Email from Sept 4

I wanted to let you know about the changes with IES - as you may have seen from my mailing address and google, they now have the center at Palais Corbelli on Johannesgasse, right in the 1st district off of Karntnerstrasse, which is a little too touristy for my tastes. Nearby can be found a convenient postoffice, the best ice cream in town, and a wide variety of restaurants that I have yet to try. For the first week, the film festival at the Rathaus was still playing. Every night they show an opera (though often strange versions; I watched The Marriage of Figero set on the 40th story of a 1980s New York appartment building, which made all the funnier the scene in which Cherubino jumps from the window and breaks nothing but the angry gardener's plant pots). They also have international food booths.

We went to Mariazel for orientation, and returned to Vienna last Sunday, so I have had just over a week here. We have 3 hours of German classes daily, and plenty of homework and vocabulary. Still there is lots of time to explore the city. I have spent a good deal of time just wandering around, especially near my house in the 8th district (Josefstadt), around the center, and from the Naschmarkt all the way home, past Mariahilferstrasse. To go to class, I can take the streetcar too and from the center, but it is also a 25 minute walk that I do whenever it isn't raining and I have time before class. My walk takes me from my appartment on Strozzigasse, a street with beautiful old buildings sandwiched between the inner and outer rings and Josefstradtenstrasse and Lerchenfelderstrasse. If I want to take the scenic route, I can walk up past the Rathaus and Parliament, through the Volksgarten and Heldenplatz, and then I have a choice. I either go the long way through the Hofburg to the left, which takes me by the roman ruins, down Kohlmarkt to Graben, where I then go by the statue of the Plague and St Stephens before turning down Karntnerstrasse to Johannesgasse. (Next time I will look for Meinl's.) Or, I walk around the ringstrasse along the route of the streetcar, past the Naturalhistorisches Museum and Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Opera, then up Karntnerstrasse. Sadly my signal to turn is the McDonald's sign: McDonald's is a few doors down from the center. If I want fastfood lunch, though, I go get Pizza or Falaful or Donner Kebab or of course a kasekraner or other sausage.

My German teacher is wonderful. Her husband is a curator at the Natural History museum so he took us on a private tour after our exam Friday morning. We saw the gems and minerals, the dinosaurs, a rotating hologram of various views of the world, and a machine with a wheel that you spin to see the continents from way before pangea to 150m years in the future (they will apparently end up all together again and shaped like a donut with one central sea). Most interestingly, he took us up to the roof (through a hallway that they use for storing hundreds of skulls on glassed-in shelves!). The views were beautiful, I have attatched a few pictures. Today as we began our unit on foods she brought various Austrian pastries in for us to try, and her own delicious homemade Liptauer. Having Austrian relatives, I already had tasted it (and in fact have been having some from the supermarket every day for breakfast) but everybody in the class was very impressed with it. Hers is very good, I might attempt to use her recipe to make some but I'd love to be emailed everybody else's recipe for it.

I have indeed seen the works of Otto Wagner around town, and they are fascinating and beautiful. This weekend we went on a bus tour of the major sights; up a mountain for a city view, to the Hundertwasserhaus, which I find quite fascinating, and to the Belvedere gardens. It was basically a tour to orient us. I loved my tourguide so much that I have changed my schedule to take her class (more below). Sunday I went with friends to the Donau Insel where we studied and enjoyed the nice weather. The train ride took us past the incinerator (I believe that's what it is) that Hundertwasser designed. Next weekend I will rent a bike on the insel and explore further before it gets cold. I have also found a swimming pool with a good price, and I will probably take a dance class and perhaps an additional recreation class at the University, both to learn to waltz and to meet Austrian students. When the semester starts up at the end of September I will get an art museum pass with one of my classes and will be able to stop into many of the museums whenever I like. Unfortunately the Leopald, Wien, Natural History, and several others aren't included; it only covers federally owned museums, but I will still be sure to see everything.

I am also planning to attend my first opera with standing room tickets tomorrow. It is opening night and La Boheme is showing. I know that Otto is a great Opera fan, so in case he (or you, or my grandmother, or my mothers) has any recommendations I will tell you all that they are showing while I am here: Il Barbiere Di Siviglia, Lohengrin (I suspect he will recommend the Wagner!), Osud/ Le Villi, Onegin, Le Nozze Di Figaro, Robert Devereux, I vespri Siciliani, Copelia, Die Sauberflote, Peter Grimes, Madame Butterfly, Rigoletto, Carmen, Giselle, Otello, Tosca, Nabucco, La Sonnambula, La Traviata, Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella, Requiem, Der Nussknacker, Don Carlo, und Romeo et Juliette. Quite a few choices!

As for my classes, I will be taking German (of course), a politics class (Post Cold War European Security), an economics class (Transitions to Market Economies in Central and Eastern Europe), and my newly added history course, Vienna Past and Present, which goes over the history of the city and includes a substantial amount of touring museums and other historical sites. I believe I'll see everything from the Roman ruins to St. Stephens to the Belvedere to the museum that houses the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. All of this with the very knowledgable guide who seems to be an excellent lecturer. Also I am applying for an internship; if I don't get one that interests me enough then I will take a class called Nations and Religions: Minorities and Majorities, a small part of which is focused on Jewish history.

That's all for now. I'll send another update when there's more to report. Enjoy the attatched pictures; sorry there were so many but they were hard to pick out of so many I've taken! I made them poor quality so they'd be small enough to email in mass quantity, but if you'd like to see a better copy of anything, let me know. A little caption for two of them (the rest should be self explainatory): "now you see it" and "now you don't" are of the statue that the Russians built as part of the treaty after WWII. The Viennese were required to keep it up, but it is truly ugly, so they spend what I can only imagine is tens of thousands a year maintaining the fountain they built that goes perhaps 3 stories in the air to hide the statute!