Saying Good Bye to a City

My summer adventure draws to its eventual close tonight. In eight hours I'll board my flight back to the Midwest, with connections in Copenhagen, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis. I don't know how best to sum up this experience. Here it is quantitatively:

7: Countries visited: Austria, Holland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Romania


6: Number of these countries once part of the Habsburg Empire (all but Germany). As a recent afficionado of all things Habsburg, I find this really cool.

4: Times I moved while in Vienna. From the convent to the dude apartment to my housesitting gig and back. Being mobile had its advantages. I kept upgrading until I found the best digs. Plus my rent was ridiculously cheap.

200: Miles I ran in the city. First my route was the Volksgarden, the Parliament, and the Opera. Then I booked it in the Augarten. I clocked my final few in Grinzing up some killer vineyard hills. (Sidenote: this number seems ridiculously high to me, but I averaged about three per day for 90 days...)

4500: Words in my 12 page report on media freedoms in Azerbaijan. The fruits of my human rights research... I'll post a link after its final edits.

1: Wiener Schnitzel. (Actually .5 because I split it.)

Qualitatively, I think this may have been the best summer of my life, or at least a close second to the summer I worked in the Rough Rider Hotel as a hostess in a town devoted to the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt. I really loved Medora.

Vienna, however, was a unique combination of a place I loved combined with doing work I found interesting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful....all the adjectives you would want to describe the daily grind. My co-workers were sweet beyond words, and I had time to do a lot of reading in the field.

I'm not sure what reincarnation this blog will take as I spend the next month in the great plains prepping for graduate school and then make my way to Chicago for my whirlwind nine month masters program.

Good bye, Vienna.