Klettern macht Spass (Climbing is Fun!)

*Jane in Vienna*

This afternoon we went to a bouldering gym just a few blocks from the Viennese opera house. If you want to imagine our journey, we live just east of the Schönbrunn castle, in the west part of the city. A street encircles the center of Vienna, aptly named the Ringstrasse, and the opera sits on the Opernring, which takes up from 6 to 7 o’clock on the Ringstrasse.

As you can see from the pictures we have posted, this place is wunderbar! You enter an inconspicuous large door, cross a small inner courtyard, and then suddenly you are in a gym that consists of three floors and several rooms with climbing holds plastered all over the walls and ceilings. We thought this might be boring, because we are used to climbing several feet in the air attached to a rope at Ohio State’s rec center, but there were so many different holds and surfaces that this was hardly the case. At first I was scared to climb up to the ceiling, because once I got there I had to fall several feet to the mats below, but after awhile even this became enjoyable. Nick and I truly felt like we were at a playground for grownups – we were playing and it was perfectly acceptable behavior. I sensed that the other climbers curiosity about two Americans messing around in their gym. Did we get lost while touring the opera? Unfortunately we could only enter one time without paying a lot of money to join this climbing society. We have to do this if we ever want to go again.

We only bouldered for an hour, because we quickly grew tired from hoisting our bodies underneath the many overhung surfaces (surfaces that lean out past vertical). At the end I finally started to feel comfortable with the rather different moves that bouldering requires versus toprope climbing, but my arms were conversely too tired for me to take much advantage.

One of the strange things about visiting another country is that you are confronted with a new world of sports. Of course here soccer is popular, but all kinds of car racing are just as popular, and so is the curious sport of handball. Climbing is quite popular in Austria, perhaps because of the Alps. Not only have most people in the U.S. never gone climbing in their lives while it is common in Austria, but the Austrians take a very different approach. In the US, at least according to my experience, the reason to go climbing for most who do it is to have fun in a general kind of way. At this gym in Austria the intention was more to learn how to use the body with maximum efficiency, and many of the adults we encountered climbed silently, seriously, and alone. While we were at the climbing gym we were displaced from one of the rooms by a large group of children who were taking some sort of climbing class. This kind of activity is so foreign to American children. Just how different could a child turn out depending on what kind of sport he/she engages during the formative years? Perhaps diplomats should devote some study to the subject.