Friday, September 30, 2016

Day 14: I like it when my ice cream looks like spaghetti

Hi readers! I'm writing this blog post from back in my room in my apartment in Wien. I've just returned via ÖBB regional rail from the USTA orientation in the adorable town of St. Pölten, and I begin teaching this coming week. About 140-ish American teaching assistants and British Council teaching assistants spent the week in a youth hostel in St. Pölten, eating meals together, living in double and single rooms with one another, and getting a pretty intense crash course in developing and implementing lesson plans as well as navigating the Austrian school system. But first: after a brief introductory lecture in the main meeting room, we teaching assistants took part in a ninety-minute workshop on traditional Austrian dance, complete with teachers in the appropriately traditional Austrian garb. It was definitely an... interesting bonding experience to have with people we hardly knew, especially because a lot of Austrian dancing requires partnering, so we all held hands with lots of strangers and laughed at ourselves the whole time.
(http://image.slidesharecdn.com/austria-120515013847-phpapp01/95/austria-map-ppt-slides-2-638.jpg?cb=1393458832)

The USTA orientation itself was definitely more intense in a variety of ways than the Fulbright Austria orientation: it required a lot more input from us and less simple listening to lectures. Based on the kinds of schools we are working in, we were all placed into various groups that met for much of the day on Tuesday and Wednesday. I am working in what is called a "Höhere Technische Lehranstalt," (hu-ruh teck-nish-uh lair-ahn-shtalt) which is essentially what Austrians call vocational training institutions; other teaching assistants are working in a "Gymnasium" (gim-nah-si-um), which is basically a college preparatory high school, or a "Pädagogische Hochschule" (peh-da-go-gish-uh hokh-shu-luh) which trains future teachers. The different kinds of schools are important to know, as the students in them are expected to have different levels of English, depending on what kind of careers they intend to pursue. 
There was a really peaceful park near the hostel. If I'd been diligent (and not required to wake up before seven in the morning) I might have actually exercised here.

The culmination of the training involved us breaking up into smaller groups of between two and five and creating a specific sample lesson plan on Wednesday, which we would then deliver in a local school on Thursday. I worked with two USTAs, and together we came up with a lesson on the American higher education model, since each of us had gone to a different type of American college: I went to a small liberal arts college; another one of us had gone to a medium-size university; and the last member of our trio went to a military academy, so we would all have vastly different experiences to relate to the students. However, when we ended up in front of the students come Thursday morning, we mainly ended up fielding questions from them about the United States, serving as their personal founts of American culture (meaning a good bit of time was spent discussing Donald Trump, of course). So while we were a bit over-prepared for our practice lesson, ultimately it was useful in that I really had to check myself as a speaker--to make sure I was speaking clearly, not too quickly, and not introducing too many foreign concepts so that the students could understand what I was trying to say.

In the afternoons, we were led on tours: first of the town of St. Pölten itself on Tuesday, then around the government buildings on Thursday. While the town itself is charmingly old-fashioned architecturally, I was surprised to find that most of the shops were actually chain stores I'd seen earlier in Vienna: Drei cell phone retailers, dm convenience stores, Thalia bookstores, et cetera. The government buildings are much more sleek and modern, and have a rather spectacular view of the Traisen river.
Amazing chocolate shop in the town. Yes, that is a chocolate drill, and a chocolate trophy, and a chocolate tool set...

If I had a view this nice, I probably wouldn't get much work done.

Evenings and meals were spent with various other teaching assistants--fellow Fulbright combined grantees, USTAs, and those from British Council. Even though I've been to parts of the United Kingdom before, it's always fun to talk about the differences in American and British cultures with Scots and Brits over breakfast, because there really are so many different ways we use words or conceive of different concepts. While roaming the cobblestone streets of St. Pölten in the evenings with fellow Fulbrighters and TAs after training sessions, I tasted my first "Hugo" (oo-goh) cocktail for the first time. It was light and sweet and fruity and utterly delicious, even though it was carbonated. I also tried a strangely wonderful German dessert called "Spaghetti Eis" (shpa-getti ice) which is basically what it sounds like: ice cream made to look like spaghetti, complete with strawberry sauce subbing for tomato and coconut flakes subbing for Parmesan cheese. I'd seen pictures of Spaghetti Eis in Vienna, but hadn't actually gotten around to trying it yet, since there was just too much hazelnut gelato to eat. But since there was a place in St. Pölten that served this treat, I figured "why not?"
Honestly, it was actually a bit too sweet for me. I'm not the biggest fan of strawberry syrup, but it was more for the novelty of eating ice cream that looked like spaghetti. Worth it!

My teaching schedule begins on Wednesday, and so does my university course. I'm more nervous for the teaching than the studying, of course, but since it seems like I will have a good bit of freedom to pick what kinds of American culture I talk to my students about, I'm not actually that stressed--if I had to remember my high school grammar lessons (shout out to Charlie Holmes, my ninth grade English teacher!), that'd be quite another story, however. It's a lot of power to have--to be able to be both source and filter of information about the United States for Austrian high schoolers, which is honestly kind of intimidating... but I'm also excited to be able to talk about where I come from, so I am confident it'll be an overall positive experience.

Stray observations/thoughts:
  • Trains here run on time, all the time, and it's amazing.
  • Vienna has a lot of different kinds of coffee, so when you order one in a cafe here, you need to be specific. I personally recommend the "Melange" (meh-lonj-uh), which is like a cappuccino but better, somehow?
  • I need to learn how to wake up early again because Austrian high schools can start as early as 7:50 in some cases. College ruined me in that regard...
  • So far, both Vienna and St. Pölten have been pretty great about having city-wide, public wi-fi. I wonder if that's specific to Austria, or if Europe on the whole is better about providing wi-fi than the U.S. is? Only traveling will solve this puzzle...
(As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here.)

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Day 8: Feeling oriented-ish, perhaps, maybe

Hello, readers! Our third roommate finally arrived, and so the three of us have been settling into the swing of things. This week was the first of my two orientations: the official Fulbright Austria and Vienna Orientation, which took place in the Fulbright Austria offices in the MuseumsQuartier, which is located in the second district. The MuseumsQuartier is basically a complex of buildings that includes a great selection of art institutions, such as the Leopold Museum (which displays Egon Schiele works), mumok (which stands for Museum Moderner Kunst, and shows contemporary art), and the Kunsthalle Wien (which shows contemporary rotating exhibitions). 
I know it's punny, but I definitely love the Fulbright Austria slogan.

The orientation itself in the first few days consisted of lectures about Austrian and Viennese history and culture, interspersed with various panels with journalists from Austrian and German magazines and newspapers to provide more political context. Especially interesting was learning about the upcoming rescheduled Austrian presidential election, which bears a lot of similarities to the upcoming election back home in terms of demographic support for each candidates and some of the pressing issues, though the way liberalism and conservatism diverge in American and European contexts means that some Austrian voter demographics don't dovetail so neatly with their American counterparts. This part of orientation was also full of getting important residency documents filed and stamped, et cetera, which just makes everything feel so official at last!

The end of orientation was a bit more on the "wow" side, as the Fulbrighters were invited to a reception at the US Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Eugene Young's residence Thursday night, and visited the Wien Museum and the little town of Klosterneuberg (pronounced kloh-ster-noy-burg) with its nine-hundred year-old monastery on Friday! It was kind of hard to believe that the reception was real--there were people from the Fulbright Commission there as well as Eugene Young, all drinking wine, champagne, and bubbly water and eating tiny foods on sticks. (The waiter kindly got me un-carbonated water, or "stilles Wasser," upon my request.) It was a great opportunity to relax and get to chatting with some of the other grantees, who are all incredibly smart and thoughtful and uniformly awesome. 

On a way more superficial level, pretty much everyone told me how much they liked my dress, which my grandmother made for me around my freshman year from an older vintage dress she picked up!

Friday was similarly a lot of fun, since the morning featured a brief tour of the Wien Museum, which is the official municipal museum of the city of Vienna, followed by a bus ride to Klosterneuberg Monastery. The tour of the museum focused more on the historical aspects of the city, skipping the paintings in the rooms in favor of the maps and dioramas of the city and its various sieges, so I will definitely be visiting the museum in future for a more in-depth look at all it has to offer. The Wien Museum is also of particular interest to me since an important exhibition called Romane Thana: Places of the Roma and Sinti was displayed in the Wien Museum in spring 2015. Based on what I've been able to read about this show, it seems like a good resource for my research project--now I just need to get my hands on the catalogue!
Predictably, pretty much everyone wanted to go to this show, but it wasn't included on the tour... definitely coming back another day for it!
(http://www.wienmuseum.at/de/aktuelle-ausstellungen/ansicht/sex-in-wienlust-kontrolle-ungehorsam.html)

A brief interlude on the way to Klosterneuberg was this breathtaking view of Vienna from waaaay on high!

The afternoon at Klosterneuberg Monastery was also wonderful in an entirely different way. The monastery is architecturally pretty unique since it was built over the course of centuries and was transformed in sections from a Romanesque/Medieval-style building to a much more Baroque aesthetic due to the Counter-Reformation movement that was quite strong in Catholic Austria. Essentially what this means is that while the outside of some of the monastery is plain and austere-looking, the inside looks like St. Peter's in Rome--just chock-full of ornamentation and colors that were meant to dazzle the worshipers and inspire faith. 

However, my favorite part of the tour of Klosterneuberg was the show of contemporary art that was on the first floor of the church, which is a yearlong tradition held by the monastery museum culminating in the "St. Leopold Peace Prize" (Saint Leopold founded the monastery). The theme of the contemporary works on display was "The Power of Greed," which, in the context of the Catholic history of indulgences leading to the Protestant Reformation, was an inspired choice, and got me thinking about what it would be like if some of the older monuments in the United States hosted more contemporary works--imagine a video installation on the side of the Washington Monument, perhaps? (Though the US doesn't really have any monuments quite as old as the ones in Europe...)
Finding what looked like a menorah... at the monastery! All those monks celebrating Hanukkah....

After the tour was the very classy wine tasting, during which I sipped from two whites and a red, all from the monastery's winery, and pretended I knew anything about wine at all. (This wine "is brusque," "doesn't overstay its welcome," "has hints of currant", et cetera. I should probably not become a sommelier because I don't think I could take it seriously.)

Today was spent mainly walking around the city itself--while the public transit here is wonderful, nothing beats just being able to go at your own pace and duck into whichever little shop or cafe (or art exhibition in the Kunsthalle Wien, just as a total hypothetical that definitely didn't happen to me today, nope) catches your fancy. Tomorrow will also be filled with art, as I plan to visit the Vienna Contemporary Art Fair in the afternoon. Moral of the story: put me in a new city, and I'll immediately find the flea market and where the art is. It's just how it is with me...

Random observations:
  • The Käsekrainer (kay-suh-kray-ner) is a sausage filled with cheese and it's amazing. So far, it's my favorite food I've had here.
  • Austrians really like their bubbly water--in fact, when you order water in a restaurant or bar, you have to ask for "ohne" (oh-nuh), which means "without"--meaning, without bubbles, or they'll bring you the bubbly!
  • When you order an omelette, sometimes they will bring it to you in the pan. Or maybe this was just because mine broke and looked more like scrambled eggs...
  • Vienna is really student-friendly so far--there are tons of discounts on museums, movie theaters, and transit for students!
  • At the restaurant near the monastery, I had an amazing bread-pudding-y dessert filled with apricot in a bath of vanilla sauce-y liquid. Delicious, but I can't remember what it's called...


Monday, September 19, 2016

Day 3: Someone please tell me how to cure my jet-lag...

Hi all! I've now been in Vienna for over two full days and have settled into the lovely little apartment I'm sharing with two fellow Fulbrighters! We're living in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus, also known as District 15. It's located pretty close to the center of the city, but also has lots of public transit and isn't too expensive or fancy--perfect for students! There's plenty of restaurants and supermarkets as well, and the buildings are all old and lovely. This excellent-looking list of things to do in 15 has me really looking forward to spending time here in "Vienna's most exciting, dirty little secret"!

The districts are organized in a kind of circular rotational way.
(http://www.elkhazen.org/vienna/uploaded_images/vienna-districts-763925.png)

So far we've been getting our bearings and settling in--we got SIM cards for our phones, did grocery shopping, and walked around quite a bit. On Saturday Vienna was bustling, especially on the Mariahilferstraße, which is just a few blocks away and is one of the largest shopping blocks in the city. It's kind of like the Santa Monica promenade in that you can't drive on the street there--in German, it's called a "Fußgängerzone" (pronounced foos-gayng-er-tzohn-uh). We found a flea market (because I seem to always find flea markets wherever I go) and we walked through it, stopping to look at knickknacks and tchotchkes along the way. Then we dropped into the Kunsthalle Wien, a small contemporary art space with a great show called "Beggars and iPhones" by an artist named Andrea Büttner. It didn't address the topic of the necessity of possessing technology, including for the homeless, in the manner I would have expected, but instead connected "beggars" and "iPhones" in a more gestural way, linking the body language of begging with the swiping motions performed on a touchscreen.


The Kunsthalle Wien is such a cool contemporary space... I'd love to curate a show in this room one day!

On Sunday pretty much everything is closed, except for the public parks and museums, but we're waiting to get our student ID cards before we do a lot of the tourist and arts attractions because it saves quite a bit of cash. There is an incredible number of museums in Vienna--not just art, but also plenty of historical and cultural museums as well, and I can't wait to visit them all.

Some of the things that are different from home that are standing out in my mind include the following:
  • the apparent nonexistence of skim/nonfat milk in grocery stores (so I'm switching to 0.5 percent)
  • paying to use a public bathroom (which is how they are kept so clean, I guess)
  • having to stand on the right side of the escalator so that people on the left can move along (which I need to remember to do)
  • the ubiquitousness of Muesli (German granola, basically)
  • having to dial the plus sign to call someone on the phone (and the dial tone here, which sounds disconcertingly like the "call dropped" noise from the United States)
  • the difficulty of finding iced tea not from a bottle (I miss you, Peet's and Coffee Bean!)
Standing outside the Vienna Secession building. Just realized that the angle I'm shot at is similar to a famous Vienna Secession work by Gustav Klimt:
(http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/university-of-vienna-ceiling-paintings-medicine-detail-showing-hygieia-1907-1?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral)

Tomorrow I have the first day of the first of two orientations: the Vienna orientation! (The other one, located in the nearby town of St. Pölten, is the teaching assistant orientation, which has me both nervous and excited!)

As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Day -1: We have liftoff!

Today is the day! Time to mosey on down to good ol' LAX (short for relax) and take off!

I'm still a bit jet-lagged from flying to Chicago and back to drop off the lil' bro at college (which was so unsettling because I'm half-certain when I wake up from this extended dream that is my life he'll be a five-year-old again), but then again, I'm pretty sure flying within the same time zone gives me jet lag.  Impressive, huh? It's my superpower. Hopefully I can sleep on the first leg of my trip--thank goodness I got the window seat. Sleeping on planes is turning out to be another superpower I managed to cultivate last year. I think I might be secretly a Snorlax instead of a superhero...
Me and my beloved car Hyphen "Dash" Ated. It's been swell, even when you ran out of gas yesterday.

As I (read: my mom) was packing up my giant suitcases for this trip, I couldn't help but think that it hasn't really sunken in yet: despite the reams of paperwork and emails from the Fulbright Commission, it still doesn't feel real that I get to have this opportunity. I've never been away from home for this extended period of time, so I don't really have an emotional or temporal reference for what living on my own like this is going to be like. Especially in another country, where German isn't my native language! I wonder if it will finally seem like it's happening before it actually does start happening. I have a feeling that getting my teaching and studying workload will ground me, like starting classes did when I started college. Or maybe once I go grocery shopping and unpack my bags...

I have always traveled with books. But this time around, I just don't have a ton of room for print books, so I'm taking two: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, and Methods and Theories of Art History by Anne d'Alleva. I've read both of them before, but Middlesex is really engrossing and not too weighty in paperback, and Methods and Theories is stalwart and also a nice, slim volume. I might try to buy a copy of The Girl on the Train at the airport, since that movie's coming out soon and it's supposed to be good. I'll also continue to buy every memoir in audiobook form--right now I'm loving Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson.
Two giant bags that were thankfully within the weight limit!

It's weird to think about all the little things I'll miss about LA. Of course I will miss the people--my friends and family in Los Angeles and all over the country. But on this last day, it's the little things I'm thinking about missing. Like my car, which I've had since senior year of high school, which has amazing mileage and fits into all the compact sports. Or Mexican food being available in massive, excellent qualities (and I'm not counting Chipotle). I didn't have those in undergrad, but this is quite a bit longer. I'll probably also miss Coffee Bean--I don't know if people take their tea iced in Europe, so I'll have to readjust to iced coffee. I'll miss the amazingly inexpensive and high-quality sushi from Ugly Roll. I'll miss being able to just drive with the air conditioning blowing in my face, singing along to some playlist of music my parents think is bizarre (even though LA is correctly known for being congested with traffic at all times). It's always the weird little things you miss.

The Californians is pretty accurate about how much Angelenos talk about driving...

As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here. I'm so excited for this adventure!

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Welcome to I On the Arts: European Edition!


Greetings!

I'm Deborah Krieger, a 2016 graduate of Swarthmore College in Art History, with minors in Film and Media Studies and German Studies. My main blog, which I've been running for the past six years, is I On the Arts. I am a freelance writer and aspiring curator interested in contemporary art, new media, visual studies, and social activism, and hope to go to graduate school and eventually work in an art museum or art nonprofit.

This blog will chronicle my experiences as a Fulbright grantee in Vienna, Austria, from September 2016 to July 2017. In this capacity, I will be taking classes at the University of Vienna, teaching English in a local high school, and researching visual artists in the Sinti/Roma and Jewish communities in order to learn how artists in these communities express their identities as minorities and/or historically oppressed peoples through their practice. I plan to examine the artworks themselves, as well as conduct interviews with the artists, centering on their choice of media, specific subject matter, and forms of self-expression. How do their works address their own experiences as members of the Roma/Sinti or Jewish communities of Vienna? How do they engage with the histories of their ethnicities in their practice? How does the current population and relative level of assimilation of the two sub-cultures affect the art they make? 

Unlike my main blog, which is reserved for professional and academic writing, this blog will be much more informal, containing more quotidian observations and stories about my daily life in Vienna. If anyone reading this wants to support me and my research and express how much they love and miss me all the way back home, I am linking to my Amazon wish list, which will consist of electronic editions of books pertinent to my research, both in Vienna and for my graduate preparations (since foreign travel plus large tomes equals expensive bags at the airport!).

I would like to thank all of my professors, letter writers, advisers, editors, readers, supporters, friends, and, of course, my family, for making my Fulbright adventure happen!