Accidental Wiener #1

When I came to Europe 3 years ago, it was my intention to travel for a few months and, if things worked out, to live here for a few years. Things have obviously worked out, and I'm still living here.

I'm often asked why I chose to live in Vienna, and what I like about this city so much that I'm still here. The answer's not a short one, so I'll break it up into a few posts over the next days.

First, let me tell you a little about why Vienna is one of the last places I thought I would ever stop and set up shop.

When we were kids, my brother and I shared a dislike for everything German. I'm sad to say that this was probably mostly due to some contact we had with a nice German family who immigrated from Bonn to the Houston area in the 1980's. Like many young teenagers, perhaps, I wasn't too tolerant of people who strayed too far from what I considered to be normal. Instead of thinking neutrally about those people as different, I thought of them negatively as strange.

And this family was, in my limited worldview, strange. They didn't speak like us, they didn't look or (sometimes) dress like us, they didn't have names like ours (except, of course, that my first name is German -- funny how that works), and in some matters, it was apparent that they didn't think like us, either. Don't get me wrong - they were fine, upstanding people, as far as I know. They were just different from anyone else I'd ever known.

From my limited experiences with this family, I decided that everything German must be strange. Sadly, this opinion followed me into my later teen years. Our family took a trip to Europe in 1989 to celebrate my high school graduation, and Craig (my younger brother, who's lived with me here in Vienna for the past 2 years) and I were adamant in our refusal to visit Germany or Austria along the way. We thought we knew enough about German-speakers, and had no interest in travelling to these strange lands.

Next installment: My first experience in Austria -- why I almost bypassed Vienna completely, and what finally (and thankfully) made me decide to visit this amazing city.

(This post, and some of the accompanying comments over at metafilter spurred me to finally start this series of blog entries.)