Every year, Tufts kisses goodbye its juniors seeking a semester abroad.
This year, two such deviant Jumbo darlings, friends Bridget Reddington and Kate Peck, packed their bags and headed for the Old World. Reddington now calls Vienna her home, while Peck resides in Prague. Enjoy their pen-pal exchanges each week and get a glimpse at life across the pond amidst musical impresarios and the shadows of the Iron Curtain.
Dear Kate,
I've been finding that I'm a huge fan of tourist attractions. There, my absolute inability to speak the native language is all okay for a few hours - it's almost expected. No language dictionary is needed to decipher the signs, it's okay to take 40 pictures in five minutes, and you're not the only one shouting in English. The locals running the whole thing might give you glares of death every now and then, but it's the last thing you'd be worried about.
Here in Vienna, I'm one step above these tourists on the scale of annoying Americans. I'm a study abroad student: the tourist that doesn't go away. Sure, I don't have a fanny pack, but you can bet I spent my first few days here visiting all the big attractions, like the Opera, the Stadtpark, and the Sch?¶nbrunn Zoo. I photographed myself with every statue in the city. I even rode the tram in circles around the Ringstrasse, Vienna's central road, frantically trying to figure out which buildings I was passing from my giant tourist map.
Now that I've been here long enough to exhaust the normal list of tourist attractions, my tourism has extended a bit. I'm now a tourist of Viennese life. In this realm, my less-than-stellar German skills and embarrassing level of excitement no longer fly. It's time for camouflage.
The start of this camouflage was a rocky one, filled with ice cream scoopers overtly laughing at my pronunciation of the word for "scoop" (kügel) and ushers at the opera knowing just from the look on my face to give me directions to my seat in English. Now, though, as I sit in a café with my kaffee melange and Sachertorte, I like to think that I've at least fooled the waiter into thinking I'm Viennese.
This café, like so many others in Vienna, is a remnant of an intellectual culture that flourished in the 20th century, with everyone from Leon Trotsky to Gustav Mahler partaking. This culture persists so much today that café etiquette is one of the first things I learned in my German course.
By now, I've mastered the Austrian greeting, I know what kind of coffee I like and can order it without stuttering, and I know that if you don't ask for the check, they won't bring it. But I lack that certain brusque formality, that nonchalance of the Viennese that sit at the tables around me. I'm still a little too thrilled by my surroundings, a little too unaccustomed to it all.
The music is the one thing I can pretend to know. Vienna, the home of Mozart, Mahler, Strauss and Beethoven, is the city of music. You can always hear a waltz playing nearby or string quartets playing on the street corners, and people in baroque costumes throughout the city hawk classical music concerts to tourists. This is Vienna's defining characteristic, and it is a passion that fills the entire city.
Last week, I went to the opening night of the Viennese State Opera after standing in line for hours for a 2,50 Euro standing room ticket. The opera was Puccini's "La Bohème," and although I could hear every word, I couldn't see anything but the back of people's heads - I guess you get what you pay for. Standing there, though, hearing the melodies I knew so well in a city I barely knew at all, I felt a little comforted: There was something I connected to, a language I understood.
Unfortunately, that small bit of comprehension isn't worth much in the daily Viennese life. Until it is, I'll keep smiling and nodding and responding with my most useful German phrase yet: "I'm sorry, I don't speak much German."
Auf wiedersehen, Bridget
Bridget Reddington and Kate Peck are juniors majoring in English.
