First Impressions After One Week In Vienna

This city is old. Evidence suggests that the site of this city has been continuously occupied since 500 BCE. In that time it has been a military outpost, a medieval city, the de facto Capital of one Empire, and the de jure Capital of another. It has held great conferences, and created art and music admired around the world. The Imperial family of this city once issued an ultimatum that would drastically alter the modern political landscape of the world. Kings, musicians, philosophers, and tacticians and more have all lived in this old city, and now I am here, just another person, added to the tapestry of the city.

While all of us on this trip took a class about the history and culture of Vienna before arriving here one thing I was wholly unable to grasp was the sheer scale of everything. In truth I should have known that the Karlskirche would be large, and Stephansdom even more so, they are after all grand churches. However nothing really can prepare you for when you are actually standing in front of it, or even standing inside of it during mass.

Of course the same day that I discovered the vast scale of these famous buildings I also learned a second valuable lesson. On Sunday everything is closed. Once again in our history and culture seminar we learned of how shops would be closed, but it was once again an entirely weird experience walking around the city and seeing the sheer number of shops that had been open the day before with people buzzing in and out of, closed with no one in sight. So this week I made doubly sure to have stocked up on groceries before my second Sunday in Vienna.

On top of these two previous lessons I also suffered from some minor culture shock, but not in the ways I would have thought. First is that the keyholes that I am using, and most the ones I have seen, are upside down. This to me seems really trivial, but for some reason sticks in my head, even as I am writing this. It’s hard to take the key into lock habit I have developed for many years and then flip it 180 degrees. The other thing is that in the parks, and gardens, the ducks that are in the ponds are the same as back home. I don’t know why, but I had assumed that a different continent would bring different ducks.

Vienna is one great bundle of history, culture, and architecture, and I have only just scratched the surface of what I can experience, so here is to what the future of my stay here has in store.