Christmas and vegetables

As for probably many others, this last week involved family, festivities, and too much food. I do like Christmas in my home town. For starters, Admont is a pretty safe bet for a true Alpine winter-wonderland. I remember two, perhaps three, green Christmases there in my lifetime. Secondly, Admont is very far away from rampant Christmas consumerism and, in that sense, Christmas there is very un-tainted and honest. Granted, I usually arrive on the 22nd or 23rd, missing most of Advent, but what I see is: Christmas lights on the main street, modest decorations on houses and in shop windows, and, sure, a selection of festive products in the stores, but the true consumerist madness seems to be happily outsourced to larger towns. And last but not least, there are all the childhood memories, down to the smell of the beeswax candles on the equally aromatic (real) tree, the crunch of the snow and the sound of the church bells.

This year, it was still technically a white Christmas, but in all honesty, the weather sucked. There was a fair amount of snow on the ground, but by when we arrived, a continuing weak rain was doing its best to wear it down. Slush Christmas. Other than that, everything was very nice. The celebrating crowd at my father's house was a rather unusual arrangement of old family and new partners that was ill-suited for overly high expectations of family idyll, but worked very well. That said, the elements of the Christmas Eve celebration were still the same I knew from my childhood and teenage years: a meat fondue (not at all a traditional Austrian Christmas dinner, but a wonderful way to draw out a meal: slower eating and plenty of time for conversation), a Christmas tree with the same straw ornaments from 20 years ago, the same song, exchange of gifts, lots of wine, and conversation until 1 am. And since for musicians, Christmas also means work, at 8 am the next morning, all six of us stood and sat, well-caffeinated and combat-ready, up on the organ loft of the abbey church: three of us in the orchestra, two of us in the choir, and one of us conducting the whole thing. The days after Christmas, of course, continued to involve lots of food and talking, more travel to visit my grandparents, and more food and talking there, as well.

It was a very nice time, but when we returned to Vienna, Steve and I were tired, and severely craving vegetables. Mind you, this Christmas was very kind when it comes to over-eating: nobody took on the role of a "mother hen", whose primary worry at any given hour is that someone might be starving to death on Christmas day. There was not much candy around, and everybody was happy with a rather modest lunch or supper to compensate for a big festive meal the same day. The portion sizes at every meal screamed "Welcome back to Europe": I would look skeptically at the small-looking portion of scalding hot food on the warm serving platter, wondering how that would feed 6, and then, in the end, find that it was plenty, and, moreover, I would not spend the next three hours in a food coma and nobody would be eating leftovers for three days. My mother's Christmas cookies are delicious, and somehow also the most healthy and nutritionally wholesome Christmas cookies one could ever hope for: they consist of ingredients such as buckwheat, oats, spelt flour, honey, and an impressive variety of grated nuts and dried fruits, and are very low on sugar coatings, frostings, cream fillings and the like. On the other side of the equation, we all like to go for walks (even though the slush put a little bit of a damper on that). But even with all those alleviating circumstances, it remains that the festive diet consisted mostly of meat, starches, bread, sweets and wine. The moment we boarded the train to Vienna from my grandparents' town, Steve and I were on a quest to consume a healthy dose of vegetables.

It proved surprisingly difficult. The only vegetable dish on the train's dining car menu was a vegetable curry, which Steve ordered, and I stupidly did not, too suspicious about whether curry in a dining car could be any good. (It turned out perfectly fine for a vegetable craving!) Foraging for dinner later in Vienna, we ended up at one of the pan-Asian places on Naschmarkt. The name rang some sort of positive bell with me and it looked a level or two up from your ordinary "Lotus Asia Kitchen", so we had high hopes. We ordered a green Thai Curry and a pan-fried fish "with vegetables". What arrived wasn't bad, as such, but definitely very adapted to the Austrian palate - which, to sum it up, is very meat and starch-heavy, very salty, and tangy, but shies away from anything that makes an honest appearance on the Scoville scale. The curry was too mild to be Thai and not sweet enough to be American Thai, and the fish was covered in a carrot-y sauce that reminded me of several hearty Austrian dishes involving cooked root vegetables. We had a serious introspective conversation about whether our idea of the various Asian cuisines experienced on the American West Coast was "authentic" enough to judge the authenticity of the food we were eating, and concluded, most likely, yes. (Plus, both of us have been to China.) Steve also concluded that Austrianized pan-Asian food was better than Dutchified pan-Asian food and insisted I put that on the record. Most importantly, though, we ended up fighting over the vegetables, which were clearly nowhere near the center of attention in the preparation of the food. It took getting back to home cooking to get that vegetable fix.

Thinking about this a little more, and scratching my head ("How come I never thought about this before?"), I remembered one of last month's orchestra outings, in which the group had reserved a room in a restaurant and settled for a limited menu that included exactly NO vegetarian option. Upon complaint, spinach dumplings with a creamy sauce were offered. From all I can see, vegetarians might be ok here, if they are willing to consume lots of cheese and cream, but it must be a tough country for a vegan. However, I also have a vague recollection of supermarkets overflowing with fruits and vegetables around the other solstice and half the country going into an asparagus craze somewhere around equinox. So, the jury is still out. This meat-and-starch thing might just be part of "the season".

Season's greetings

Here we are, suddenly it is "the season". I've already seen several days of snowfall (followed by today's rain), and just as I have spent most of my money and nerves buying winter clothes, I am finding myself spending more money and nerves shopping for Christmas gifts. At least I won't be sending them overseas, so I am not having to consider size, weight, customs restrictions and shipping fees, which makes things easier.

The Viennese Christmas markets have produced even more offshoots on the various squares and plazas of Vienna than I remember from 6 years ago, and the smell of various spiced, sweet, hot alcoholic beverages is joining the usual olfactory background of wet streets, car exhaust, döner kebab and cigarets. I am currently going through a non-photography phase (yeah, that happens), and even if I wasn't, it would be hard taking pictures at those Christmas markets, especially since I tend to not see them in daylight. I'd get something like two unknown people's faces (probably with one of them in the process of taking a bite of something) three more people's backs, some snow flakes or steam reflecting my flash, and perhaps a chain of lights in the otherwise black background. So, here's something off the interwebs instead:

 Image credit: MAGMAG Events & Promotion GmbH, from here.

Glühwein, Feuerzangenbowle, Glühmost etc. can be a very nice thing to have on a cold day. However, I remember Viennese Christmas seasons as month-and-a-half long merciless strings of social Punsch/Glühwein events during which I would get more and more disgusted and fed up with the stuff. There was no way out, unless I stopped attending social events. Even when I pulled the emergency brake and stopped drinking it sometime in mid-December, I could still get very fed up with the smell. My years in Tucson were a welcome break from it. First, you have to wait for the weather to get cold enough to warrant making hot drinks (and then there is stiff competition from hot chocolate), second, to the best of my knowledge, there were two people aside from myself who would make it (a German friend and an Australian friend, go figure…), and third, even if it were a popular drink, it couldn't legally be sold and consumed on every street corner. Two or three Punsch/Glühwein events per Christmas season with American moderation on the amount of alcohol consumed turned out just right for me. Of course, this year, my Punsch/Glühwein consumption has ramped up a little, but so far, things are under control. I presume some combination of no longer being a student and still being "new in town" is my saving grace.

But back to the seasons - what is mind-blowing to me is how fast they have changed. In absolutely no time, beautiful fall has turned into real winter - just yesterday, it seems, that tree in front of my office still had leaves on it! Sounds like a trite platitude about how time moves on oh so quickly, and I wouldn't be writing about it in my blog, if I didn't remember the exact opposite feeling from my first months in Tucson. I arrived on July 27, 2007, it was sunny and hot, and it was monsoon season - I distinctly remember the creosote smell in the air, and how I was wondering what on earth that was. Even though, of course, people immediately taught me about it, monsoon didn't mean anything to me. You have to live through the rainless Tucson spring and early summer to understand. The thunderstorms were neat and sometimes spectacular, but the Alps have pretty impressive convective summer thunderstorms, too, and rain as such wasn't anything special to me yet. The change of season from monsoon to fall didn't register a whole lot with me either, partly because I had not yet developed much sensitivity to the high temperature ranges. To me, there was no real difference between the low 90's or the mid-100's, and besides, I did not have my mind wrapped around the Fahrenheit scale yet, so the numbers made no intuitive sense anyway. As far as I was concerned, it was sunny and hot every day, and that meant it was "summer". So, from July to November 2007, it felt like time was not moving at all.

Only over the course of a couple years did I calibrate to the comparatively subtle seasonal changes in Tucson: The winter low desert hiking season and the gorgeous sight of the occasional snow in the Catalinas. The running streams and fields of golden poppy in spring. The dreadful June cooped up in air-conditioned buildings watching the news on wildfires, with the occasional escape to Mt. Lemmon or Mt. Graham. And, of course, monsoon: the slow buildup of clouds, the first time it's humid enough to smell the creosote, and eventually the first rain, drawing me and my neighbors, who I would never see otherwise, out of our suburban dwellings onto the streets, watching the miracle of water falling from the sky. Then the flooding streets, the lower temperatures, plants that had looked half-dead growing leaves, the slopes of the mountains turning green. And the gorgeous sunsets produced by the clouds.

When describing the excitement of Tucsonans about monsoon to Austrians, I used to say that it was like getting excited about the first snow. It probably helped conveying it, but I am not so sure it's doing it justice. Yes, people were commenting on the first snowfall this year, and the second. (The first was a freak one in October, a week after my arrival.) But the talk about beautifully "sugar-dusted" houses and hills, Christmas mood and soon-to-open ski lifts is not comparable to the level of excitement and dominance in conversations that accompanies the first monsoon storms. And one thing is completely missing from the "first snow" talk: the enormous sense of relief. Snow is a welcome and exciting thing (with some downsides, mostly related to traffic, but that's the same with the monsoon), but in the end, people feel more or less entitled to it. Monsoon rainfall is viewed as a gracious gift.

Culture shock?

Apparently there are people out there who never get culture shock. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. And really, I don't  know how people operate who say they never get it. It seems like the most logical thing: a couple months in, you realize that you've lost your past life, you've become sore with the constant abrasion between the cultural norms you are routinely operating on and the ones you're confronted with, and you've run out of steam, because in spite of all the energy and effort spent trying to get settled, you are not (yet).

I had culture shock (or re-entry shock, but that's really the same cake with a slightly different frosting on it) after every move overseas, and in retrospect, I know that after my first move away from home, from Admont to Vienna, I had it, too. When I arrived in Seattle, I was warned and prepared by the nice people from the University of Washington's "Foundation for International Understanding through Students". Culture shock arrived, I dealt with it by seeking out stores that sold German/Austrian food, my mom sent me Austrian newspapers and a few of her watercolors (which made me cry like a baby), I was missing home, but I wouldn't actually have wanted to go there, because I loved Seattle. I waited it out, felt good again after a month or two, and went back to Austria a few months after that. Where, after another couple months, I had re-entry shock, which sucked. It's one thing feeling disoriented in a new culture, it's another to feel at odds with your home country. But there it was. I went to Starbucks a whole lot, dressed like an American college student, and listened to KEXP online. I waited it out and things were good again. I went to Tucson a couple years later, in July of 2007. I went through a pretty rough time the following January, and it took a little while to come to grips with Tucson, but eventually I settled into years of normal life, with all its ups and downs. Big ups and downs, mind you, but part of normal life. Actually, I just realized that the only place I lived in continuously for longer than in Tucson is Admont.

So, "going home again" this time, I was dreading getting hit by culture shock in a cold, dark winter, with no Steve around to cheer me up. I tried to heed some people's advice to not expect it too much, to avoid a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I still prepared: before I left Tucson, I made sure I had a supply of ground dried chiles from Native Seeds, I moved my 1702 pint glass as a high priority item, and I bought those cowboy boots at "How Sweet it Was" on 4th avenue not just to show off.  As with the last return to Vienna, I am amazed at how easy it is to get re-oriented here, shopping inconvenience and orchestra heartache notwithstanding. Just last week, I was swayed into contemplating that maybe, this time, I am getting away with it, that maybe, I have become a cosmopolitan who can just move and feel at home anywhere on the planet. Or, failing that, someone who has gotten sufficiently familiar with the cultural differences between the Western US and Austria to be able to move specifically between those two places without too many issues. Or that maybe I've grown out of it, now that I am on the other side of 30.

But now I am not so sure anymore that I am getting away with anything. Since a couple of days, I feel sore and sad, my energy is low and there's also a dash of negative outlook in the emotional mix. I am a little fed up with yet again trying to get a foothold in this city that's obsessed with the past and happens to also be full of my personal past. All I want to do right now is go back to Tucson to hang out and play a boardgame with my old friends, ride my old bike, talk to my old boss, stop in for a chat with Dr. B, go to Trader Joe's to buy my food, go to SASO rehearsal and have some ridiculously intense stout at 1702 afterwards, dig through a thrift store for dirt-cheap black concert shoes (there's no such thing as cheap shoes in this country), and plan a camping trip with Steve somewhere in the desert for the weekend. I want to get back to what I have known to be business as usual in the last few years. The "dash of negative outlook" comes from the fact that I know I won't be able to do just that ever again - because even if I went back to Tucson as soon as possible (even under most conducive circumstances, that could not happen until years from now), it would not be the same thing anymore, it would be another new life to get used to. There are also some irrational things that are puzzling to me even while they happen. Ridiculous small things can make me cry. Life seems bad even though everything is going well. It suddenly becomes important for me to drink my beer from the 1702 glass, my cowboy boots somehow make my walk through the day a little easier, and the chicken fajitas I cooked using some of the ground chile from Native Seeds mean a little more than "finally some spicy food". All of it sounds suspiciously like culture shock. It seems a little early to me, though, it's only been 6 weeks. Maybe I am just in a bad mood because many Viennese routinely are, but I would absolutely hate to think that it's that contagious. Perhaps I can parse how much of this is darkness-related by getting my hands on some vitamin D supplement…

Politics and my friend Maria

I got to know my friend Maria way back when we were both 18. We were paired up in a dorm room as freshmen. We became friends in the very uncomplicated way 18-year-olds become friends when they share a dorm room: we bonded over figuring out life away from home, good or bad grades, and late-night phonecalls to our respective long-distance boyfriends. Throughout our student years and beyond, we met for coffee, movies, walks and meals, invited each other to our various parties, took a climbing class together, and eventually we even stopped introducing each other as “my former dorm roommate” (so much for the European definition of “friend” vs. the American one). We stayed in touch through my years in the US, not particularly frequently, but we also did not feel the need to contact each other every week. Whenever we met, no matter how long it had been, we had great chats and it largely felt like no time had passed.

A week ago on Sunday, Maria and I went for a long walk along the Donaukanal, followed by some delicious tea and cake at a trendy café by the riverbank. The Donaukanal was beautiful in its urban way, sporting some last fall colors along with the usual colorful graffiti. And my amazement with this much flowing water has not worn off yet. The tea was also impressive, as it was not your odd tea bag, no, it was a bundle of fresh herbs to be drowned in the hot water. Never seen that before.

For Maria and me, it was the first time in years that we hung out together without it being the “OMG, we haven’t talked for AGES, what’s going on in your life”?-kind. When you become friends at age 18, you cannot easily guess whether you’ll still have anything in common at age 31, especially when you embark on very different careers, and spend years apart in different corners of the world. But we still get along wonderfully. I almost forgot how much I enjoy talking politics with her. This time, we re-bonded over something that we now have in common: We are both 31, unmarried and childless (but in LTR's), on relatively ambitious career tracks and have, at some point in the last few years, veered off a path many Austrian women take: sacrificing their careers for raising children.

I know I am venturing into emotional territory here (“What’s wrong with prioritizing your children?”), so I want to emphasize that I am not talking about a couple making a well-planned and conscious decision to temporarily dial back the career of one or both partners to make space for the family. I am talking about a large group of educated, highly trained mothers sliding into a traditional housewife role through a string of small, voluntary steps, subtly guided by a complex interplay of social norms and the welfare system, and jeopardizing their own future economic base in the process. I am a scientist, so without any further dangerous navigation through risky verbiage, here’s some stats (all data from Statistik Austria, for the years 2010 or 2011):

87.3% of women with children under 8 interrupted their employment when the youngest child was born, compared to 6.4% of men. Fair enough, someone has to give birth after all. But, of those 87.3%, only 13% interrupted their employment for less than a year, and only 5.6% for less than 6 months. 70.7% of women with children under 3 are not employed. Of women with children under 15, 64.7% are employed - compared to 93% of men. Of those 64.7%, 43.4% are working part time (cf. 4 % of the men). That means, only 36.6% of women with children under 15 are working full-time. Of the employed men with children under 15, 78% state that their partner is taking care of the children during work time, for the employed women with children under 15, that same rate is 30%. A few circumstantial facts: 56% of all university degrees and 43.5% of all doctorates are earned by women. The “unexplained gender pay gap” is about 18% (it’s around 25% if you include the “explained” parts, such as the split into the different kinds of jobs women and men tend to work). The divorce rate (the probability that current marriages will end that year) is around 43%. Single (or divorced) women with children are among the groups with the highest risk of poverty. Retirement pensions (a part of the social welfare system here) for women hover around half of those for men, largely due to the gender pay gap and time spent outside of the workforce while raising children.

Ignoring any big-picture economic viewpoint, one might ask: if the career interruption opted for by many women is voluntary, what is the problem? You cannot judge people for how they choose to organize their lives. But, well, “voluntary” is an interesting concept. If you feel “strongly compelled” or “morally obligated” to do something, or simply “can’t see another way to make it work”, how voluntary is it? A last tidbit from Statistik Austria: the most common complaint of those part-time working women with children under 15 is that they cannot find childcare that would allow them to work more hours.

On our long walk, Maria and I chewed through quite a few of the many factors that come together to produce statistics like this and the question of the “voluntariness” of it all. Perhaps a couple things are worth mentioning: One is that there is a long-standing notion that young children should be spending 100% of their time with their mothers (nevermind the fathers, they usually don’t even enter statements like “It’s not good for a 6-month old to be taken away from their mother and handed to a stranger!”). Another is that there is an equally long-standing notion that “combining children and career is difficult”, usually formulated as uniquely female problem (men are fine, men with children are responsible fathers of families.) Both together strongly transport the message that as a woman, you have to make a choice between family (and in particular, being a "good mother") and a career. Also, men are automatically assumed to be ambitious and career-focused, while women are automatically assumed to be quiet and family-focused. Needless to say, the automatic assumptions of your social surroundings go a long way when you’re a kid or young adult looking for guidance. The way the social welfare system is currently set up, women are pretty much told that “what you do” is: you take between one and three years off for each child. The government will give you money for up to three years, and technically, you are still entitled to your job after two. Partly as a consequence, a vicious supply-demand cycle makes daycare for children under 3 a pain and a half to find. Just for good measure, Kindergarten for kids over 3, and primary school traditionally only do half days. And last but not least, in a society that is generally slow and often reluctant in changing its ways, men and women slip into traditional gender roles in their relationships as a matter of course. The mother staying at home with the children for several years, during which she is (understandably) responsible for the entire household, cements those roles and sets the example for the next generation. I could dig up more statistics on things like how the housework is split, but I’ll save you another paragraph full of percentages.

Why do we care, Maria and I? Of course it’s a classic “cause” you can care about. But I think we care on a more personal level, too. First, people like me and her and our partners can wind up competing with men with housewives in professional life. Once people like us start a family, on the basis of sharing the many duties, joys and chores of life evenly, we have to face the truth that nobody in such a partnership can put quite as much time and energy into their work as a man with a housewife (or a woman with a house-husband, of course, but we can all take a good educated guess about the percentage of that among Austrian couples with children under 15). I am not trying to blanket-accuse all men with housewives of not caring about spending time with their family. It just feels like they have a “secret superpower” that allows them to rarely ever have to worry about things like getting off work early enough to pick up the children from somewhere or what to make for dinner. (It reminds me of a certain incident of playing an area-control boardgame with a couple and a few other people: the man in the couple won the game by a large margin, essentially because the woman protected him and did not care to win herself. The rest of us were in an unfair disadvantage and the game was frustrating.) Another reason we care is because how couples our age share the family duties impacts how society views us and what people expect of us. Maria and I are both lucky to be in good job situations right now, but for many women in their 30s seeking a job in Austria, there are issues around employers’ implicit expectations of them taking years off and/or being less dedicated of a worker than a man for reasons to do with raising children.

If you have followed me through here, thank you. Maria suggested I split the entry in two parts, because it’s too long, and I agree in principle. It would have left me with one entry entirely about Maria, and another entirely about politics. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the former would have left me feeling strongly compelled to (completely voluntarily) write similar entries about all my dear friends here, and all my dear friends there, and that just might not be compatible with a career in my day job…

Rehearsalmania

So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how much I missed the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra. I still do. A lot. But things have improved in as much as I am not completely numbed by it anymore. I am enjoying playing, and I am not contemplating putting the viola into a corner anymore.

I did end up joining that second group that had contacted me, and it was a good thing I did, even though this means I am seriously swamped with rehearsals now. One reason: Their upcoming concert is in this hall:

Looks familiar? No? Well, if it doesn’t, that may be because usually when people see it, it’s on TV, stuffed with people in fancy outfits, decorated with flowers, it’s January 1, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra are playing the Radetzkymarsch. I wasn’t aware amateur orchestras even got to play in Musikverein until a few months ago. So, needless to say, playing my first concert in Vienna in Grosser Musikvereinssaal is pretty glorious and I am very much looking forward to it.

But I am pretty happy about playing with this new group for other reasons, too. They are in good shape. (They wouldn’t be playing in a sold-out Musikvereinssaal otherwise.) They are mixed in terms of age and background (the orchestra I joined a few weeks ago is mostly students) and they have only around 15 rehearsals per concert. Three months ago, 15 rehearsals would have sounded pretty close to unacceptable to me, but I have to adapt my expectations to the local custom (25+ rehersals per concert seems to happen, too).

Part of the local custom is to spend all this rehearsal time meticulously polishing every detail. As a violist, this inevitably entails spending significant amounts of time listening to violins rehearsing. But don't get me wrong, I am really enjoying the progress: sound, phrasing, rhythmical accuracy, fine-tuning chords… I have not yet seen much time wasted (which is something that can happen with too many rehearsals). I am re-learning the balance of following the principal while standing on my own stable feet and I am enjoying the feeling of blending into a section in terms of sound quality, dynamics, and intonation. I am also enjoying the fact that nothing gets glossed over: if it’s out of tune, I will get tuned. If it’s early or late, we will do it again until it’s on time. If it rushes, we are told off. If it doesn’t sound like it should, it will get fixed. There is very little “getting away with things”.

I remember this meticulous detail work from my student days in Vienna, but haven’t experienced it all that much in the last few years. I was leading a section in an orchestra in which the philosophy was more along the lines of: “Here’s this awesome, incredibly challenging program, this is the compressed rehearsal schedule, now let’s make a mad dash for it”. With around 6 rehearsals per concert, you spend much rehearsal time in “survival mode”. You know that you have this and perhaps 5 more chances to figure your entrances out, and nobody will go over it slowly 10 times until it works. Perhaps it is the reason my fellow American amateur musicians strike me as confident, terrific sight-readers, bold to the point of recklessness, and (sometimes a little too) carefree. In contrast, rehearsing things over and over will deliver a more polished, higher quality product, teach people about good playing and being sensitive to musical subtleties – but perhaps it also makes people a little more insecure and overly cautious? I will have to re-visit this idea in a few months, or perhaps, years...  

Anyway, even with good work being done, the many rehearsals sweating over every detail feel a little much for me right now. (Along with everything feeling sharp - I spent the last 5 years tuning to A440 and everybody here is doing at least 443.) But yesterday, I had this conversation with one of the musicians here, which, I think, neatly hits the nail on the head why they do it this way. I told him that in SASO we did Shostakovich 5 in 6 rehearsals, and even as I said it, I realized how utterly “devil-may-care” it sounded to him. “The Vienna Symphonic Orchestra may be able to do that”, he commented, laughing and shaking his head. My answer was equally fast: “In Tucson, there is no Vienna Symphonic Orchestra.”