An American in Vienna

Sorry for the cheesy title, but I am in Vienna! For half a day now. Well, really a quarter day.

Vienna! Everything is placed: Billboards off the highway coming in from the airport were low and in the brush and trees. Tall tall industrial things: smokestacks and factories were married in village clusters with pastel colored tall European edifices and churches and such.

I got to the Westbanhauf station by bus and checked in to the Do Step Inn Hostel just around the corner. Alexandra, a lovely Romanian, welcomed me and spent quite a while showing me maps. In the bunk room I met a young Polish fellow dropping by Vienna on his way back to England where he works and an Australian college student backpacking around Europe during her summer break.

I felt stinky and tired so I decided to...run! I only saw one other jogger and he looked American - as I ran first to the address of the residence where I am to stay for the three months that I am here starting Sunday night. The street: Mariahilferstraße! This is like Canal Street in New York, in that it is a hip shopping district (have I told you that I don't know Manhattan that well?), with the big beautiful exception that the white ornately ornamented building in which I am to live is old and beautiful.



These two pictures came up when I googled my address for images. I think my residence was completely white, so these may not be right, but you get the idea.



Another picture of Mariahilferstraße.

This is very exciting. I ran around to the State Opera House - the Staatsoper - which is beautiful and around the corner and across the street from the school where must of my classes will be held. I returned from running to shower to enter my bunk room to four gruff looking, but jolly, Romanian men who asked me first for a cigarette and then asked me questions about where I come from and New York. I'm glad that I will be there to mitigate the fact that the sixth roommate is a helpless young Aussie girl.



The Staatsoper.

The city feels real to me. The lighting is different - I'm telling myself this to explain why I can't seem to orient myself coordinally. Much of what I ran through feels like a denser Washington D.C. maybe until I got to almost the very center with its cobblestones, churches, columns, and pubs. There is shadiness side by side with the beauty and interest and quaintness that I could see during my jog, but I can tell that the Viennese are careful and design oriented, smart and lyrical. All this from a first morning jog! And it is only noon. And I heard someone doing lip trills through her scarf and ear-muffed head as she entered the Staatsoper.

The city is more condensed than I thought, but still expansive enough to feel monumental and full. I think that I will be able to walk or jog most of the streets of downtown Vienna by the end of my stay here. Maybe I'll be able to show you my progress. Maybe I'll be boy-scoutish and mark off with a sharpie on my cool little tourist map all the streets I've explored. If I had a camera (!) I would already have uploaded pictoral details of my quarter-day adventure: my blue and yellow painted stucco hostel, my warm clean bed and shower, my Romanian bunkmates, my beautiful palacial residence starting this Sunday, the Staatsoper, and everything. I would have just kept clicking and then animated it stop-animation style. It would have been quick, because I was running.



Stephansplatz. That is Stephan's Place, not Stephan splatzes - a faux verb pronounced shpl-ah-ts. Du splatzt?

From here: I need to go exchange money, get a weeklong train pass, and then I am going to wander. I'll probably eat a mid-afternoon meal out somewhere and then try and get standing room tickets to Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Staatsoper. Then I will come back to my little room at the Do Step Inn and sleep.

More to come!