Stumbling Through and Learning The Viennese Culture

By: Leona Pfeiffer

March 12, 2013

Three weeks into my stay in Vienna, I’ve settled in quite well. While the straßenbahn (tram) system still gets me lost from time to time, I know my way around the busier parts of the city—where to bank, buy groceries, pay rent, find classrooms, and go out with other students. I live in an international dorm for exchange students attending all of the universities in Vienna, so it’s not uncommon to run into someone from Sweden going to the business school or someone from Croatia studying at Uni Wien.

Everyone in the dorm says hello when passing strangers in the halls. To each other, we often speak English, which seems to be easier for a majority of the Erasmus students living here to speak than German. I’m reminded of the beginning of my freshman year at Georgetown when I’m around the apartment, as everyone invites everyone to everything, exchanging numbers with people they’ve just met and bonding over new difficulties like how to do laundry and where to get liquor.

Even now, as everybody’s begun to develop a closer group of personal friends, the students here are accepting, outgoing, and interesting; everybody has their unique story to tell, and the people living here are from just about everywhere.

Having this pretty comfortable feeling at my home is all well and good, but it did not at all prepare me for some cultural differences among actual residents of Vienna I’ve encountered so far that I wouldn’t even have thought about.

One greets and goodbyes with kisses here, two of them (“Remember: two!” my apartment mate, a girl from Switzerland who has already been here a semester, warned me. “And start with the right cheek! Otherwise you almost kiss their mouth!”). One reserves hugging for very close friends. The doorknobs do not turn and are there for show, I guess. It is considered rude to enter a private home without first taking off your shoes (some people may have extra hausschuhe, slippers, to offer their guests instead, but not everyone). And finally, if there are no windows, there is a light switch, I swear—somewhere. One just has to find it and run up the flight of stairs while it lasts, as many lights will shut off on their own after a short amount of time to conserve energy.

How did I learn all this?

In my first three weeks, I’ve accidentally hugged a girl goodbye and definitely made her a bit uncomfortable. I’ve spent a solid 15 minutes in the hallway trying to open my door, double-checking the number on the door against the number on the key a hundred times. I’ve spent an entire meeting very conscious of my bright mismatched socks at a coordinator’s home, and I’ve felt my way through many dark tunnels of a hallway. And throughout all of it, I’ve looked like a bit of an idiot—which is exactly how I was supposed to spend my first three weeks looking.

And now that I’ve mastered the correct ways to deal with what initial surprises I encountered, I’m just looking forward to the next step of this cultural experience; this is the fun part: tricking everyone else around here about where I’m really from.

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