Snippets from Vienna

Ryan and I enjoyed wandering around Vienna for about 5 days. Our first day we visited Cafe Central, one of the most famous coffee houses in Vienna. Cafe Central served as the meeting place for various groups of intellectuals from its opening in 1860 until now.

The Turks laid siege to Vienna in 1683, and legend has it that the croissant was created by Viennese bakers, as an insulting reference to the crescent on the Turkish flag. However, apparently the Viennese took a liking to the Turkish beverage known as coffe.

A traditional coffee house in Vienna is a far cry fro the Starbucks we know today. (If you thought $3 for a latte was a lot, try paying $5 for a cup of coffee have that big, for one.) The waiters and waitresses wear tuxedos, and your coffee usually is served on a silver platter with a cup of water (for hydration after your coffee) and a piece of chocolate. When I lived in Vienna, I couldn't afford to eat out, so if my friends and I wanted to go out, we'd go to a coffee house and indulge in an expensive cup of coffee and a pastry.

Altough we live in the Land of Buweiser, (St. Louis), there's another Czech beer called Budweiser, which Ryan wanted to try while we were in Vienna. According to my husband, the beer connoisseur, for a foreign beer to be sen to the United States, for health reasons, the beer has to contain certain preservatives. He said that European beers he might drink in the U.S. have a better taste in Europe since they lack those ingredients. (Who knew?)

Vienna was famous for its "Jugendstil" style of art around the turn of the century. (We call it "Art Nouveau" in English.) Otto Wagner was one of its most famous proponents in Vienna. An architect, he was interested in city planning, and designed many of the city's rail stations, which can still be seen today, such as this station at Karlsplatz. The Jugendstil style was known for its flowery motifs.

Many of the buildings in Vienna are known for their fancy exteriors, such as the building(s) behind me, on this street in downtown Vienna. In the background, you can see the palace, or Hofburg.

Although Vienna is mainly a tourist destination now, at one time it was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire; its reach stretched from Austria to Germany to Poland to the Czech Republic to Slovakia. The sheer magnitude of the size of the buildings there, as well as the wealth they represent, can be staggering.



One of the days, we stopped by an Italian restaurant for lunch, and Ryan ordered a calzone. If it weren't funny enough that it came shaped like a fish, it made me laugh that the tomato sauce dripping down the plate made it look like the fish was bleeding.

As some of you may know, and others not, the year I lived in Vienna was, hands down, the most difficult year of my life. I felt by myself in a strange country, knowing my friends were somewhere else in a different land, enjoying all the things that make college life fun. I think part of going back was a healing of sorts. In many ways, the healing happened long ago. (It's been 10 years, after all, since I left.) However, one of the reasons I've struggled so much here in Mt. Vernon is I feel at times like God is making me repeat Vienna all over again, by leaving my friends in Dallas behind, except this time, I don't get to go home at the end of the year. One night, after listening to me rehash some of the feelings I had when living in Vienna, Ryan tendely told me I didn't have to be alone anymore. While that knowledge can't undo the memory of the pain I felt, it was a reminder that my situation is fundamentally different this time around. I am not alone.


This is a picture of me in front of the Servitengasseschuelerinnenwohnheim, (the "Serviten Allery Student Girls' Dorm"), where I lived 10 years ago.