Silvester in Vienna

*Jane in Vienna*

I have been in Vienna since December 17th. Most of my visit here has been spent with Nick's immediate family, who came to Vienna for the holidays. We have been doing a lot of touristy things with them, which has been nice because we could have never seen so many things without Nick's parents paying for it, but after a few weeks of doing this we are both ready to get back to working on our dissertations and settling back into a daily routine.

We spent Dec. 29-30 in Budapest with Nick's parents. It's a really weird place! Nick and I went there on our honeymoon three years ago, and the bizarreness of the language to us English speakers was enough to make it strange. It's really the language of the Magyar tribe that for whatever reason never died out. It's closest relative is Finnish, but even there the relationship is distant. After my second visit to Budapest I have finally figured out some Hungarian words, although nothing helpful. "Jegy" means ticket, and "Ter" means square. Then there are all of the Soviet era leftover statues and buildings, and for some reason piles of rubble and unfinished construction sites pervade the outskirts of Budapest and aren't uncommon even in affluent places within the city. In this picture an unattractive building site lies on the ground of the royal palace.

New Year's Eve is called "Silvester" in Austria because Dec. 31st is St. Silvester's Day. The same name was used in Hungary, based on advertisements I saw in Budapest. Vienna holds a huge outdoor celebration for Silvester, but unlike Times Square, people are allowed to drink outside and there are no security checks required. The city set up several stages in downtown and connected all of them by the "Silvester Pfad" (path), marked by colorful flags.

Nick and I planned to ring in the new year at St Steven's Place, but our low tolerance for the European musical sensibility caused us to relocate to a bar near the university at around 11pm. The music there was still pretty irritating, but occasionally the DJ played things we liked. So Europeans love rock music, but they don't understand it the same way Americans do. Basically, Americans tend to understand the music in a much more African-American influenced way - we love the backbeat, gritty unpolished sounds, and it still stands for rebellion. In Europe rock tends to be polished and pretty, and everything tends towards either chanson or dance music. To me the rock often gets lost. The stage pictured above seemed to be the most popular, and all it consisted of was some kids dancing to remixed American music. The dancers didn't seem to have planned very much ahead of time, and there dances reminded me of Stomp competitions. They were silly, but the music was disappointing to us because it all just boiled down to dance music. "Billy Jean," "Country Road," and the White Stripes "Seven Nation Army" were all squared up to a dance beat, which was so prominent that most of the tracks from the original song had been stripped away. Michael Jackson's voice was barely audible in Billy Jean!! We enjoyed observing a musical culture that was so similar and yet so different to our own, but we could only take so much of getting excited when a song would start and then hearing it quickly turn into the same dance music. The people in the crowd, though, loved this stuff. Everyone sang along when there were occasional words and danced nonstop. (By the way, the bass part to "Seven Nation Army" has already spread to European crowds). Other fascinating stages included the cover band stage at City Hall - when we were there a Brian Adams cover band was playing (seriously - do these even exist in the US or Canada? Ok, they probably do in Canada...) There was also a stage for older people that featured music that reminded me of one of those variety shows from the 60s.

Apparently there is no law against fireworks in Vienna, at least not on New Year's Eve. People were lighting them up throughout the day in our neighborhood, which is usually very quiet. You would walk down the street and suddenly jump because some kids had lit 30 firecrackers on the sidewalk in front of you. This made us on edge, but it was also neat that people were making their own celebrations rather than waiting for the government to do it for them. At midnight Nick and I were at a bar, and everyone ran out of the building to watch fireworks shooting off in all directions, as people happily took it upon themselves to make the show. The scene doesn't really come across in this picture - but you can see some ground-level fireworks in the background and all of the smoke in the area. As we rode the U-Bahn home people were lighting fireworks at the stations. Even though we were weary from our weeks of holiday traveling and touring, the night was still really fun. Prosit neues Jahr, everyone!