First Day in Vienna

Sunday 1.8.10


Introduction:

My name is Zac Hann. I'm creating this blog because it's an assignment for a University of California, Davis Summer Abroad program. It's called Vienna: at the Crossroads of Central Europe. The professor is Kathy Stuart and including myself there are 26 students in the program. We're spending the month of August in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Though it is a history class, I am a biochemistry major and not experienced with a rigorous academic background in history, which many of the students in the program are. So my thoughts and analyses here will be largely that of a layman who is studying history on a university level for the first time.

history.ucdavis.edu/vienna

Me in front of St. Peter's Basilica

Thoughts on the plane ride over: lots of free food. This never happens in U.S. flights. The flight to Frankfurt also had free movies/TV shows. All announcements were first in English, then in German. Frankfurt Airport was pretty crowded, and I had to go through another security line. The guard there said it was good that the security line was so crowded as that meant people were spending money and stimulating the economy. I much prefer the way Germans think to that of Americans. The flight from Frankfurt to Vienna was awesome in every way. They took us out on a bus to the plane, as there wasn't enough room for all the planes to actually be at the terminal. This is also something I've never experienced on domestic flights. The Austrian Airlines plane was comfy and had green seats. The literature was in German and English. I've actually noticed an astounding amount of English in Europe. I guess they expect everyone to be able to speak English, which is probably the case. Whenever there are only two languages on something in Europe, one of them is always English. In any case I tried to read the German and compare it to the adjacent English to practice for Vienna, until I noticed that I was sitting next to a window and I could watch the beautiful Central European landscape roll by beneath me. It was very breathtaking; often dark green forests came right up to the edge of towns. You see this occasionally in the States, but it's very common in Europe. We also got food on the flight, even though it was very short. Some sort of cheese sandwich, I think. From Frankfurt to Vienna, the announcements were first in German, then in English.

In the Vienna airport I met some friends from the program and we shared a cab to the apartment. The ride through the city was amazing: my first time outside North America and outside an airport. Got to the apartment and met Josh, the on-site coordinator. Got some keys and things. Then the three I cabbed with and my two roommates went out to find food. We walked for a while but most of us were starving so we decided to just get pizza and beer, it was cheap and comparably familiar. My first legal beer. It was a Gösser, a type of beer I see everywhere in Vienna. Must be like the Austrian Budweiser. However, cheap beer and wine in Austria is millions of times better than cheap beer and wine in the States. As I'm typing this I'm drinking a Gösser dark brew, which is really good. It was about a Euro a bottle. Here the standard size of a beer serving (bottle or mug at a bar) is half a litre.

My apartment in Vienna.

Anyway, after lunch we went back to the apartments and got our public transit passes and went to Stephansplatz.  Vienna has a lot of very old, very beautiful churches, but St. Stephan’s Cathedral (Stephansdom) is by far the dearest to the Viennese heart. It’s very old (Gothic), and very big. In fact, no building in Vienna on that side of the Danube is permitted to be built higher than the south tower of Stephansdom, so that it continues to dominate the cityscape of old Vienna. I have not yet ascended said tower, but I will definitely do this before the month is out. It is said to offer a spectacular view of the city.

In Stephansplatz was a street magician. He had a pretty big crowd around him, so he’d probably been performing for a while when he got there. His dreadlocks denoted that he was definitely a product of the new generation. As he was completely silent (perhaps a habit adopted by European street performers to accommodate the eclectic mix of languages in large cities?) it was impossible to tell where he was from. I thought his performance was based more on acting than skillful sleight-of-hand, but my companions seemed to be impressed.

We walked around the city by Stephansplatz. There were a lot of overpriced tourist shops that I’m certain the locals refuse to set foot inside. We also saw the Mozarthaus, but it was closed by the time we got there. I tried to find Peterskirche, but we ended up in the Hofburg, which is beautiful, and to which we returned since then (and to which I’ll return in the future before I leave). One thing we were really surprised at was a giant advertisement poster on the side of a building which bore George Clooney’s visage. It was an espresso ad. Willful digression: it’s interesting how American coffee culture has invaded Vienna. Vienna has had a claim to the title of “Coffee capital of the world,” that it has proudly built up since the drink was introduced to the city during (so legend has it) the Turkish sieges of the city hundreds of years ago. The Vienna coffee houses have been frequented by the movers of the world. They were home to the literary, musical, and artistic superstars of the Vienna scene. Leon Trotsky regularly played chess in Café Zentral. Recently the American coffee giant Starbucks has had the “audacity” (as several Viennese have described it to me) to encroach upon the legendary world of Viennese coffee. Though everyone was sure the chain would fail within a week, Starbucks has experienced massive success, including several locations in the Innere Stadt, adjacent to immortal legends like Café Demel and Hotel Sacher. The giant poster just described showed American actor George Clooney promoting a home espresso machine. Is this the product of tourism, or young Viennese embracing the “new” culture and liberal progressivism epitomized by Starbucks?

Despite the familiar Mr. Clooney, we got a good deal of old, beautiful Innere Stadt architecture and history in the first day. Vienna is beautiful. I feel every American city that I see when I return to the States will seem hideous to me after the renowned architecture of Vienna. In the Beller text (A Concise History of Austria, part of the required reading for the course) he mentions the Loos-Haus, named after the architect, which was so plain that the Viennese dubbed it “The Building Without Eyebrows.” Emperor Franz Josef was so upset by the building that he ordered all the drapes of the windows on the side of the Hofburg overlooking the Loos-Haus closed, so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. I’ll probably repeat this later, but on August 3^rd we took a bus ride with a “tour guide” (a friend of Professorin Stuart’s) named Dr. O, who was not a native Viennese (she hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) but who has lived here for 45 years. She would frequently refer to a structure as “that rather plain building to the left.” Any of the buildings she described as plain would have easily been the most impressive, ornate, beautiful building in 99% of American cities. Years of living in Vienna has given her ultra-high standards for architecture that she is not even aware of.

Anyway, in conclusion to the digression, we found our way to a more modern, club style bar called “Ocean’s 1” (not eleven, one, but again George Clooney invades Vienna?). One of our number greatly appreciated the “atmosphere” so we stayed and enjoyed some local wines and beers before heading home. End first day.

A local beer called Zipfer.