Sunday, March 20, 2011

x Coffees in Vienna (the first of maybe-a-series-but-who-knows-my-track-record-with-these-things-isn't-very-good)

Well yes, it's been a while. I acknowledge that and hope not to make any further mention of it.

Last week I read a book called Three Thousand Coffees in Vienna, by a lady named Colleen DiFranco with whom, as I discovered, I have very little in common. The author is an American who lived in Vienna for several years (she may live here still; I haven't investigated) and the book bills itself as a picture of ex-pat life, largely American and English, in the city.

My own feelings about living as an Ausländer tend to yo-yo wildly depending on my state of mind, the weather, and which newspaper I've read on a given day. Sometimes I still wander breathlessly around the old city centre, marveling at the architecture and the numerous historical plaques proclaiming that "Mozart gave his first public concert in this house, at the age of six" or that "Freud wrote the first draft of "The Interpretation of Dreams" in this café". Other days I see things like this (or the German-language equivalents thereof, of which there are many) and have to psyche myself up to order a coffee, nervous that my accent will offend some xenophobic jerk of a potential waiter.

There are a bevy of differences between me and the characters in DiFranco's book, perhaps the most significant of which being that, while I moved here alone and of my own accord, most of the (exclusively female) characters populating her short stories are tag-along wives. Their husbands work for the embassies, or the UN, or one of the many internationally-acronym-ed organizations that have their headquarters in Austria. They, for the most part, didn't want to leave home and are counting the days until they go back again. They make no effort to learn German and then insist that "you don't [can't] make friends with Austrian women". Some of them worked as lawyers or doctors in their home countries but are, in Vienna, either retired or simply happy not to work. They are mostly middle-aged and mostly wealthy. They go to a Polish town for the weekend on a pottery-themed shopping spree and end up buying so much that they can barely haul it all back to Vienna on their rented bus.

Basically, it was a book that disappointed me by having much less to do with my life than I was hoping it would. The theme that rang truest for me, namely the bittersweetness of making good friends who will eventually and inevitably leave the city and move very far away, was overshadowed by too many paragraphs about shopping and "jokes" about not understanding the local language.

However, as little as I got out of the book in general, it did give me an idea. The characters in the first story meet every week at a local coffee house to eat, drink, and gossip (like the Sex and the City brunches, if you took out the sex talk and replaced it with more shoes and some Polish pottery). I should explain here that a Viennese Kaffehaus is quite a specific institution, and should not be confused with a Parisian Café, an Amsterdam Coffee Shop, a Starbucks, or the delightfully eccentric, organic-soy-latté-with-gluten-free-carob-cookie-dispensing independent locales which exist on every second street corner in Victoria (Spiral Café ftw!), though these all have their charms. I've been fascinated by the Kaffehäuser since my second day in Vienna, when I stumbled my way through ordering and paying for a tiny coffee from a stern, penguin-suited waiter, to whom I spoke the approximately three words of German that I had learned from "Teach Yourself German Grammar", purchased two weeks earlier from BMV on Bloor St.

A Viennese Coffee House is generally smoky (though this has changed somewhat since the introduction of partial smoking bans last year), usually fairly small, and often staffed by brusque waiters (never waitresses) wearing suits. A coffee costs anything from 1.50 to 8 Euros, depending on where you are and whether you want a fancy one with whipped cream and booze in it. There are normally booths along both sides of the room with upholstered seating. Between these two rows are small tables, which nominally seat 2-4 people but are easily challenged in this respect by the fact that even the tiniest coffee arrives borne on a large silver tray. The respective sizes of the trays and the tables are such that two trays will usually cover the surface of an entire table, leaving little to no room for food, elbows, newspapers, etc. But they do look lovely. And the grumpy waiters always bring you a tiny glass of water with a spoon balanced delicately on top of it. This also fits easily onto the tray, lending the whole exercise a modicum of purpose.

There are well over a hundred of these places in Vienna, and I have been to many of them. Once you receive your coffee (or other beverage of choice) you're generally left alone to read, study, sketch, or people watch until you flag down one of the cranks in suits and ask for the bill. One thing they don't get upset about is customers staying for hours after purchasing a single espresso.

The ladies in the book loved their Kaffeehaus, and I love many of the ones I've visited. Some, however, are more expensive than others. Some are smokier, and some have more eccentric customers to observe and ponder the life stories of. Some have great coffee, and some have merely acceptable coffee.

I've been looking for ways to get myself writing more frequently, and this seems to me to be as good a way as any. This will be, I fervently hope, the first in a series of posts examining the Wiener Kaffehäuser I Have Known and Possibly Loved.

Subject: Café Korb (literally "Café Basket"), Tuchlauben 10, 1010 Wien

Visit: Sunday afternoon, 20.03.11. Seated at tiny middle table, as the comfortable-looking and generously-sized booths were full.

Order: For me, a jasmine tea and a plate of potato-cheese puffs with salad. Tasted like cheesy tater tots, in the best possible way. Later an apple strudel, served warm and blissfully without raisins. My companion had a peppermint tea and potato and sausage goulash, followed by a dessert that I don't think I can translate into English. Sort of like a fluffy baked bun filled with cranberries, floating in a sea of creamy vanilla sauce. (We had been walking around for a few hours and were really hungry.)

Price of a Melange (standard coffee order with steamed milk and foam, basically a Viennese Cappuccino): 3.50 EUR

Wait staff: Male and impeccably-suited. One surprisingly friendly waiter (happily, serving our table) and one furious-looking one who brushed my arm with the tails of his coat every time he walked past, making me jump more than once.

Atmosphere: Standard Kaffeehaus. Lots of brown upholstery and wooden chairs. Light fixtures that would have been at home as chandeliers in my grandparents' dining room. Quite smoky, though I discovered a mysterious, large, and completely empty non-smoking room in the basement, during a search for the washroom. Either this room was closed at the time, or it's just so well hidden that no customers had found it yet. Pleasant view through large windows onto the square outside.

People-Watching: On this day, fabulous. Patrons included a heavyset, 50ish woman with eyebrows plucked into huge, perfect half-circles. She sat alone in a side booth and read newspapers with great purpose, throwing each one down on to the bench opposite as she finished. Seemingly a non-smoker, she glared insistently at another, similarly aged woman who was smoking a cigar at an adjacent table. Eventually the first woman stood up, wended her way slowly to a side door and propped it open, before lumbering back to her booth. The second woman responded by springing up herself and slamming the door shut again, before gesturing agitatedly toward the first woman and scolding her with some angry-sounding words that I unfortunately didn't catch. There was also a lady who informed the friendly waiter, as she was paying, that she didn't care for the other waiter at all. It appeared that they'd had a "conflict" several days earlier, but since then he'd been friendlier. She remained unimpressed.

The title of Most Impressive Korb Patron of 20.02.11, however, is reserved for an Englishman who was sitting directly behind me. Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that he was an Englishman, since his accent was so ridiculous that I can only assume it was fake. It was as if...I'm not sure I can come up with an appropriate cultural reference for this level of silliness. I hear him intone the phrase "oh, I say!" exactly as it would have rendered in a terrible American movie. It would not have surprised me to learn that his name was Basil Reginald Wellington and that he was employed as a Professor of Dedicated Froppery in Shropshire upon Figgiwig.

Miscellaneous: Washrooms are labelled with abstract symbols rather than with words or any sort of standard male and female signs. I was saved from making a difficult decision when two women came out of the ladies just as I came down the stairs, but eventually decided that the symbol on the mens' door looked phallic enough that I would have chosen correctly if left to my own devices.

Verdict: Good food, if slightly overpriced. I unfortunately never tried the coffee. Far too smoky for my liking, though I'm intrigued by the mysterious basement, which, between the abandoned non-smoking room (including modern, arty decor and a small stage) and white, curvy, abstract bathrooms, seems to belong to a different establishment altogether. Top-notch eccentrics as clientele. I'd visit again when I'm less hungry, and ask about the basement. Rating: Six famous, dead Viennese intellectuals out of ten.

Right, that's one down. I promise pictures next time.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Baddest man in the whole damn town

I've been looking around for things to reassure myself that Christmas in Vienna is not going to be as sad as I'm afraid it might be. The latest of these is the fact that stores and supermarkets have (so far) not given themselves over to playing the same annoying Christmas songs over and over from the beginning of November. Instead, they've stuck to the usual bizarre array of old-to-newish, mostly American tunes that I haven't heard in ages. Today's installment was "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown", which was then - not unpleasantly, I might add - stuck in my head all day.

Reassuring thing #2 is that there is a guy right outside my residence selling teeny tiny Christmas trees, one of which I will soon purchase and install in my room, undoubtedly in slightly crooked fashion. Then I can decorate it cheap-student style, with popcorn strings and construction paper chains! Amanda, if you're reading this, we're going to make popcorn strings and construction paper chains while you're here. I'm afraid you have very little choice in the matter.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Would you mind if I told you how they do it in Austria?

Alternate title: Reading facebook message boards can be hazardous to your health

Who knows how Canada's constitution works? It's not always me, but I can assure you that it is definitely not 95% of the pissy 18-year-olds who've chosen to share their indignance with the world via the message board of "I'm against the Liberal coup d'état".

Firstly...ok. I know that anyone who's reading my blog already gets this, but OH GOD STOP CALLING IT A "COUP". This is a coup. This is a coup. This is a coup, too. What is happening in Canada is a peaceful, legal, perfectly constitutional response to a Cabinet that has lost the confidence of the House. Furthermore, it's already happened in Canada, both officially and unofficially. Everybody take a breath.

While you're breathing, try to think for a moment about your response to the term "coalition government". I saw an awful lot of "look at Italy and Israel!!!! Coalitions are doomed to failure!!!!!1!!" And I suppose you have a point, Mr. "Jack Layton is a Communist" of St. Albert Catholic High School, especially when you consider how much more Canada has in common with Israel than with Sweden, Ireland, Germany, or any other of the numerous stable, peaceful democracies listed here. I hear Switzerland is a real hell-hole these days - good thing those train tickets to Zurich are refundable.

I'm going to talk about Austria for a minute, since its the only country that I've had the good fortune to live in under a coalition government, not to mention during an election of same. I'll be the first to admit that Austrian politics fall on the "kind of messed" side of the (democratic) political spectrum. Full disclosure: in the past two months, the following things have happened.

  • An election occurred, after the previous coalition government split following disagreement over Austria's level of involvement in and committment to the EU
  • 16-to-18-year-olds, voting in their first election in Austrian history, overwhelmingly tilted to the far-right, leading to a minority parliament with representation from the center-left (29%), center-right (26%), far right (18%), batshit-crazy right (11%), and green (10%) parties
  • Immediately following the elections, two of the major parties (center-right and green) changed leaders, seemingly overnight
  • The overly-tanned and immensely-popular-in-certain-circles leader of the batshit-crazies died in a car accident, leaving his 28-year-old protegé/best friend/rumoured lover to take the helm
  • After considerable soul-searching, the leader of the center-right party rejects appeals from the far right to form government, and instead reaches out to the leader of the center-left
  • They take their sweet-ass time coming to a consensus on policy and cabinet positions, leaving plenty of time for the newly-minted Saviour of the Batshit-Crazies to resign his party's house leadership, take a week to think about it, and then quit politics altogether to make a movie about his deceased mentor/maybe-boyfriend and weep publicly
  • The leader of the center-right gets cold feet, and publicly submits "10 Important Questions" to his would-be coalition partner. He NEEDS ANSWERS! One of the questions may have been, "do you like me or like like me?"
  • The center-left guy answers the questions the next day in a national newspaper, and the government is formed in the next week. The leader of the center-left (Werner Faymann) is the new Chancellor, Joseph Proll (center-right kingmaker) is Vice-Chancellor, and Cabinet positions were split evenly between the parties.
Austrian politics are not without drama. However, there are some things that they are without, namely negative advertisements, fear-mongering, and childish name-calling. Coalition governments are the norm in Austria, and people accept that for them to work, for the most part, everyone has to play nice. The discussion that went on during the campaign, and during the post-election playmaking was...discussion. There were no viral marketing blitzes, no cross-country rallies, nothing that had a "-gate" appended to it. The parties' platforms were laid out in the newspapers, even the free, tabloid-style ones I read on the train to practice German.

I don't mean to paint Austria as an idyllic, post-partisan dreamworld - it's not, and there are issues. The point is that there has come to Europe a sense that government consists of everyone who has been elected to it. That perhaps MPs should think of governing before they think of securing their legacies. That perhaps agendas should be discussed and revised, rather than imposed. That perhaps everyone in Canada should relax and think about things before screaming about socialists, separatists, and not-a-leaders (oh my!).

And while I'm thinking about it, someone should tell Stephen Harper that, while I'm holding in my Nelson laugh in the spirit of cooperation, a bully is not the same thing as a leader. Leaders talk to people, leaders inspire, leaders take counsel, and above all, leaders get shit done. Something about living in glass PM residences and not throwing parliamentary maces...? Man, I can't wait to see what happens.

Oh yeah, and Austria also has proportional representation. Just in case you were wondering.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Keep on fighting those stereotypes

From Roy MacGregor's article "The Audacity of Obama", published in the Globe and Mail:

No wonder, then, that Peter Newman once suggested that "The quintessential Canadian hero may have been Mackenzie King, who ruled this country longer than any other man, enjoyed the sex life of a gnat, never took a political chance and was so fastidious that, on a 1949 visit to his good friend John D. Rockefeller, he brought along six spare shoelaces."

Jezt kann ich ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen

I've been trying to learn German. I think I can now amend this to "I've been learning some German", because yesterday at work I understood fully 90% of a politely heated conversation about booking holiday vacation time via the company intranet ("No! If you don't come in on the BLUE days, it's an automatic vacation - otherwise the time is just subtracted from your total." "I think you are wrong." "You are the one who is wrong."...etc. Blows were narrowly avoided.)

The month of intensive language courses I took - four days a weeks, three hours a day, after work - was exhausting but undoubtedly useful. That was in September, and since then the world around me has been slowly turning into something I understand again. I've gone from doing mental happy dances at any intelligible overheard conversation (my first triumph: "Maximillian! How many times do I have to tell you?") to being annoyed when I can't understand. I still sound like an idiot three-year-old when I try to speak in German myself, but with more courses coming up in January, I hope to soon progress to the level of a five-year-old who's a just a little slow.

A fun upside of trying to learn German at work is the hilarious Austrian idioms, slang, and bizarre contractions my colleagues use. Of late, my favourite is the Upper Austrian phrase, "Auf, und der Kuh nach!" You say it when you want someone to get up and leave with you, and Juergen translated it as "Get up and follow the cow", but I prefer the word-for-word translation of "Up, and after the cow!". It calls to mind frantic Austrian farmers charging pell-mell through hilly pastures, shouting at neighbouring farmers to help them or, God forbid, there'll be no cheeses this Christmas!

I've also had my first sweet taste of being able to talk right in front of someone who has no clue what you're saying. This is snobby and mean, and I haven't done it very much at all, but one of my friends here is a fellow Canadian intern who's dating a Turkish-Austrian girl, and it is endlessly entertaining to discuss Turkish football with his girlfriend while he thinks we're talking about him.

Lastly and most obviously, there are some things that just sound hilarious in German. Of course, it's full of crazy-ass compound nouns. Why call it a fridge when you can call it a "cold cupboard"? Doesn't a shootout make more sense as an "eleven meter kicking"? One of the undisputed kings of these is the Donaudampfshiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenskajuetenschluesseloch, or the keyhole of the door to the cabin of the captain of a steamship company operating on the Danube. I'm still trying to find a way to work it into a sentence. A shorter but no more practical example is the sign displayed in the window of a nearby supermarket, proclaiming "Monday is Banana Day!". It would be funny anyway, but the fact that "Bananentag" is one word makes it gold.

In conclusion, languages are fun, and German is extra fun because you can essentially invent words whenever you want. Eat your heart out, Shakespeare.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Two things that only two select groups of people will appreciate

I met an Austrian guy the other night who not only lived in Victoria long enough to do a Master's thesis at UVic, but also visited Toronto long enough to meet with a...mutual acquaintance at U of T.

For the Victorians - he lived in Cook St. Village! And when I was describing the location of my parents' house to him, he said, "oh, Craigflower! Like the bus route?"

For the Engscis - we had the following conversation about his day at U of T:

Austrian guy: I was only there for an afternoon, but I'd previously arranged to meet with a professor there who's a bit of a bigshot in my field

Kari: Oh? What do you study?

Austrian guy: Computer Science. The professor seemed really smart, and he sounded excited to meet me in his emails, but when I got there it seemed that he'd completely forgotten about me and scheduled something else instead. It was interesting to meet him though. He's really young for a prof - I think he was 28 or so when I was there.

Kari: Any chance his name was Parham Aarabi?

Austrian guy: ...yeah. I thought you said you studied Aerospace?

Kari: Um, I did, but during the Foundation Years...I mean, I was in this program called...yeah, it's kind of complicated.

Austrian guy: Ok. Say, that guy's a little arrogant, isn't he?

Kari: Just a bit. Did he tell you about how he's building the car from Knight Rider?

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Four years ago

Four years ago, I was sitting on Deniz's bed in UC, burning myself on overheated transistors, writing a design proposal that was neither realistic nor accurate, and cursing as we watched a sea of red expand across the continental United States on CNN.com.

Tonight, it is 4:13am, and I have just returned home from a bar where a hundred ecstatic, travelling Democrats remain, drinking cider and wine spritzers because the beer has run out, and cheering on their guy with voices that are already hoarse.

CNN.com currently projects 207 electoral votes for Obama, not including California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, or Florida. There is a strong Democratic Senate majority. Elizabeth Dole lost. I am going to bed. 2008 wins.