Last Day

Today was the last full day in Vienna and I personally had mixed emotions about it. For the last 50 days I have been in Europe and had the MOST incredible experience of my life and I really didn’t want it to end. It was one big fairy tale. On the other hand, it’s been a while since I have seen my friends and family, a while since I have had a legitimately good cheeseburger and an IPA.

When I look back on the trip, there are some things that I will definitely miss:

-Public Transportation – Getting from point A to point B is fun in Europe when you don’t have a car. Since we had a month long pass for the above ground trams and the U-Bahn and city busses we were able to get anywhere with ease and see the entire city. Also, when you take public transportation, you see what is going on around you, you see who’s going to work, what they are wearing, who is going out for drinks, who just shot up heroin and can barely stand up, you really learn more about the city you are living. And of course, the public transport is pretty reliable so you do make it to where you are going in a reasonable amount of time.

-City Centers – in the US, we lack the historical city structure that is ubiquitous in Europe. All the cities here are similar in that there is a city center and then the city expanded around that. In Vienna this is obvious because you have the city center within the Ringstrasse and then outside of that you start to have more and more housing and commercial expansion and then when you get to the outskirts you have houses with yards. My city of Thousand Oaks doesn’t have a city center, so there is really no place to go where there are lots of people just hanging out. City centers are awesome!

-Wine and Beer Gardens, Cafes – in the US we lack any sort of restaurant or café that resembles these fine establishments in Europe. With cafes, I think that a lot of the reason why ours aren’t as good is attributed to the fact that our cities don’t have a city center for the most part. The beauty of the city center is that there are always people there, people walking around, people going to work, people on dates, and when you put a couple chairs facing the street, people will want to sit there and have a conversation and watch the world move around them. It is really fun to just sit down and watch, but with strip malls and random streets in the US, we don’t have the luxury of such establishments. Wine gardens and beer gardens are something so foreign because when you think wine and wineries in the US, it’s more of an adult endeavor that you might do with a spouse or your parents. But wine gardens are so much different because it is a casual experience, you sit down and get some wine and chat and enjoy, the setting is perfect, the wine is perfect and you are with good people, there is nothing snobby or stuck up about it. And if you want food, you just go up to the counter and order some pork or sausage, it is fantastic and it is really reasonable too!

-Lifestyle – everything moves at a different pace here, it isn’t that it’s faster or slower, it’s just different. It’s hard to describe it, but there are definitely hectic parts of days which are just like everywhere else in the world, and then there are slower ones, like going to a café and getting a coffee and just sitting. It is definitely something that should be experienced, because I think that the people in Europe share closer bonds with each other than we do in the US. I don’t think that TV is as big as it is in the US, I think that they do more with what they have around them, they go to parks, to the river, walk around the city, they are more personable in my opinion, at least from the people I met and spent time with. I really enjoyed this aspect of Europe!

Things that I miss from home:

-Family and friends

-Burgers

-Convenience stores

-Stores open on Sundays

-IPAs

-Live American sports

So in the end, I do miss the US, so I’m excited to get back home and grab an In-N-Out burger and watch baseball! But I will never forget this trip and Vienna, THE BEST EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE!

Thanks Kathy!

Danube River Valley

Today was a free day for us, so Karl, Matt, Ryan, Maria, AJ, Ben and I went and rented bikes to ride from Melk to Krems along the Danube. After an hour long train ride or so we got off the train in Melk and began our journey. We started off at the Abbey in Melk which was absolutely beautiful. Then we headed off on our bike for the 37 km ride. It was really one of the best days in my life, it was ridiculous how amazing everything. Little city after little city, vineyards everywhere, castles just sitting on the tops of the hills. For 37 km it felt like nothing, my legs were hurting a little bit, but you just get so caught up in what’s around you that you forget that you are doing any work. We stopped and got some food at a little restaurant at the base of a hill that had the remains of a castle on top of it. The food was so good and the restaurant was overlooking the Danube. After food we got back on our bike to go check out the castle, but as we started riding, Ben got a flat tire. We ended up a kilometer or so down the road at a gas station where we were lucky enough to have a nice guy come and help us get his tire back up and running. We made it the rest of the way with no problems.

We also had a chance to see the Dürstein Castle where Richard the Lionheart was held captive. It was an incredibly hard hike considering this was very near the end of the bike ride, so we were getting tired, we hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and we had to climb a mountain, everything was going against us. But we made it and the view was unreal. I know that Richard the Lionheart probably didn’t get out much to check out this view, but if he did, this might not be the worst place to be held captive.

We made it to Krems and then got some eiscafes and hopped back on the train to Vienna and called it a day. If you go to Austria you must make this bike ride, it will blow your mind!

United Nations

Today we went to the United Nations Vienna International Center for the majority of the day to speak with employees at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as some interns so we could learn a little more about what it’s like to intern at the UN and the qualifications it takes to get in.

Upon arriving at the UN, I had done some research on the organizations we were going to be talking with and I had a pretty good understanding of what there functions were. It is interesting to note that although the VIC is located within the city limits of Vienna and within the country of Austria, it is not part of Austria. We had to bring passports to get onto the premises because it is international territory. This also means that the VIC has there own police, their own fire department, and they don’t have anything to do with the Vienna or Austria, except for the location of it all. First we had a 45 minute tour some of the buildings and some background information on the UN. The basics of the UN are that there are 193 member states, who are all part of the UN for one reason, to maintain peace. The VIC has 5 sub-organizations located on the premises. Our guide Petra asked us an interesting question; Why would the UN decide to put a headquarters in Vienna if they already had one in Geneva, Switzerland? The reason she told us was that Vienna is the furthest most eastern capital city in Western Europe which meant that it was a prime location for meetings and conferences because it was easily accessible, similar to how our study abroad is called “Vienna: At the Crossroads of Europe.” Effectively, it’s location to the former Iron Curtain is important. The UN needs money to run and function, so each member state pays a percentage of their GDP for the services of the UN, which means that the United States pays 18% of the total UN budget, and the top 5 budget supports account for around 50% of the budget. Last logistical item regarding the UN as a whole is that there are 6 officials languages, English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Russian.

After the tour and after lunch we had a lecture from an employee of the IAEA. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency started with the goals of providing safety in the form of preventing accidents, security by preventing malicious acts, and safeguards by promoting non-proliferation. When I though IAEA, I immediately wanted to think straight to the nuclear weapons and not to all the other benefits of atomic energy. For example, X-rays and radiation equipment are forms of atomic energy that benefit people. There is a huge discrepancy in the number of radiation machines per country, in the United States there is 1 radiation machine for every 100,000 people, which means that need this machine can get access, but in Tanzania, there are 3 machines for 40,000,000. So the UN has the task of trying to spread the benefits of these machines. Radiation also proved helpful to Mediterranean Fruit Flies, which were laying larvae in fruit and then the larvae eat the fruit from the inside, but the UN was able to create a fruit fly that could not reproduce so the number of fruit with fruit fly larvae decreased significantly. So although it is easy to jump to conclusions and say atomic energy is bad, it is a important and growing sector of the world. But back to nuclear weapons; in 1970 there was the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which said that the first 5 states that had tested nuclear weaponry were allowed to keep them, but nobody else could gain them. These 5 were the US, Great Britain, Russia, China, and France. The treaty has been successful in creating an atmosphere of peace regarding nuclear armaments but there are still 4 countries with nuclear power that have yet to agree with the treaty, those are North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel. The most interesting take away from this lecture for me was the fact that the UNIAEA really doesn’t have the power to do anything like stop a country from creating weaponry or making a country not do something with atomic energy. The UN is not a police force, so they can just offer their help when it comes to safety matters. I want to say that I wish they would be more of a police force but that would create a system that would create corruption at all levels and that would not maintain peace.

One of my questions was regarding the phasing out of nuclear energy in wealthy states. How will the role of the UNIAEA change with the phasing out of nuclear energy? In Belgium, the country voted to phase out nuclear energy by the 2020s, and other countries have similar aspirations. Obviously, there will always be countries that have nuclear energy such as France and the US, but with cities with nuclear reactors that are close in proximity and the recent Japanese disaster, maybe more and more will chose a different path in regards to energy.

Our next lecture was from a man from the UNODC who talked to us about human trafficking in the world and what the UN is doing to ameliorate the situation. He really wanted to emphasize that the human trafficking is EXPLOITATION, whether it is labor or sex or anything, you are taking someone’s life and exploitation them for your benefit. The UN can only do so much, more than anything they aim is to educate people around the world about trafficking. It is kind of sad in my opinion that the UN is not policing something as serious as this, but like I said with the IAEA, it is just not possible. With so many people being trafficked within countries and between countries, the UNODC is faced with an enormous task, and via education, they hope to get people aware and then trafficking would decrease.

My question was about the funding of the organization. If the UNODC wants to put an end to the problem of the trafficking of people and illicit drugs, yet does not receive enough funding to be most effective, what is the organization doing to increase funding? For me, the fact that the organization is mostly educating does not make me feel incredibly great about what they are doing. Obviously there is a fine line between doing good and turning into something corrupt, but there has got to be more that the UNODC can do to stop the trafficking of people.

All in all, the UN was a really cool place, but they do not do what they seemed to do before we went there in my opinion. I will not doubt the good they do for the world, because they are a huge factor in maintaining and promoting peace in the world, but I do think they can do more, it is just a matter of how.

Adolf Frankl Gallery

Today we had a free day which some of us had the opportunity to go and meet up with Thomas Frankl at his art gallery of his late father’s work. It was a truly great experience because he talked us through his father’s paintings. From the early 60’s his father began painting pictures about the Holocaust and the Nazis. Although he survived the Holocaust, he was unable to express his experiences for a long time after. Thomas said that his father, Adolf, was lucky that he had the ability to express himself through art, because he was not able to do the same with words, and by holding in the emotions life might have been that much harder for him after the Holocaust. His pictures were beautiful and powerful, they told the stories of his home town Bratislava, Slovakia and how the Nazis came in. It was really interesting how he used so many bright colors in some of his works, because it is such a dark topic, but at the same time there were paintings that were bright in some places and then when the Nazis were portrayed it would get darker and darker. For me, art was not something of interest, but with artists like Adolf, there is more to art, it is not just something to hang up, but it really has meaning and emotion. Especially considering the fact that this was his only form of expressing his emotions from the Holocaust. Thomas said that they did have the chance to film him later in life so that his grandkids and all others would be able to see it, but I think that was in 1989, so these paintings become even more powerful in my mind because this was all he could do to tell what happened.

He was very talented in this sense, because although he painted about a certain theme and had a definite style, they were all so different and successful in telling his story. The gallery was a small little place that was located in the Judenplatz, so it was a great location considering it’s topic, and we were very lucky to have Thomas show us his father’s works and share his life with us.

Wine Gardens

Today was a recovery day from lots of traveling and not a lot of sleep, but I did take on the endeavor of going to the wine garden with AJ, Lili, Gezi, and John so they could film their video for their project on wine gardens. We made our way up to Klosternueburg again to visit a wine garden before we met with Kathy and some others to go to another wine garden and eat and drink with some of the Augustinian Canons. The wine garden was awesome, I love the idea that you can go to a place drink wine and eat really good food for a good price. It looks like someone’s house with a bunch of tables and it is like a deli service where you go up to the counter and order your food and then take it back to the table. I got some pork and blood sausage, which was a bold move. The pork was incredible, it was nice and fatty, they pour a little juice over it and it’s just heavenly. The blood sausage on the other hand was a little tough. I enjoy the flavor of blood sausage in the beginning, but the after taste is a little weird. Also, the texture isn’t really my cup of tea. So those factors coupled with the fact that everybody else around me is telling me how much they hate it and how gross it is just made it even harder. I only ate half of it, but what the hell, I did order it! After they finished filming for their video, we made our way to the second wine garden where we met Kathy and the others. This was the same deal as before with the deli style service. Of course, I ordered some more pork and loved it again. At this wine garden it was interesting because we were sitting with Ambrose, the Canon from Klosternueburg, and he was getting into debates with us about religion and sex and drugs and everything. At one point we asked him to ask us a question. So he asked us; “If you do not believe in God, then how can you be a (worthy? Legitimate?) person?” AJ responded that there are surroundings growing up that help us construct certain ideas and morals that help us lead worthy and fulfilling lives, and I agreed with him, but Ambrose wouldn’t even listen, and this is what pissed me off about this guy, I would try and get a word in and I get a hand in the face. It was so childish, I mean here is a guy who has spent the last 15 years or so of his life devoted to his religion and his God, and he’s debating with a bunch of history students who don’t focus their lives on opposing his views. It’s like the New York Yankees playing against your high schools baseball team, it no contest. His job is to win those arguments, and he doesn’t care what anyone has to say. I’m not saying he is a bad person, I just don’t respect his ways of arguing, he’s a smart guy, he doesn’t need to stoop to that level.