I've been in Vienna for a few days now and already feel pretty comfortable with the city. There are tons of beautiful buildings, more cafés than I could ever eat at even if I lived here, and amazing art pretty much everywhere in the first district.
As far as expectations, I have/ had a mix of positive and negative expectations:
-starting in the airport and continuing to the subway and city streets, I thought I would get horribly lost everywhere (so far, hasn't happened)
-I expect my German conversational skills to improve a lot
-I expect to try tons of different foods (and hopefully like them)
-just a note here: for some reason I expected to be able to recognize pretty much everything on menus. I was wrong. That's not a bad thing, it's just interesting that even basic things like sandwiches can be very different.
-I also didn't expect a big difference in the shopping habits between the Viennese and Americans. I was also wrong about that.
-I expect to form new friendships with people in my group and people from other countries
-and I expect to see a lot of Vienna
I think most of my expectations are realistic. I wasn't expecting my Cultura Wien class to be so heavily focused on grammar, but I'm glad it is. Even two days of class have taught me that there's a lot that I don't know. It has also been a little hard to have tons of conversations in German. When out of class, most students from my course prefer to speak English or their native language (same goes for vcu students). But who knows, maybe in a week or so we'll try speaking more German on our free time.
Grocery shopping at the Ubahn Billa was also a shock to me. I didn't expect the crowd and hadn't been aware before that most shops here closed on Sundays. I'm definitely starting to understand that Europeans have a different concept of personal space. I can't count the number of people who bumped into me at the grocery store.
I like to think that I'm pretty relaxed (when I'm not running late), so I'm perfectly alright with my expectations shifting throughout the trip. So far, I'm feeling very good about being here and am very excited for the remainder of the program.
As aforementioned, coming here showed me that there's a lot I don't know about German. I can speak fairly well. I can read, comprehend, and write about German literature pretty competently. However, my grammar, especially when speaking, is still weak and my vocabulary definitely leaves much to be desired.
One thing I love about German is the ability to make compound words. I think it's very cool that the language allows speakers to pretty much mash two words together to create a new word that everybody should understand.
The most difficult aspect of German for me is remembering the gender of nouns. Even now, I feel like I'm guessing half the time. I can only assume this will improve with more experience.
In order to get more comfortable speaking and communicating here, the only things I can really do is dive in. I have to have conversations, read about things, and write often, expecting to make mistakes but willing to learn from correction. So far I haven't hit any major roadblocks concerning communication, so I'm not feeling very intimidated.
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