shop advertised cheap cell phones in the window. A quick jaunt downtown proved that the Stephansplatz also remained relatively unaltered; tourists shoved their way into the Stephansdom, attempting to avoid overly eager salesmen dressed in kitschy Mozart costumes, while the stench from horse manure lingered in the smaller surrounding alleys. As I said, not much has changed.

This is both Vienna's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, the city gives one the sense of being part of something larger than oneself--the feeling that, regardless of what you do or where you go, the city will go on just as it always has without you. In a certain way, the past almost feels present in Vienna--but then on the other hand, the ghosts of the past almost feel present, too. In such a city, it is practically impossible to feel ambivalent--one is either awestruck, or overwhelmed.

New Year, Fresh Start, Same Country

Yup, it's that time already--fall is in the air, Notre Dame is once again accruing losses to sub-par football teams, and somewhere across the ocean, apple strudel is calling my name. In just one short week, I will be returning to Austria to study at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship. Those of you who attempted to follow my last blog, Ann's Austrian Adventures, know that I was not the most--erm--diligent blogger. Consider this blog an attempt to make amends.