Vienna Calling: Rob, Maddie Lou and Will Have Arrived


Don't turn around ah ah oh...
Der Kommisar's in town ah ah oh...

Greetings from Vienna, home of the Freudian Slip, The UN Nuclear Energy Commission, Schiele's Naughty Artwork, and Falco.
We have not been able to accomplich much in the way of turn-of the-century decadence, but we have polished off a jar of Nutella in the last three days (best smeared on fresh Turkish flatbread and studded with red currents bought at the open-air Naschmarkt from a toothless Albanian woman)
The Flight over is always hellish, but the Kids were superb. Will mostly watched movies with no sound, and Maddie quietly colored. When Will finally zonked out somewhere over Greenland, I stowed him under the seats like carry-on luggage and hid him with a blanket so that the (grouchy, unprofessional) Delta flight crew could not see him. The first night, wee all crashed at 9. Maddie and I were up at 3, and we lasted the whole next day.
I am not asking too much of the kids. I gave them their favorite sugar soda pop (Almdudler) and Haribo Pacifiers for breakfast, along with the requisite Nutella (The Breakfast of Champions). I also let them slouch in front of the tube and watch Spongebob and Mr. Bean for hours. World travel is not for the faint of heart, so the kids deserve a break. They have been totally wash-and-wear. It makes me feel less guilty for schlepping them around the world and making them speak German with me and each other the whole time.
The reason I took the kids: Kinder-Uni Wien, a two-week program at the U of Vienna that involves kids in age-appropriate science, art, medicine, philsophy and literature classes. Maddie went in 2005, and now I have both of them enrolled. They are in an all-day supervised group so that Papa can do his research (or so that he can blog in the National Library Reading Room). The first day, they came home from a chemistry class with homemade pop-rock candies, slime, and bath salts. It rained, and so Maddie got a raincoat from Austrian Telekom. Yesterday they learned about hearts at the hospital, and today they are doing a "Democracy Workshop." That reminds me: We passed a building yesterday with "Bush go home" painted on the roof. Will: "I love this place."

The kids are having a great time, even though it is a long day (8:30-5) and all in German. The leaders are young, energetic, and really excited about my kids. The other participants are right up Maddie and Will's alley: energetic, quirky, often bilingual, and prone to spontanious pillow fights in the rec center. They are having fun, and that wa my number one worry. If they pick up some German and some interest for academics, that is all icing on the cake. I will be teaching a class for the Kinder-Uni again this year, taking 25 seven- to twelve-year-olds on a tour of the old city and teaching them about different authors who wrote about Vienna.

Comments

J.M. Tewkesbury said…
You know, Rob... For someone who once extolled all the virtues of Germany and reminded that a certain German chancellor, fascist dictator was Austrian, you seem to have become quite an Austro-phile! ;-)

Glad to hear you and Maddie and Will are having a great time in Wien! And Almdudler. Oh, I love that stuff. I drank it all the time as a missionary. Better than ginger ale any day.

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