A Cold City

Every day it gets a little colder here in Vienna, and in a rather suprising display of its latitude the sun sets a little earlier every day as well. Right now the average time for sunset is somewhere around four o'clock in the afternoon. The wind here makes me wish that I had chosen to bring long underwear, but in just 25 days I will be back in a similarly freezing Indiana, the long-johns close at hand. Today is Thanksgiving, and in an hour or so our group is meeting together in a Church Basement near Thaliastraße for a "pitch-in" with our host families and a few other people not on our program but somehow related to it. Seeing Wien from the 23rd district is very different than my previous experiences, which focused on the 16th, 1st and 2nd districts almost exclusively. There's a very different feeling in Vienna than in Berlin, and for some reason the Austrian capital city feels much larger, much grander than Berlin. The buses, however, are sadly not as reliably as in Germany.

Wien, Wien, nur Du allein

Unfortunately, and as with all vacations, mine passed all too quickly. It was very refreshing to be in Scotland, but after a somewhat dreadful 32 hour train ride back to Vienna, I realized that it would be tough to break back into German after speaking and thinking in English for a little over a week. Vienna was fortunately warmer than Germany was when we left, but now with storms on the horizon we can see now that the relative warmth will not last too long. I live in the 23rd district of Vienna, which is about an hour ride to the City center using public transportation. We have three classes - Austria and the European Union, Art History with a focus on Austria, and Austrian Literature - and many, many excursions. Vienna is still the same city as I left it before, but it is interesting to see the city from a different angle. A good example is my host family's house; I would have never known there were single-family four-storey houses in Vienna if I had not lived in one. It is also interesting to note the differences between Berlin and Vienna. The public transportation in Berlin, for instance, was more developed for a city considerably larger; a particularly aggravating aspect of the Public Transpo here in Vienna is the habit of trains and street cars and trains to leave early, even before their scheduled arrival time...