Half Way Point of My Sabbatical

I realize with the beginning of October that I'm at the half-way point of my sabbatical. It seems hard for me to absorb all the experiences I've been having, of being a foreigner in a foreign country, of trying to negotiate everything in German, the language of Austria, and feeling at times like a loner and stranger in a big city, Vienna. On the other hand, I have also had several experiences of hospitality, offered, strangely enough, by church people of the English language Protestant congregation I've attended twice now, the Vienna Community Church. In both cases the people inviting me to meet them for coffee in a cafe or to dinner in their home have been American women married to Austrian men, who live on a semi-permanent basis in Vienna and know what it's like, from personal experience, to be a foreigner in this culture. The Viennese, though often charming at one level, are not used to welcoming the stranger in their midst, and though the city has become quite multi-cultural over the past 15 years since Austria joined the E.U., the cultures tend to co-exist side by side, with little interaction between them. There are a lot of immigrants in Vienna from Middle Eastern and African countries, but rubbing shoulders together on the public transportation system or in the streets doesn't mean communicating much with each other. You see quite a few women wearing burkas or head scarves, and I would estimate the population of Vienna is now maybe 10 to 20 per cent Muslims from Turkey and other countries in the Middle East. There is an uneasy co-existence between them and the Austrian people who've lived here forever, and you see political posters plastered all over the place advocating getting tough on immigration and crime, linking the two as one phenomenon in the Austrians' minds. Whether the crime statistics actually support this linkage is hard to determine, but there is an assumption in many Austrians' minds that the immigrants are responsible for a sizable increase in the crime rate in Vienna over the past 15 years.

Muslim immigrant women in Zell am See, Austria

Anyway, it's an interesting social phenomenon to observe. I've gotten quite well acquainted with the subway and tram system. It's wonderfully well engineered, and you can get anywhere in the city quickly and cheaply using the public transportation. It makes the Twin Cities light rail and buses look pretty paltry in comparison. Taxes are high here, but there are a lot of social services provided which make the quality of life better for all. This is part of the reason why there are so many immigrants... they are here for economic opportunity and an improvement in their quality of life. Perhaps with their kids making up a sizable per centage of the school age population, the next generations of Austrians and immigrants will get to know each other and learn to appreciate and accept ethnic and cultural diversity as the norm and not a problem to be groused about!

New faces of Austria.

I've had a busy week hosting my mother who came to spend 8 days with me here. We rented a car and drove south, to Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, and then back up into the Austrian Alps. We had excellent weather most everywhere we went, and I got to hike on the glacier leading up to the highest mountain in the Austrian Alps, the Grossglockner. You can see some of the pictures below.

T F-S by the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain at 12,000 ft.

You can see a crevasse here that is characteristic of the glacier's rapid melting, due to global warming. There were markers showing how far it's retreated over the past 40 years.