Berkley Center

As I was growing up, I traveled almost every summer to Europe to visit family—but it was always with my family. After living in the Washington, DC metro area for all my life, studying abroad in Vienna was the first time I really got away from anything I knew for an extended period of time—and I had so much to learn. I knew of some basic cultural differences already from past experiences here (though see my last blog post for some I wasn’t expecting at all), so I thought that I would be well-prepared to start a life here.

When I first arrived in Vienna, I did everything I could to blend in with the Viennese. I wanted anything but to live up to the loud, stupid, drunk American stereotype I thought the locals would expect. I was very careful to try to pick up all of even the minor quirks of life in Vienna that I could identify and, more often than not, I set myself up to trip over German as I tried to speak too quickly. In fact, this fear of being identified as American and being connected to a negative stereotype made me too nervous to do some things which were not in my immediate comfort zone, such as asking questions in a class full of native German speakers, trying restaurants or food stands I hadn’t been to before, or having a longer than 20 second conversation with the man at our closest wurstelstand (hot dog stand).

After a few weeks of this, I started to get sick of the same old things and finally started branching out. Classmates had been friendly and seemed genuinely interested in the fact that I was American, would ask me questions about life in Washington, DC, and didn’t seem to stereotype me at all. This is when I began to be more comfortable living in Vienna and less afraid of being identified as American—because, after all, I am!

The other Georgetown students and I were invited to a student’s birthday celebration in part because we were American—she’d heard that toga parties happened all the time at college and wanted Americans to come celebrate in their typical way. We told her that toga parties weren’t really a huge thing, but of course eagerly accepted the invitation to join a local in her home, excited but really focused on making a good impression. The usual 20-somethings and their various vices surrounded us, and the Austrian students present picked us apart and made me feel more welcome in Austria than I’d felt before because of how, instead of the judgment I had been expecting about being from a different place, they were not only accepting of but excited about the fact that we were American.

It took this welcoming experience to feel like I was really at home here, and to completely let go of my fear of being stereotyped. I worry now less about completely blending in and more about discovering everything I can in my last two months here before I leave without being nervous, and I think this is the most important discovery I could have made in my time here while there’s still time to do that.