Zürich, Switzerland

I arrived safely in Zürich tonight. The nine-hour train ride was a bit long, but the scenery was absolutely gorgeous. We drove straight through the snow-covered Alps. There is something about white-topped mountains against a baby blue sky that is so beautiful. Unfortunately the InterCity train was traveling so fast that I couldn't take any pictures, but I'll post plenty of other pictures once I return.

If I don't make it back to another Internet cafe before the 31st, I wish everyone a Happy New Year!

Leaving for Switzerland

I'm leaving for Zürich in just under an hour. The train ride is nine hours, so I'll have plenty of time to read and to sleep. In addition to sightseeing in Zürich, I'll also watch a friend compete in part of the Zürich Six Day indoor cycling race. After the race, the two of us will head to Paris for New Year's Eve and Day. I'll return to Vienna next week, in 2008, with plenty of pictures and stories to share!

Baking Adventures

I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies last week for some of my friends, teachers, and colleagues. I do this nearly every holiday season and it has become a tradition. However, I have always been home for the holidays and even when I have been abroad at other times of the year, I have never had the opportunity to do much baking.

So this was quite a learning experience. Among the items not stocked in Austrian supermarkets include brown sugar and chocolate chips. Hmmmm. Both ingredients are essential to the cookies. It's astounding that in a country so well-known for its chocolate and for its baked goods, you still cannot buy a product as basic as chocolate chips. Luckily, Austrian supermarkets do stock bars of baking chocolate, so I bought one of these and hacked it into chocolate chunks.



Then I just had to find a solution for the brown sugar. Well, brown sugar is essentially white sugar with molasses, right? I couldn't find moasses--though I was told you can find it in specialty gourmet stores--but I did find some dark honey. So, in the cookie recipe, I used less white sugar and added a bit of honey and it actually worked quite well. The taste of honey wasn't overwhelming and the cookies might have turned out a tad moister than usual.

Once I made all of the ingredient substitutions, I had to fiddle a bit with the oven. I have a gas oven, which means that I need to light it manually every time I want to use it. That's not too difficult, now that I know how to do it. What makes things more interesting is that most Austrian ovens do not have temperatures labeled on their heating dials. They just have numbered "settings".

I do have a description of what each setting is supposed to be for, but the descriptions are much to vague to be useful. So, I baked the cookies between the settings 4 and 5 -- that is, between the settings for "strudel dough" and "Braten" (roasted meat). In a few hours, I had a few dozen cookies.

Apparently, the cookies were well-liked, which is somewhat amazing, considering all the estimation and wild guessing involved in the baking. I brought a tin to my university's engineering department and it was empty by midday. I also brought a plate of cookies to my landlady and she brought me some of hers in return.



I must say, hers are much fancier and much more "Austrian", of course. The crescent-shaped ones, covered in powdered sugar, are the Vanillekipferl for which Vienna is famous.

...

An addendum to the baking story: now that people in the engineering department know I can bake (or at least fake my way through recipes ;-), I have since received requests for American brownies. Let me assure you that Austria does not sell brownie mix, so these brownies will be made completely from scratch. Stay tuned for the exciting details!

Merry Christmas from the Land of Mozart & Strauss!

Press play on the audio player and turn up the volume.

Christmas has finally arrived here in Austria. Back home in the States, it is still Christmas Eve and in the East, it's already well into Christmas Day. Most Austrian families celebrated Christmas last night. The Christmas tree is decorated with candles, chocolates, and ornaments, presents from immediate family are opened, and many attend midnight church services.

I took a walk through the city center to Stephansdom, or St. Stephen's Cathedral. The streets were lit up in golden lights.
Built in the 12th century, the Stephansdom has a rich history. Part of this history, however, includes severe damage from civilian fires during the last weeks of World War II. Mainly due to this damage, the cathedral is perpetually under renovation. Nonetheless, it is still one of Vienna's most recognizable architectural and cultural landmarks.

For those of you wondering why I am standing next to a statue of Johann Strauss in the first photo, that's actually a real living person. Stephansplatz, the area surrounding Stephansdom, is known for its artists and street performers. There are always people there dressed as a variety of historical and fictional characters. What makes them unique is that instead of being dressed in regular costumes, they cover their costumes in a paint that makes them look like statues. If they stand still enough, they really are convincing!

So, from Stephansdom and from the Land of Mozart and Strauss, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

Holiday Festivities

This past week has been a week of festivities. The school where I teach had a big celebration, complete with singing, speeches, and lots of traditional holiday food. The eighth grade performed a few choral pieces and a few of the faculty members sang some a capella.



After the performances, all of the teachers gave the principal a poinsettia, appropriately called in German, a "Christmas star".



Directly after the celebration at the school, I went to another celebration hosted by my university's environmental engineering department. This one didn't have any singing and only one speech, but there was also lots of food and we went bowling afterwards. While bowling, I learned that you call a bowling ball not a “Ball”, which is the German translation for “ball”, but rather a “Kugel”. Apparently “soft” balls, such as tennis balls, are called “Ball”, but “hard” balls are called “Kugel”. I just wonder why you still call a scoop of ice cream, which is definitely soft, a “Kugel”.

Time for some travel!

Winter break has finally arrived, which means I have survived most of the first semester in Vienna! (We still have three more weeks of school in January before finals.) After a 14-hour winter-break-is-finally-here hibernation-nap, I woke up this morning on the first day of winter well-rested and ready to start organizing my plans for the break.

As most of you know, I’ll be spending Christmas in Vienna. I’ll be having Christmas dinner with a family from the German school where I taught this past year in the US. They have been like a host family for me here. The grandparents have shown me around the city, have invited me over for coffee, and have generally helped out during my time here. I think they also like that I come from the same area in the US as their daughter. Even though they visit her several times per year; I still bring that sense of “Home” with me, and they do the same for me.

So … what exactly are these travel plans I speak of? Shortly after the Christmas festivities and just before the post-Christmas boredom sets in, I will be traveling to Switzerland to see a friend of mine compete in women’s indoor track cycling and then the two of us will go to Paris for New Year’s Eve and Day. Altogether, we will spend three days in Zürich and three days in Paris. Add a day for traveling by train and by air, and I’ll be an international European tourist for about a week.

For these new travels and for future plans, including hiking in the Alps and elsewhere (once it’s a bit warmer!), I finally bought a serious backpack:



I’ve been looking for one for a while, but hadn’t found the “perfect” one – one that was the right size, right fit, looked nice, and wasn’t too expensive--until today. I bought this backpack on the Mariahilferstrasse, which is a little amusing since this street is nearly the Viennese equivalent of New York’s Fifth Avenue—a place where most people would rather window shop than actually purchase anything. Little did I know, however, one of Vienna’s only sporting goods stores is on the Mariahilferstrasse. Go figure. Compared to its surroundings, the store looks so out of place, but after searching in other stores all afternoon, I was sooo happy to find it.

So, now that I have a good traveling backpack, I am ready to start packing for my next mini-journey. But before I begin packing, it is now time to relax, enjoy Christmas—which curiously in Austria is celebrated on Christmas Eve—and generally be merry. Happy Holidays everyone!

A snowy day in the office

It's snowing outside, the kind of snow that blows diagonally across the rooftops from a never-ending gust of wind.



I just met with one of my research colleagues to discuss a literature search I've been working on, regarding the design and economics of greywater recycling systems in office buildings. I was worried because I hadn't found much relevant literature. However, what I did find, is good material. So the actual result of the literature search was that: there actually isn't much current literature available on this particular topic. Most of the literature deals with recycling greywater in domestic households or saving energy in office buildings, but very little of it deals with the combination of saving water in office buildings. Even so, much of this literature is outdated. So now that I have finished the active part of the search, I just need to summarize the comparisons (i.e. which projects saved how much water in what ways and for how much money) and read through the article synopses one last time.



I'll do all this in the next three hours because at 4:00, we're having an office party at the main building of the campus. After the party, I'm going bowling with my department. For some reason, everyone seems to think that since bowling is an "American" sport, this American girl must be an expert at it. Haha. As I told one of my colleagues, "Ich kenne das. Das bedeutet nicht, dass ich das kann." In other words, I can bowl, but that doesn't mean I'm any good at it! It should be a lot of fun, regardless. Somehow I doubt we're keeping score.

Poetry Slam. Austrian Style.

I should have published this entry weeks ago, but I didn’t get around to doing it then. I thought it might be useful to publish it now, since it might give some context to the following entry, entitled “On Teaching and Performing”.

So at the end of October, I attended “Ö-SLAM”, Austria’s National Poetry Slam competition. According to its official description, Ö-SLAM defines a poetry slam as a “reading competition judged by the public”. Notice that the definition says nothing about poetry. All sorts of creative pieces were allowed. The only rules were “3 minutes. No tricks. No gimmicks,” meaning that each performer had three minutes to perform their piece alone, without any props or tricks that would take attention away from the piece being performed. The audience rates the performances on a scale of zero to ten. The poet with the highest score at the end of the night wins. The poet and slam master Alan Wolfe sums up the spirit of the slam in his famous quote: “The points are not the point, the point is poetry.” Of course it’s nice to win, but it’s even nicer to be able to have a venue where poets can showcase their creative work and where interested audience members can listen, and perhaps one day showcase their own work, too.

On a personal note, the woman who hosted Ö-SLAM was coincidentally the same woman who hosted the very first slam I ever attended, which was also in Vienna, when I was here in 2004. It was nice to come full circle again. In 2004, I barely knew what slam poetry was. Since then, I have attended many slams and open mic events. (Shout out to all the amazing people of W.O.R.D.S., past and present!) It was really interesting to return to hear the host perform again, especially since her style has changed significantly since 2004, and of course to hear all of the other talented Austrian poets perform.

There’s theoretically another slam in Vienna the day after Christmas. I might make it to that one … we’ll see.

On Teaching and Performing

I was walking home from the train station tonight and thinking about the teacher’s comment last week about defending one’s country, when the lyrics to Alix Olson’s “dorothea tanning” poem started running through my mind. (It’s funny how we sometimes think in lyrics.) Her poem doesn’t directly answer the questions posed by that particular situation, but it does pose some related questions of its own.

Those of you who know the poem can recite it along with me:

there's this dorothea tanning painting
and the arm of the artist is barely breaking through
there's a gash in the canvas and that's how i feel standing here in front of you
it's a furious grief
it's fear scoping out the mad
it's this submarine of artists launching towards their shore of sad
see, we were all eaglespread under america's weight that day,
eyes starry, striped in steel bars, hate-studded
with the slogans and logos of manifest destiny,
shoulders slumped in homage to our shriveling, shuddering century.

As retaliation became our password,
and the username: three thousands lives spent
and the message sent was in jingoistic text
and we all got sick fast from the warnacular virus attached.
As F-16's quickly colonized our city
and brown deli owners scrambled for flag mercy
and activists gambled with emotional heresy
and the budget of the death toll was quickly tabulated
and balanced against capital and CIA fabrications

See, that day grabbed us all by the collar of our questions
and held us hostage there
and to second-guess the quarter truths was a sudden double dare.

And still, we hacked up history like hairballs,
quiet cats on tiptoe
reaching towards subversion
flip-flopping on our tiny block
generationally uncoached in our courageous contortions
and sometimes it seems, there is nothing left to protect,
liberty decivilized, freedom kept in Dow Jones check.
As Donny and George grab the rings and steer us clear towards nuclear brink
And i guess i thought life was meant to be lived
But then again, I ain't been asked to think

Since that day my sister crept from her publishing house
across the bridge and towards the highway
And my best friend balanced on a Brooklyn roof
as the silvering slipped towards a charcoal skyway
And my station wagon, for once, hushed her rush,
surrendered fire trucks to the freeway.
And this hot head leaned on her cool hood,
and calculated harm's way.
And her radio was mumbling and her cell phone was buzzing
and some guy somewhere was screaming something
and all she could think was "my god, are they okay?"
But she was one mile of water away
from where she could do anything.
See, there's this Dorothea Tanning painting
and the arm of the artist is barely breaking past
and the media screams "she is cruel, duped, and crass."
But, I squinted, saw her fist, it was not clenched up to swing.
It was a gesture towards dissenting hearts, and it's beckoning us in.
There's this Dorothea Tanning painting
and the arm of the artist is barely breaking through.
There's a gash in the canvas,
and that's how i feel
standing here in front of you.

I performed this poem a few weeks ago for a class that I taught on slam poetry, which turned into a class on poetry and performance. (We need a second period to really put the two together.) The sixteen-year-old students certainly didn’t understand every word of Alix’s poem here, but they did understand the gist of it and by the end of the period, they also understood the importance of performing a piece, as opposed to simply reading, or rather mumbling, it aloud.

/////As a quick sidenote: it still astonishes me how a noisy group of teenagers can suddenly become silent when I start talking about certain dramatic moments, such as the day the Twin Towers fell or the day of the shooting at Virginia Tech. I asked a group of sixteen-year-olds if they remembered where they were the moment they heard the news on 9/11. If I were to write out their comments for people to read, you would think they were American, not Austrian students thousands of miles away. /////

But back to the topic of poetry and performance: Having to stand and speak at the front of a room has repeatedly reminded me how much I enjoy performing. I didn’t necessarily expect to enjoy teaching before I came to Austria—and honestly, I don’t always enjoy teaching when the students are completely disinterested in the material—but more and more, teaching reminds me of performing. If I can go into the classroom and put on a show, engage the students and connect with them in a way so they learn the material without realizing they are learning, then I have achieved my goal. Right now, the students see my lessons every couple weeks as a (hopefully) welcome break from their regular schedules. I’m trying to make these periods not only special because they are “different”, but special also in terms of content and quality of the material. Of course I have a long way to go to reach this goal, but I can honestly say I am enjoying the journey.

Comments

Apparently I wasn't paying attention when I set up this blog because I made the comments section "members only". I've opened it back up, so if you want to leave a comment and you don't already have a Blogger account (or even if you do), just click on the blue "comments" link on the bottom of the post, write your comment, and submit. Voilà.

Defending One's Country

I was asked to teach a lesson yesterday on gun violence and school shootings in the US. Having recently lost a friend at Virginia Tech, this was the last topic I wanted to teach. However, as another friend pointed out to me, a "real-life" story would make the lesson all the more compelling. Okay, fine.

As the period progressed, the discussion evolved from one on school violence to one on the upcoming Supreme Court case interpreting the Second Amendment to one on the United States' tendency to police the world.

Had it been up to me, we would have stayed with the topic of violence in the US, but this particular teacher always tries to incorporate the highest number of current events into his lessons as possible, and hence the evolution of topics. I've learned to deal with his teaching style, and honestly, it isn't that big of a deal as long as I've been keeping up on world (and US) politics, but yesterday he took things too far. While debating how the US does or does not meddle in other countries' affairs, particularly those of the Middle East, he suggested in his Devil's Advocate manner that the US should incorporate Iraq and Iran as the 51st and 52nd states of the nation because it already controls so many of the laws, customs, and financial interactions in these two countries anyway.

While I obviously disagree with his facetious comment about the 51st and 52nd states, I do agree that the US interferes too much in the daily life of people in Iraq and Iran. As I expressed and elaborated upon these sentiments, the teacher exclaimed from the back of the room: "Defend your country for once!" I was shocked into silence for a moment. I'm not here to defend the United States; I'm here to try to explain it. There's a huge difference between the two. According to Fulbright's mission statement, I should be increasing "mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries", namely Austria. Believe it or not, I'm not personally responsible for every US action from World War I to the present. Nor am I going to defend US activities with which I don't agree. Likewise, I will verbally defend my country when appropriate.

In my moment of stunned silence, I wish I could have told him: I am only one person. I may come from the US, but I cannot represent the entire nation, just as one person in Austria cannot represent the entire Austrian nation. I have some impressions and some experiences to offer if you want to listen. Of course, I want to hear your experiences, too. This is how we begin a mutual relationship; this is how we increase mutual understanding. We are all global citizens, human beings. Our humanity must come before our politics, not just in theory but also in real-life interactions. Remember: we are teachers. When we teach, our students listen. This is how they learn. What did they learn today?

Word of the Day: verteidigen = to defend