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Oct. 9th, 2007 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishFirst day of my first normal school week: Migration and Memory lecture. I found Colleen perched on a step outside the lecture hall, waiting in a crowd of several hundred for the doors to open and the lecture to begin. I'm not quite sure why people can't go into an empty room before the lecture begins: I'm presuming a cultural thing.
The lecture was good and interesting, and for the most part follow for us pitiful foreigners. It's meant to deal with the issues of identity and memory as people move around and go into exile, etc. Interesting stuff, and it sounds like it should fit in well with my other sets of classes for this semester. Even the literature classes are largely about recent history.
After class, me and Colleen discovered a good and reasonably cheap coffee-to-go place in the Ubahn, and I think we will likely become disciples thereof. It would be much cheaper to figure out how to make coffee on our own, and I am seriously considering making that my mission of the week. However, I have tea, and for the moment that's good enough.
We went to Kurt's class today: it was kind of unclear from the invitation that we'd gotten (through an intermediary) that he was inviting us to come to his class, and *then* the dinner out afterwards. Colleen and I thought it was going out to Kaffee und Kuchen. But we had to sit through the class, and then we headed out to dinner at another one of Kurt's highly 'authentic' Vienna eateries. Oddly enough, I ran into a girl from the University of Chicago group, Julia, who knows a dear (future-hipster) friend of mine at Wellesley. It was kind of nice, but I ended up sitting on a hard wooden bench for several hours, and my bum is letting me know that it disapproves of such shenanigans.
The group of people that Kurt introduced us to were nice, but once more I am a little depressed at how nonhardcore they were. All the Americans I meet in Vienna are studying with American programs in Vienna, and they're not actually taking classes here. Or, alternatively, they're not studying here at all, but working, so that they don't actually have to learn anything about the city other than what they need for their jobs, which are done in English. It seems unadventurous, and a little lazy, to go to another place and neither learn the language nor try to understand the culture. It's more than a little sad, really.
In other news, I know have enough chicken to choke a moose, and cooking shall ensue.
The lecture was good and interesting, and for the most part follow for us pitiful foreigners. It's meant to deal with the issues of identity and memory as people move around and go into exile, etc. Interesting stuff, and it sounds like it should fit in well with my other sets of classes for this semester. Even the literature classes are largely about recent history.
After class, me and Colleen discovered a good and reasonably cheap coffee-to-go place in the Ubahn, and I think we will likely become disciples thereof. It would be much cheaper to figure out how to make coffee on our own, and I am seriously considering making that my mission of the week. However, I have tea, and for the moment that's good enough.
We went to Kurt's class today: it was kind of unclear from the invitation that we'd gotten (through an intermediary) that he was inviting us to come to his class, and *then* the dinner out afterwards. Colleen and I thought it was going out to Kaffee und Kuchen. But we had to sit through the class, and then we headed out to dinner at another one of Kurt's highly 'authentic' Vienna eateries. Oddly enough, I ran into a girl from the University of Chicago group, Julia, who knows a dear (future-hipster) friend of mine at Wellesley. It was kind of nice, but I ended up sitting on a hard wooden bench for several hours, and my bum is letting me know that it disapproves of such shenanigans.
The group of people that Kurt introduced us to were nice, but once more I am a little depressed at how nonhardcore they were. All the Americans I meet in Vienna are studying with American programs in Vienna, and they're not actually taking classes here. Or, alternatively, they're not studying here at all, but working, so that they don't actually have to learn anything about the city other than what they need for their jobs, which are done in English. It seems unadventurous, and a little lazy, to go to another place and neither learn the language nor try to understand the culture. It's more than a little sad, really.
In other news, I know have enough chicken to choke a moose, and cooking shall ensue.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
identities please
Date: 2007-10-10 03:48 am (UTC)Re: identities please
Date: 2007-10-10 11:33 am (UTC)Colleen= fellow Wellesley student and American