october, 2001

Dienstag, 2. October, zweitausendeins, 17:00 (GMT +0200)

just took the placement test for german at the university of vienna, and we all placed into level four (fortgeschrittene 1, after the three levels of anfänger), which they tell us is good.

Fortgeschrittene 1: Sprachgebrauch des Alltags- und Berufslebens unter Anwendung des gesamten Grundwortschatzes, ca. 2000 Wörter), Referate über Themen von allgemeinem Interesse, Sinnverständnis von Radionachrichten, Zeitungslektüre und Belletristik, Aufsätze mit Problemstellung, Syntax und Idiomatik zu stilistisch nuanciertem Sprachverständnis

that's cool by me, since it's i guess the equivalent of german 4 at swat, and i've really only had one semester. olivia and i spent the evening reviewing and taking email breaks, since we were studying at the cafe ... i took a phone break too and called anna, whom i'm going to see in about three days.

yeah, even though she's in spain, i'm going to see anna. munich has fallen through. (i'm trying to keep this through-falling -- which is an even awfuler concept when literally translated auf deutsch -- with munich to a minimum, but when the only emails i get are responses to linux questions or slug posts, the whole thing feels sometimes rather hopeless.) martin's being sent from city to city, doing security audits, and there's no way i can go up there, like i'd planned to since april. but anna's in barcelona, and through ökista i can afford to go over and see her, especially since she's going to be able to put me up while i'm there for most of the time. cheap food, she promises, and good; we might jet off to morocco or just take the bus to san sebastian, and do the student touristy thing there for a few days before i return on sunday the fourteenth. it's a tiny bit above my budget, and definitely more than i wanted to spend on fall break, but i really have no option not to spend money, if not munich. and plus, when am i ever going to get back to spain? especially when anna's there.

so i'm flying off to barcelona in three days, and will spend a lovely week and some there, basking in the early-october but yet-tropical weather. going to enjoy this.

i'm all the time on the move recently, it seems. we went to prague this past weekend, and did it much better than last time with pyo. we had a professor who's apparently written several books on the history and architecture and whatevernot in the city, and he lectured in german and english alternately, confusing onlookers to the group mightily, for several mornings. learned much more about the city than before, when we were traipsed through with a group of eighty or ninety kids, briefly shown memorials and told a few stories, and then gone back to the nasty nasty hotel and spent our crowns (gotta love the deflated economy, and what 37 crowns to the dollar will buy ya) at the hotel bar. this time we had a nicer hotel, actually in the city, and i didn't feel so tourist-obligation-y with the nine or ten or twelve kids in our group -- me and olivia from swat, another chunk from linfield. found a "dobrá cajovna" (hatschek on the 'c') first in cesky krumlow that we stopped in on the way up, and then another one right on the main wenceslas street in prague, which we visited twice more. the best tea i've ever had in my life. i bought a beautiful hexagonal teapot, and 100g of "malayan tiger" tea, a red brew with coconut overtones, served with a small bowl of thinly-sliced coconut. (back in vienna this afternoon i had a plain pfefferminztee with lunch, and olivia wondered aloud how i could take that, after the spectacular teas of this weekend.)

prague this weekend was really a series of restaurants, our teestube, cafes, and a microbrewery. this time we finally managed to find u fleku, the world-famous microbrewery that serves excellent dark beer, waiters coming around the beergarden courtyard with huge trays of half-liters of the stuff, placing them down in front of people who have already finished theirs, then following that with shots of something they called "czech medicine" when asked, which tasted like apple and cinnamon with goldschlager. the beer was some of the best i've had, but that's to be expected from czech beer. this merriment (and there was much) was all preceded by a visit to "jewel of india," a gourmet indian restaurant that would only ever be in my budget in czech crowns. excellent food, as usual there (i was there twice last summer, and am too lazy to link it now). forgot to get samosas but that's just a reason to go back, i suppose.

it's a little weird that olivia, i, and all the linfield kids except one are all in the same deutschstufe -- whatever, and we're not all in the same section, so we'll meet other people and it won't matter at all, but i think the placement test was really only deciding between levels 3 and 4 (anfänger 3 and forgeschrittene 1), and the levels within that group are very different. whatever; not my problem. i'm going to enjoy having a little more class per week. this all starts on oktober 16, right after we get back from spain. i'm going to see if there's a linguistics course being offered that i can sit in on too, but i think their semester already started a day ago or so. we're on the trimester schedule, officially.

really no urge to write anymore today. i'm going to go practice, because i haven't been able to all weekend, and because i won't be able to in spain, and because i want to. i'm going to read my email at the cafe later, and wait for email that likely won't come. rationalize. read a märchen? sleep, and go to class early, practice ... i dunno. bide my time. i should stop waiting, because i have a sinking suspicion, but i want so very much so very badly for it not to be true, and all it would take is a little communication. please.

Samstag, 6. October, zweitausendeins, 24:45 (GMT +0200)

first rule of the hitchhiker's guide: always carry a towel. oops. this morning, crashed at anna's host brother's apartment, i got up to shower with no one in the house (managed to sleep in till almost 10, having woken up initially at 8:30, which is already an hour later than i've slept in weeks -- i'm slowly being turned into a morning person, i swear!), and realized they'd left me no towel. well, between scarves and the marvelous dessicant powers of air, i managed to get dry, but damn.

i'm in spain, after a not very eventful 9 or 10 hours of traveling yesterday. or rather, they tell me, catalunya. the catalan is as prominent as the spanish here, if not more, but it's not half as opaque as i expected it to be. just kind of french and spanish mashed together, and therefore sounding very much like portuguese in some respects. it would be fun to try and pick some up, were i here for any longer. i did get a german tour book of barcelona in the vienna airport on my way out, to kill time and to read something a little lighter than "the unbearable lightness of being" or "gödelescherbach" ...

october 3, 2001: just bought a beautiful edition (yes, i'm a sucker for aesthetically pleasing covers!) of die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins -- translated from the czech, and since i've already read it twice in english, i maybe will understand some. am i a glutton for punishment or what?!

(really -- what was i thinking, not to bring any english fiction? reading materials have i plenty: german fiction translated from the czech; english nonfiction weighing about ten pounds (gödelescherbach); german tourbook on barcelona. anna, as usual, knows me better than i do myself, so in our rambles today we stopped at a multilingual bookstore and purchased me a prayer for owen meany, which she was appalled i hadn't yet read. comforting to have a book in hand.)

actually understood most of the tourbook, which i was happy about, and i had much fun with the german-katalanisch glossary at the back. ginnie's taking catalan in the spring, and i am very jealous. she and anna tried to convince me tonight that i needed to stay an extra semester in europe like they were doing, and that i should come on their program, and just fake the spanish. i thought about it briefly, and then realized that i am trying to double-major here, and i really would like to graduate. heh. so, tempting as it might be, i'd probably come out of it not able to speak any language instead of ten, and not graduating. oh well.

one thing i'm jealous of here, though, is the night life culture. yeah, we haven't visited any clubs in vienna yet -- we were going to go to club roxy the other night but then olivia backed out, citing a flute lesson for which she wasn't quite prepared in the morning, and we left without any kind of idea of what the city does after we go to sleep. i joked on the phone to M a few weeks back that olivia was trying to turn me into a morning person; he just laughed and said to tell her "good luck." i woke up of my own accord at 8:30 this morning, and that was the latest i've slept in weeks. really, my dreams end and i wake up at around 7:15 a.m. every morning, and i'm in bed before midnight. we go to operas at night, but after standing through carmen or das rheingold or what have you, one really doesn't have the stamina to then go dancing. (right now anna and i are sitting in easy everything, which is bigger by a ton (though not as fast!) than bignet (which olivia and i used in austria), not out dancing or drinking because (a) i want to get out to metro stop vallcarca where i'm crashing before the trains stop going at 2 a.m., and (b) we were walking around the barri gòthic all day, and our legs are kaputt.) the university season is only just now starting, and so students should be returning to the city, but seeing barcelona in all its extroverted, spazierengehen, rambling, funky socialness, i'm just not convinced vienna has anything comparable. we will check out the club scene there, that's for damn sure ... here, even though anna, allison, and ginnie aren't exactly meeting any locals, who speak to each other in catalan and have their own social circles, they have a program full of girls with whom they enjoy chilling (and they all have cell phones! they spend the entire night text-messaging each other from across the street, and calling each other, and making it twice as expensive for anyone outside of the city to call them, but they're so cool ... i want one, but whom would i call in vienna?!), which in the spanish sense means eating dinner around ten, then maybe going to a bar or something, and then out to party. late. i might be converted back to regular nori sleeping schedule before i return to my adopted city ...

oh! and barcelona actually sells paper products, which is really really exciting, because i've been trying to buy a notebook or something in vienna, and they just don't exist. i bought myself a red roller-ball pen and a red, smallish, quadrille notebook today for about $3. normal prices but the purchase makes me very happy.

meantime, i'm thinking about this situation too much. i keep vacillating. ups and downs. deciding it's okay; not being able to deal. seufz. what can i do but wait, hope and see.

so, i can now reclassify myself as a galactic (or at least european) hitchhiker -- after she found me warm milk with nutmeg and vanilla liqour, i borrowed for the duration a towel from anna.

postscript: we saw le fabuleux destain d'améline poulain dubbed over into german the other night, while still in vienna, at the apollo kino, and it rocked. would love to see it in english (well, subtitled, like foreign movies usually are!) sometime to get some of the faster wordplays and plot developments, but still got most of it, and loved it. heather doyle and jenny lunstead and emily, go see it -- mr. chomsky does the world!

Mittwoch, 10. October, zweitausendeins, 29:27 (GMT +0200)

i can see in my periphery three silver streaks beneath my eye (crayola glitter marker) and it's five twenty-seven a.m. in barcelona ... sitting at an easyEverything, internet cafe, having begged five pesetas off a passerby to buy a tunafish sandwich (ingredientes; pan, atun, tomate, lechuga y salsa fina), while ginnie buys 200 ptas worth of time (at 182 ptas / dollar these days, 200 buys you 4 hours after midnight) and príncipe crema de chocolate cookies to sustain us here at the cafe until i can get back into anna's apartment for the morning while she goes to class. we've just been to moog, which my german tourbook i bought myself in the vienna flughafen says has immer das neuste von trance, and for which i received a coupon on las ramblas while rambling there the other day, for a 1.200 pesetas entry including drink. not the cheapest club i'll ever go to but it was damn fun: to begin the evening with dinner -- pasta from a bag, followed by leftover paella (from a jar), with a shared rum-and-coke-in-a-can; after which anna made us cafe con leche (cafe amb llet in catalan, of which i am understanding more by the day) to keep us through the evening, and into which she put not only espresso (the mokka spat at her) and milk (spanish milk isn't refrigerated until opening -- weird pasteurization which tastes equally weird unless mixed with things like espresso), and some of the bottle of tia maria of which we'd split the price in the grocery store, while listening to manu chao on spanish radio (i want the cds!); after which we found ginnie and their mutual friend anne at the bar karma (which actually wasn't called karma, but rei de copas), where they had previously befriended the bartender, who brought a liter and a half of sangria for las guapas, which meant two glasses each, punctuated by dissuading a drunk guy from discovering where we were from (anna's been telling people she's from canada, but really didn't want to answer this shithead, so he kept asking), followed by a shot each of "liquor de amor" (a.k.a. nasty pink shit) on the house; once in moog, anna's and my entrance coupons covered a vodka y limón for me (and one with gin for ginnie). and that was just the bebidas. moog is a hole-in-the-wall club, in a neighborhood that thankfully had police cars patrolling and keeping an eye on the only entertainment locale within blocks on this graffittied alley of the arc de theatre. the stamp they put on your arm to go out has four glyphlike symbols on it. they have a coat-check but it costs 200 ptas, and they won't let you re-check stuff. good music, trance, beat in straight four and sometimes an imposed hemiola, live djs (and wednesday the best night to go because it was in-house music, not guest djs). blacklight (the "jack daniels" logo on anne's recently-won shirt stood out against white teeth and corneas, and lint). strobe flashing against the wall of bourbon smirnoff four roses martini (m. and i drank that straight in ml; small sips -- his the only similar parties i've been to, and in whose company i've been to similar clubs (kunstpark ost)). music and beat dictate the moves of everyone around you, most of whom are too self-conscious to really dance, or to notice a blank space of floor, suddenly opened by shuffling feet, and move into it. up on the ledge. around the wooden floor. small amounts of some mixed drink spilled onto my open-toed sandal but that's the price i'd pay at paces or anywhere. danced till 4:15 a.m. when anna needed to go (class in the morning -- not early but needed sleep), the coat check lady refused to recheck my and ginnie's coats, and while anna and anne wandered home, ginnie and i wandered to a very closed sbarro in search of pizza (not to be had until 8 a.m.). five pesetas begged off another internet cafe patron brought my total pocket change up to 375, which bought me the aforementioned sandwich -- not as good as the aubergine grilled ones in kunstpark ost, but enough to stave off the hunger until i sleep.

amazing, in a way, that i'm still up and typing, let alone danced for so long. i've been trying to do all the touristy things in barcelona, plus function on their schedule -- which means breakfast whenever, lunch not before two, dinner not before nine, and then out at night. today allison and anna and i hit the mercat de les encants -- a flea market which anna described as a place where the people "dump out everything on their bag on a big blanket, and then stomp on it." it wasn't quite that chaotic when we were there, but there were merchants yelling "barato barato barito," advertising their cheap prices -- and they were, as i got a purse (i'll take it to the opera in vienna; it's not completely going to fall apart, and it was $4), a dirt-cheap razor, a deck of spanish playing cards (different suits than the standard clubs - diamonds - hearts - spades), and two louis armstrong cds, all for cheap. saw gaudí's unfinished la sagrada familia afterwards, and then alter (after huge amounts of brie, french bread, and sautéed apple for lunch) park güell, with mosaics all over the walls and benches and lizards and ceilings. i bought a mug with a gaudí quote in catalan, which was identical to the one on the mugs in german, but a different quote than on the mugs with english, spanish, french, or portuguese. wondered why the fuck. the day before, ginnie and i went to figueres, the place where dalí was born, and saw his trippy museum there. opera playing in a car with scary mannequins inside, who get rained on now and then. realism to macroscopic pointillism to just trippy, confused dalí. excellent lunch outside afterwards: gazpacho, tortilla españa, a liter of sangria between us two, and crema catalana (northern spain's version of flan). put me out nicely for the train back. picasso museum on sunday, when it was free. all the famous works of these 20th-century guys seem to be elsewhere (madrid; florida), but the visits were still highly worth it.

meantime, i've been reading headlines in catalan on the metro stations. saw news of the initial bombings of afghanistan there; while i have no formal training in this language, it's italic and therefore not opaque enough to obscure the fact that my country is bombing another one. i can't get this through my head that this is real. it seems so far-removed here safe in the e.u. ...

these silver things are still on beneath my eye, and i'll see them flickering in the fluorescence of this cafe until madrugada seeps in through the orange-trimmed windows -- or until i peel them off ... we'll see who can hold out longer, me or the sun.

Dienstag, 16. October, zweitausendeins, 13:27 (GMT +0200)

i'm sitting here trying to write a paper, but how can i possibly write anything about a concert i heard twelve days ago, and right before i left for barcelona? i wanted resources (i.e., online ones) at my fingertips when i wrote it, so i waited till i was back, only to discover that the internet really doesn't do it. just not at all. i miss underhill! i want grove's at my hands; i want recordings of these two pieces (Brahms' String Quartet in a minor, op. 51 No. 2, and Bruno Walter's Piano Quintet) at my fingertips, i want normal music student resources! was ist hier los?! goddamn it. so the only thing i could really do would be write about programming, but olivia's already done that, and this is for an 8:30 class tomorrow, and i want to go to the opera (ernani) tonight, because i haven't been in two weeks or more, and i miss it! plus, i just took cute pictures at a photo booth in karlsplatz for my bignet student id card, which i paid money for a month of high-speed access, and then the lamination fucked it up so the (relatively expensive!) photo was ruined. i still have three more but the girl at the cafe informs me that they're just shitty quality photos, the ones from the photo booths, and that i'd have to give her a new one or just deal with the fucked up one. i have no way to get a new one, so i'm just dealing. but they were cute photos! and goddamn it, i want to go to munich this weekend! i'm going crazy. it's no one's fault; he's busy; but this is getting to a point where i just have to see him. and he hasn't written or called. of course i'm not mature enough to just say fuck the whole thing; this is a good thing just at the wrong time. still don't believe that and have too much faith. bad photo. can't write a paper. raaaaaaaaaar!

Mittwoch, 17. October, zweitausendeins, 15:29 (GMT +0200)

this semester is proving to be really frustrating. i didn't expect it to be academic in the sense that swarthmore is, and i didn't want that. that was half the reason i was taking a semester off -- and the other half was i wanted time to actually do music.

well, i'm doing it, insofar as i'm practicing daily, and taking lessons from elena denisova. she's fabulous, she really is. she's from moscow originally, and has lived in vienna for a number of years, where she's finally getting established. she's recorded some, some with her husband alexei somebody, who's a conductor and a great pianist. she's really a violinist, and while diedre has made me slightly wary of that type, rictor and she have shown me that no matter if they don't have the specifically viola mentality, i can still learn a hell of a lot from a great player, which she certainly is. i've got 14 lessons with her this semester covered and arranged by dePauw, the program i'm going through.

that's really the only good musical thing about this "music program," however. i suppose you can count the ridiculously cheap access to great opera, too, and the daily concerts, most of which have standing room. i don't get to all of them, but i certainly make an effort to get to a lot.

other than that, we have a music class once a week at the danube international school, with dr. daniel l., an american ex-pat (all my teachers are ex-pats this semester). it's really not a class. he gives us readings sometimes, and then tells us to go to concerts and write about things. what's the class about? it was supposed to be about the second viennese school, and his big thing is "using vienna as a classroom," which is all very noble and good and would be cool, if there were performances by schönberg, webern, berg, and all them daily. i actually haven't seen anything by a composer of the second viennese school since i've been here. the closest we've gotten is mahler (we've seen two of his symphonies -- the 7th and 8th -- at the musikverein), and one piano quintet by bruno walter a few weeks ago. but those are fin-de-siècle composers in heart and soul (at least, the walter, written in 1904, certainly was then -- and even if he branched out more later, he rejected atonality and serialism his whole life, so that's hardly subscribing to anything second-viennese-school-ish). so, the idea of "vienna as a classroom," at least for this subject matter, is quickly failing. we're also doing absolutely no analysis, or anything really musical. it's a very half-assed music history course at absolute best.

this morning after our half-hour class (usually it's an hour, even though it's supposed to be one and a half, but today he just said, well, you have your assignment, why don't i let you go back to bed. i was yawning, but i always do that during 8:30s! that doesn't mean i'm bored! this guy is funny -- olivia found one piece we listened to in class a couple weeks really beautiful, and she started crying when it was done. i think she really freaked dr. l.