abroad!

In one week I will be on a plane. In one week and a few hours I will be home.

Waiting bothers me; I’d rather be home NOW than have to figure out what my “last sights to see” are until THEN. Plus I have an exam on Friday. Can I truly allow myself to see a few last things before my last exam on Friday? Shouldn’t I be chained to my desk and studiously studying? (Right. Like that’ll ever happen.) What about worrying about getting to the airport (which is in Berlin, and I and all of my things are in Vienna)? Or worrying about never seeing my favorite boutique Orsay ever again? Or worrying about hanging out with my friends here—really, my family after six months.

I am going to miss them.

Originally this site came about from close friends wanting to hear about my adventures while abroad. I thought I’d be able to keep up with it, but obviously, I was wrong. I’ve taken too many pictures and had too many adventures, and, well, aren’t these the kind of stories best told on a frighteningly cold winter day next to a warm fire over coffee or tea? Not to mention that none of the college friends that begged me to be kept updated even knows this exists, despite my trying to let them know.

Yesterday, after trying to figure out what to write about next, I came to this decision. I’m going to do what I want to do. In September, I realized I wanted to have a scrapbook of all the pictures and all the adventures. All the things that are personal and that I want to share with my friends and family, not with the entire Internet. This is what I wanted to do, not what everyone else wanted. I wanted something more tangible than a web page. I wanted something I could hold onto. I want the narrative next to the pictures, and I want the display to be part of the story.

I also want to tell my friends my stories face-to-face. Because one thing I learned so far away from home is that Internet interaction just can’t relate to face-to-face interaction.

So abroad is over. Sara, I’ll tell you some of my stories this summer. Becky, I’m sure you’ll get a chance to hear more, too. My family will hear everything I can stand to share, and my college friends will get their chance to hear how I’ve changed. Hopefully for the better.

As I mentioned in the last post, we visited Krakow over a long Austrian weekend. With a group of 21-year-olds, it really isn’t such a magical place. First place to visit: bar. (Well, we did get in somewhat late…) But personally, I’m getting a little sick of bars. They’re all over the place—what’s there that’s unique about Krakow and Poland?

Well, okay, we did see all the Krakow citizens decked out as soccer fans parading through the streets, accompanied by policemen in full-out riot gear before we went to the bar.

The next day, though, we went on an epic 6-hour walking tour of Krakow. Now we’re talking. We went to the oldest University building, and admired the piping system.

It was raining pretty steadily for the first hour of the tour, so there was definitely use for these. What kind of story did these guys tell? Why were they added to the building? Whoever the architect was had a better sense of humor than the architects in Vienna!

The tour ended at the church in the main square, the name of which escapes me. Probably a Maria-something-or-other church (aren’t they all Maria?). That is to say, I vaguely remember a “Marienkirche” being mentioned in the tour, which was held in German.

Afterward Uncle Mac took us out to lunch, where we all tried pierogis. Mine weren’t that great, which was sad because I never got a chance to try other ones.

The next day was spent at Auschwitz, where I took no pictures. Just before leaving, though, I took this picture to remind me of my six-word Polish vocabulary:

Krakow Glowny… “Glowny” is “Main”, so the main square was also “Glowny” something.

Now that I think about it, I learned that that funny l is pronounced more like an w, so I was definitely pronouncing that wrong the whole time, as well. What other Polish words did I learn?

• Piwo = beer
• tatonka = delicious mixed drink, vodka and lemon and apple juice, which we started to call “liquid apple pie” (did I mention spending too much time in bars?)
• Toilety = toilets

I had more than that, but I apparently only remember these now. Ah well. Until next time!

(More pictures at Krakow, Poland.)

Last weekend was a four-day weekend in Austria (because of a Catholic holiday), so Uncle Mac (as we’ve taken to affectionately calling our college) took us on a trip to Krakow, Poland. Not only did we visit the city but we took an hour bus ride to the labor camps Auschwitz-Birkenau. I learned there that Auschwitz is not just one labor camp as I expected but a collection of camps. Auschwitz I is the main, smaller camp; Auschwitz II (aka ‘Birkenau’) is a very large camp nearby, and there are over 40 subcamps in and around Poland.

Well, those facts are great and all, but what about the camp itself? What was the experience of it? Everyone’s curious about Auschwitz, and it’s a huge tourist attraction now. Many, many people go there, take the tour, and follow the leader while taking pictures. Then they leave.

Stop.

Take a minute to absorb that. You go to Auschwitz. You take a tour. You follow someone around, you half-listen to what the person is saying, you watch a million other people do the same things. You take pictures whenever the tour guide stops for a second. And then you leave.

Full stop.

Is this what Auschwitz means today? Is this what it means to remember the Holocaust? For something so recent and so highly denounced to have become a tourist trap blows my mind away. Perhaps it is because Auschwitz I is so much smaller than I thought it would be, that the millions of people coming to visit have to crowd together and really, there is no way to avoid the noise of people. It is harder to get the feeling of horror from such an experience.

All right, I’ll give them that. At the same time, these people could have tried harder to understand what they were seeing. I likened it to theory we’ve read about theater from Bertold Brecht: “K-Typus” is when theater is presented as a carousel ride, where you get on, enjoy yourself for a bit, then get off without getting anything from the experience. I think this is what happens when you take a tour of Auschwitz. You half-listen to a tour guide drone on about the camp but you don’t get a chance to absorb it. On the other hand, “P-Typus” is theater as a planetarium: you know the stars you are seeing aren’t real but still you’re learning something about it. You know the theater isn’t real life but you get something from the experience. You know the camp doesn’t operate anymore but still you have a sense of what went on there.

Tours provide cursory overviews of what they present: in this case, while the tour guide gave a LOT of information, a lot of it was rote and partly hinders the experience of Auschwitz.

My other beef with the tourists at the Auschwitz camps is the use of cameras. While I appreciate how the digital camera gives everyone another toy to play with and create with, touristy pictures irritate me. It’s as if instead of actually seeing what you’re looking at you’re just proving you were there. It’s very contradictory to the in-the-moment attitude that should accompany traveling. Worse is taking these quick snapshots at places like Auschwitz: it’s very much proving that you’re only there for the ride—not to see Auschwitz and contemplate what happened, why it happened, what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Rather than trying to comprehend all these facets of humanity you’re just going along on a ride.

I get that not everyone is smart enough to think about all these kind of things while they’re at a labor camp or concentration camp, but at the same time I think it should be common sense. If you’re going somewhere, you’re going for an experience. You’re going to have complicated feelings and you’re going to have to deal with them. Just taking pictures seems to me to completely avoid these feelings and experiences in a detrimental way. Turning Auschwitz into a tourist trap trivializes what happened. And that I cannot stand.

I didn’t mean to take so long between posting about my adventures; I got very sick a few days after getting back from spring break vacations and since then have been trying to catch up. I think I’m ready to tell another story. You know, when my friends asked me to keep them updated on my adventures, I thought, “Oh, that’s a great idea! I’ll tell the story of being abroad.” Except in the past few posts I haven’t exactly told stories as much as tried to badly caption an excerpt of the pictures I took. Why? I’m a story teller, or a writer, or a what-have-you. I think in stories. So firstly, I’ll apologize for the lack of story in my posts about London and Edinburgh, and promise to try harder about next time.

Next, I want to explain something that amuses me about these stories. Blogs usually start at one time and then go on in a line, right? But because I didn’t start at the beginning, on January 3, and instead started halfway through, this is more of a collection of stories in different countries in Europe rather than one adventure from one place to the next. Instead of having it all laid out there, you have to piece together the pieces. This makes me smile: not only I have to work, but you do too. I wonder, what kind of story could you put together from my pictures?

I’ve been in Vienna since the end of Spring Break, and this week I was sick of it. We had a four day weekend coming up, as Ascension counts as a holiday here in Catholic Austria. I wanted to go somewhere and do something, and my roommate presented me with the perfect opportunity: go home with her to Salzkammergut, where all the art geniuses of the turn of the 20th century spent their summers. I jumped at the chance, even if just for one full day of sightseeing there. I was ready to leave. Vienna was okay, there was even a full weekend of events planned, but I needed a time out: time to see what natural wonders you could see in Austria.

Aha! That is what I needed. Being a predominantly city girl, I hadn’t realized how much I was aching for nature. My roommate made sure to catch me up on the sights and the small towns and Austrian way of life around here. I probably could have stood in that spot forever: soaking up sun and breathing in the lake. I did enough soaking up the sun that day, and my arms are now acceptably browned for the summer.

The funny thing about Salzkammergut, which is a collection of small towns in an area of Austria, is how much it reminds me of home. That lake: that could be Lake Chabot. The houses built on the side of the hill, overlooking the lake: That could be Sausalito. Isn’t it beautiful?

After a day of wandering around, driving around, seeing what I could see in another part of Austria, I felt grounded, ready to go back and enjoy what Vienna had to offer. I realized that everyone needs a break sometimes, to get out and recharge. But the question is: how do I do this at home? How do I get a cheap train ticket and just go somewhere else?

It’s a dilemma, really.

(Salzkammergut, Austria)

On our last full day in the United Kingdom, we decided we needed to see the big tourist things, like Big Ben:

And the Tower of London, which isn’t a tower:

At the end of the day we also realized we needed to visit Fleet Street in honor of Sweeney Todd:

I also made up a silly story about this building that looks like a Fabirge egg:

Seriously, what an odd-looking building! You would think it would be on a tourist info brochure. Such odd architecture. We spent part of the day trying to figure out what it is and how to get there.

On the way we ran into some street performers:

Basically, it was a really full day. Once again, you can view the gallery of these pictures as well.

We didn’t want to spend all of our time in London, as we wanted to see all the UK had to offer (or at least a large part of it). (P.S. Sara, if we do go to Ireland after college? We need to make a stop in Edinburgh too. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and SUCH a knitting town, as I discovered later. I should have realized that when I discovered a yarn store practically across the street from our hostel.) Edinburgh has its very own castle, or should I say fortress?:

This castle/fortress is situated on an extinct volcano. But you never know with volcanoes, do you? All this rock and grass and hills make for VERY different scenery than what you see in Vienna and London. It was such a refreshing change.

We spent most of the day exploring the Castle. With museums, a cafe, and a very old cathedral inside, it took quite a bit of time. We had to pay quite a bit to get in, but luckily there was quite a bit to do. When we left, though, we decided it was time to enjoy the beautiful weather, which we enjoyed a lot, coming from a place where spring was only just starting to show its face.

So of course I had to take a picture of the flowers.

Walking home later that night, we found a cafe with a most interesting claim:

It appears to believe it’s the “Birthplace of Harry Potter”. What?! Apparently J.K. Rowling used to spend lots of time here… I love stumbling upon places like that.

The next morning we decided we wanted to see the Sea. We asked for a recommendation, then hopped on a half hour train to the little seaside town of North Berwick. There, we found the Coast.

And then we couldn’t get “By the Sea” from the Sweeney Todd soundtrack out of my head. Later we listened to most of the album (especially after visiting Fleet Street in London–but that’s a topic for the next post). We walked along the beach, where it was cold but oh so lovely to be next to water. We made sure to try a fish and chips and “black pudding” (which isn’t really pudding. Really. These British people need to learn to name their foods properly).

After we had our fill of quaint beach town we hopped back on the train to see what else Edinburgh could show us. Whereupon we found Adam Smith’s grave. Yes, THE Adam Smith, father of capitalism himself. We were stoked.

After this long day running around Scotland, we hopped another plane back to London to spend two more nights there. And what we did with our last full day in London I’ll save for the next post. Til then! Once again, more pictures in the Edinburgh + North Berwick gallery.

What better place to start than in the middle? For spring break, rather than staying in Vienna, I, Stephanie, a student from the U.S. studying abroad, first in Berlin and then in Vienna, ran away to the United Kingdom with a friend. I know, you kind of hate me now, right? Everyone seems to. With reason, I believe.

So, on Friday, the 3rd of April, we flew to Londontown. Rather than taking pictures like crazy I played sudoku on the flight. And talked in English. That was quite frankly a huge relief. But of course, the first thing one must take a picture of in London is the telephone booth.

Those things are seriously everywhere! Berlin and Vienna might be big tourist towns, but London definitely took the cake. We also saw right away a plethora of red double decker buses.

I am fairly certain I took this picture from the top of a double decker bus. Riding on a double decker bus is fantastic. Also, an all-day bus fare? Cheaper than 2 bus tickets. Definitely what you want to get. Tube transportation? Costs much more, plus it’s got these zones you need to watch out for. Just get the bus tickets.

One of my favorite sites on our first day in London was this:

We were trying to find our way through this pedestrian street and suddenly saw this. Upon further inspection we decided it was nothing in particular, but I still really like the odd, non-touristy things that you stumble upon while walking through the streets. It makes a city feel like a home for people rather than just a place that attracts tourists.

But worry not, we also went to the tourist sites, such as Buckingham Palace. The guards were well behind the gates here:

Funnily, Buckingham Palace wasn’t nearly impressive after seeing all the German castles I’ve seen lately. Compared to Charlottenburg, Sanssouci, even Schönbrunn, as my travel companion said–not a big deal. I guess the English weren’t as interested in impressing people as the German nobility was.

In short, the first day of our spring break trip to the United Kingdom was a blast. Lots of pictures were taken, and lots of things were seen. We were continually exhausted throughout this trip. More pictures can be found in the Day One album. Until next time, when I post about Day Two–Edinburgh!