Dan and Em's Blog

I’m originally from Maryland, but I’ve lived in Virginia for the past 17 years.  I’m in shock that there was a significant earthquake there today.  There was, a couple of years ago, a very small one in Maryland that a lot of people in my area felt.  I was awake, rocking Benjamin to sleep, and missed it entirely.  From what I understand, this was not something likely to be missed or mistaken for something else.

Now that I’ve made contact with my entire family (either directly, or through someone else) and I know that they’re safe, my mind is splitting in two different directions.  The first is shock and concern.  Hearing that there was a 6-ish earthquake in Virginia is a little like hearing that all the animals escaped from the zoo and took a stroll down main street:  both are, obviously, possible, but not something you really ever expect to see.  Virginians don’t expect to see earthquakes, let alone strong ones, so I worry that construction isn’t up to it.  I hope that injuries are minimal and few.

The second part of me is jealous.  (Yes, jealous.)  It’s not so much that I have I never felt an earthquake, but that I just missed out on a shared experience for the rest of my family and friends.  In the sense of common memory, I just became an “other”.  “Remember that earthquake?”  No, I was in Austria.  I’m a “Virginia Earthquake” outsider.  I feel like I missed out.

I have two amazing brothers, both younger than me (although in Peter’s case, not by much).  (I also have three sisters, but this post isn’t about them.)  Growing up, both Peter and Adam drove me crazy – they often terrorized my toys and took immense pleasure in destroying my overly particular way of doing just about everything.  But, even when we were little, and tormenting each other, we were always there for each other, and we all loved each other very much . . . and we all knew it, even when we didn’t want to admit it.

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Austria is a landlocked country.  I’ve never even lived in a landlocked state before, so this is a strange concept for me.  Growing up, we went to the beach every summer.  When I was little, my grandmother had a place in Ocean City, Maryland, and then when we got older, we’d go to the Outer Banks in North Carolina or to Cape May in New Jersey.  As an adult, I’ve been to Cancun, the Bahamas, Hawaii and Florida, in addition to trips back to Ocean City.  The beach is regular fixture in my summers, and occasionally even in my falls, winters and springs.  It’s an important part of my childhood memories, and a love that is shared with my entire family.  Only a few years of my life have passed without a trip to the beach, and nearly all of those were for specific reasons (we didn’t go the summer that B was born, for example).

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Today, in my German class, we worked on telling time.  (Actually, we worked on reporting the time and understanding it when someone else tells us — the ability to actually tell time was assumed.)

There are a variety of conventions used, most of which I found to be fairly complicated — some are used by all German speakers, but a few were specific to Austria.  What I found particularly interesting is that after (and including) quarter past the hour, they orient everything to the hour that is coming, rather than the hour that has passed.  For example, you’d say it’s “half eleven” when it’s 10:30.  You’d say it’s “three quarters six” at 5:45 (i.e., three quarters of the hour towards 6:00).  At 8:15, you could either say a quarter after 8:00 or “quarter nine” (a quarter of an hour towards 9:00).

As our teacher said, after a quarter past the hour, that hour is history — old news.  They look ahead to what’s coming, not what’s already happened.  They also ask the time (literally) as “How late is it?”  When I consider that the Austrians are the most punctual people I’ve ever been around, this all seems to make a lot of sense.  They aren’t stuck on where they’re coming from, they’re looking to where they’re going.

I know that it’s supposed to be impolite to discuss finances, but, in the interest of frankness, money has been pretty tight here lately.  Financially, things should be better here than they were at home, but we weren’t counting on carrying the expense of our condo at home for as long as we have.  (In retrospect, I have no idea WHY we weren’t counting on that, but we weren’t.)  We’ve burned through our liquid savings and used up the line of credit extended to us by the bank here in Austria.  It had gotten to the point where we planning to quit grocery shopping and see if we could live off of just what we had on our kitchen shelves between now and Dan’s next pay day (which only comes once a month).

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I speak one language.  I took 7 years of middle school/high school/college French, and my comprehension is ok, but my ability to speak is pretty poor.  I understand some Spanish, just from having heard a lot of it (and because you can make educated guesses on a lot of the nouns if your French vocabulary is decent).  I’m just starting to learn German.  I can sign the alphabet in American Sign Language and I can code in a variety of programming languages.  That’s it.  Actually, I feel pretty good about it.

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I knew, of course, that there would be a language barrier when I moved here.  (The fact that the only thing I knew how to say in German was “Gesundheit” before getting on the plane was a small clue.)  I’m really very fortunate:  as far as I can tell, most people here study at least some English at school.  Under the age of about 40, the vast majority of people I encounter do speak at least a little English.  But, I didn’t know that there would be an additional barrier — the fact that I speak American English and not British English, which is what they study.

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Today began my third week of German class.  I go three days per week, and the first four times I had class my mom was here, so getting there was relatively easy (for me).  All I had to do was get her set up with the things she needed for the boys, get myself ready, and get there.  Travelling alone is pretty easy — I can take stairs or escalator, I can sit in any open seat on the train (or even stand, in a relatively small space), I don’t tend to drop a lot of things, and I walk pretty fast (especially for someone fairly short-legged).

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The holocaust is the proverbial “elephant in room” here in Austria.  This is where it happened, not very long ago.  There are people who are here who lived through it.  It isn’t abstract and it isn’t distant.  I’m not an expert, and I don’t claim or pretend to really understand what it must be like for those who were touched more directly by it.  But I am finding myself more affected by it, more aware of it, living here than I ever have been before.

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