Кругозор [krugozor] (Russian) – world view, horizon, mental outlook, range of interests, perspective, broad-mindedness.
The idea of having a broader understanding of the world.
This was a word I came across whilst drinking Baileys and eating Kazakh chocolates with two friends from the summer course. One was from Ukraine and the other from Kazakhstan, but they were speaking in English for my benefit. Whilst talking about the differences in our cultural heritage and how rich the diversity on the summer course was, we ran into this. After a silence followed by a burst of Russian back and forth, hand gestures were used to describe what was meant. I knew exactly what they meant by that point, but I couldn’t find a satisfying way of rendering that in English, so we carried on with the Russian word instead. And so my Кругозор grows.
There really is quite a mix of people on the summer course. To give you a breakdown in numbers: 69 participants, 39 different countries, 6 continents, 25 native languages, 40 years age gap between the youngest and oldest.
All the summer course participants.
As such, I have found myself forced to confront the idea that many UK-based linguists try and combat: that English is a universal language. While I wouldn’t say that it’s the perfect solution that some UK monoglots would like to think it is, the fact that it’s the first language people turn to after German here is indicative of its universal status. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far here speaks some English, however little, from having studied it in school for some time. But that’s not to say that it’s perfect. Indeed, most of the English that I’ve heard here has been stilted as people try to convey their ideas, often translating very literally from one language into another. Despite that, they usually get their message across. (One guy was telling me on the first day how he didn’t get much sleep because he came to Vienna from Rome on an early morning train and he couldn’t sleep because “the train was dancing”.)
However, there are quite a few native Spanish speakers here, as well as a large Russian contingent and a couple of people from all manner of francophone countries, so I’ve heard those spoken around the academy as well, and when it’s been French, I’ve usually joined in. As a linguist, it has been reassuring in some ways to know that it’s still necessary to speak more than just English and that the languages that I’m studying can actually play a similar role in the right circumstances.
Aside from all of these other languages, what have I actually been doing to improve my German, you know, the reason I came here in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you…
The summer course’s lessons take place every weekday morning for about 3 and a half hours with a break in the middle. There are 6 different classes that we got sorted into based on ability after a written and an oral placement test on the first two days, and I’m glad to say that I’m in the top one. Granted, that’s only partially due to my own language ability, as a surprisingly large number (I’d go as far as to say nearly half) of the course participants had very little German and some had never studied the language before arriving here. My lessons have been a mix of grammar exercises, creative projects like writing and recording our own radio advertisements, reading or watching news articles and thinking about the ideas behind them, and lots of discussion work.
My class at the summer school.
As the head German as a Foreign Language teacher at the summer school, my teacher for the course is very good at what she does, and I’ve already started taking notes from her for lesson ideas for when I’m working as an English teaching assistant in Strasbourg. She’s a teacher whose questions are often curve balls, thrown such that the first difficulties are not linguistic ones where I lack the means of expression, but mental ones where I lack the coherent ideas to express until I’ve had time to reflect. Trying to discuss not what instrument you would play, but what instrument you would be on the first day saw many confused faces before we started thinking about the various implications and aspects. She’s also someone whose language occasionally reminds me of modern dystopian fiction, referring to her personal preferences as belonging to a particular faction. I hadn’t realised that ice cream parlours were such a divisive topic of conversation in Vienna.
The other half of the summer course has been the afternoon programme of activities. Some days this has been research projects about different parts of the city, where we’ve had to go out and explore the area and then give a presentation to the rest of the class about it afterwards. We’ve also had various excursions and tours to different points of interest in the city.
A group of us exploring a local district of the city.
At the end of the first week, we took a coach ride for about half an hour out to the outskirts of the city and to the countryside, where we went for a walk through the woods. I say that like it was a calm and pleasant experience, and not the long, drawn-out ordeal it turned out to be. Ok, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But trying to take a group of about 50 people through woods with no clearly marked trails and steep uneven terrain is rarely easy, never mind when you end up taking ‘shortcuts’ and getting slightly disorientated whilst those at the back fall further and further behind, traipsing along and regretting their choice of footwear. As it turns out, flip-flop style sandals aren’t really the best idea when you’ve got a 4km walk through a forest that would be acceptable terrain for D of E.
In front of a vineyard, but still nearly 1km away from the wine…
Nevertheless, we made it to the Heuriger, an Austrian invention, which is essentially a place where you can drink wine produced from the local vineyards and enjoy a good meal. The word ‘heuriger’ comes from the Austrian-German ‘heuer’, meaning this year, and refers to the grapes grown and turned into wine this year. By the time we reached here, I was definitely ready for a drink… or two…
Our table at the Heuriger. Yes, that is my 3rd glass of wine. Well, if they will keep bringing more…
In the second week of the course, we went on visits to the National Library, where there’s currently an exhibition on about life in Austria in the First World War. Coming from Oxford, home to some of the most beautiful libraries I’ve ever seen, I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it was gorgeous. It was also really interesting to see the exhibition, not only because Representations of War is one of the topics for my Finals oral exam, but also because it’s not very often that you get to see history told from a completely different perspective, but not just one that’s the polar opposite of everything you’ve been told so far.
I have a lot of time for libraries with marble pillars and painted fresco ceilings.
We also went to the Art History Museum later that week, but I don’t have any particularly interesting photos or tales from that one, I’m afraid. I’d already visited it with my family at the beginning of the month, so I mainly went along for the guided tour we had and the opportunity to get another look at a few of my favourite pieces.
Last week, we went to the Imperial Furniture Museum, which I appreciate may not sound like the most thrilling place in the world, but I actually rather enjoyed it. Ok, so I started losing interest after looking at the 100th dining table chair, but our tour guide in the museum was really good at telling us the stories behind some of the pieces which helped bring the history to life a bit more than looking at an ornate writing desk might otherwise do.
Unrelated to the library and the furniture museum, I found this chair in the Museums Quartier on one of my wanderings.
Those of you familiar with Film Noir will probably have at least heard of, if not seen, The Third Man, a film set in post-WW2 Vienna. Last Monday, the academy organised a screening for us to watch the film, and then on Thursday, we went for a brief tour through part of the Vienna sewer systems where the final chase sequence was filmed. I enjoyed the film, having not seen much of the genre before, so it seemed like a good choice. The tour was… aromatic. Putting it like that makes it sound much more appealing than it was. That being said, I did enjoy the feeling of entering this other world, hidden behind the outward façade of Vienna, getting to see this dark subterranean world and hear the faint roar of traffic rushing over Karlsplatz overheard. It wasn’t an olfactory experience I wish to repeat, but then again I suppose that’s not the tour’s main selling point. Or should that be smelling point…?
In terms of things I’ve been doing outside of the summer course, I’ve been going to even more museums with friends from the summer school. During the first week, a group of us ended up going for a walk through one of the parks and going for a coffee at the Palmhaus café and then going to the Albertina Museum where there’s currently an exhibition showing works from Monet to Picasso. The museum was open later on Wednesdays when we went, and part of that also meant that there was an event going on to try and draw people in, so after we’d had a look around the various galleries, we went out to see what was going on. I must admit, going from Monet and Manet to Nicki Minaj and mojitos was quite a contrast, and not the direction I’d foreseen my evening taking…
Ain’t no party like a museum party…
On the way back from the museum, I also found this. So there’s that.
At the end of the first week, we also took a trip out to the Wachau, a region of Austria west of Vienna, where there are many vineyards and several monasteries. I’m still undecided as to whether I think this is just pure coincidence… Regardless, we had a lovely day in bright sunshine, walking around the various beautiful old buildings and courtyards and enjoying being out in the countryside. One of my friends from the summer course, Maxime, is from Belgium and had driven here to Vienna, so we managed to get around in his car, which was very useful and kind of him, saving us from trying to figure out a system of trains and buses to enable us to get around there.
Whilst we were there, I noticed this sign regarding large vehicles in the area, complete with a very long list of exceptions. I can only assume that lorry drivers in Austria have telescopic eyesight and so have time to read all of these before driving past.
The following day, Maxime, Ariadna (another friend from the summer course) and I went for a look around Museums Quartier, which turned into sitting in a café there whilst it poured with rain. We didn’t end up going into any of the museums then in the end, but we did notice a photobooth in the square, so naturally we stopped off there before heading back our various ways. This was the result:
In case you can’t tell, we weren’t ready for the first one. Apparently Austrian photobooths don’t believe in giving you a countdown or a warning of any kind. We’ve since split the photos, and the second one is now in my wallet next to my driver’s licence. I must remember to show the right photo if I get IDed…
This post is getting quite long, so I’ll leave it here with one final thought I had from the first week of the course. I’ve already got another couple of posts planned, so I’ll probably be updating this twice a week for the next fortnight or so, or until I run out of stories from Vienna to write about.
In the first lesson at the beginning of the summer school, our first task was one of those “go and ask 5 people these questions” tasks, well-known to anyone who’s studied languages, where conversing in the language is enforced through prescribed questions. As harsh as that sounds, it really was an interesting task because of the questions, like the musical instrument one I’ve already mentioned. One question that stood out to me was the following:
Nennen Sie zwei liebenswerte Traditionen Ihres Heimatlandes! (Name two likeable traditions of your home country.)
Now as you may have noticed, the idea of home and a home country was a key part of this, and so naturally the group discussion afterwards turned in this direction. In our group, everyone is from Europe (I’m not sure if that’s technically correct, but as the three Russians are from Kaliningrad, the sense of being in Europe is still there), which meant that we all went in with the mindset of someone used to knowing that on the other side of the nearest border, there would be a different country with a different language and different social customs. We were therefore already aware of the diversity within Europe, and maybe because of that or maybe despite that, the question quickly changed from being a discussion of traditions to the things that we missed. Except the idea of ‘missing’ something was rarely expressed. Instead, we talked about how things differed between the places we call home and Vienna or Austria, often in terms of presence and absence, having a tradition here that doesn’t exist at all at home and that was something completely new to us. We talked about the differences in the food here, in the way people wait unwaveringly for the green man before crossing the straight, in how we interact with the space and the other commuters on the train in the morning. And despite the emotional attachments we have to these things, shown in the raised tone of voice and the smiles that crept over our faces in a moment of personal reverie, we never said that we missed them. Whether for fear of being too intensely patriotic or because we wanted to keep those little idiosyncrasies secret to ourselves, we never expressed a nostalgic longing for those things despite the novelty and excitement of being somewhere new. We spoke politely, we discussed the differences, focusing on the present moment for our new collective point of reference.
It seems that homesickness goes by the name of culture shock now.
In Search of Lost (Reading) Time 