By Amanda Cedrone, News Staff
Strudel tastes a lot better in Salzburg. Eating it was a part of my daily routine while I was in Austria for five and a half weeks for a classical music dialogue – along with visiting opera halls, climbing mountains and drinking really good beer.
To be honest, I was skeptical about the trip at first. As a journalism major, classical music isn’t exactly my forte. But the dialogue filled some basic requirements I needed, and hey, I love “The Sound of Music,” so I figured, why not? It seemed like as soon as I made the decision to go, I was in Austria living with a German-speaking family who had four children under the age of 13.
Despite the language barrier, I grew into a routine for those five weeks, which became my new normal. I would wake up and walk through the hills of Salzburg to my classes that lasted into the afternoon. During class, we would listen to Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn – among other composers – and discuss the difference in their upbringing and musical styles.
We visited museums, like Mozart Geburtshaus – or Mozart’s Birthplace – where original letters were displayed that gave us insight into what each composer was thinking when they wrote a specific piece. I learned how to identify a single instrument within an entire section of a symphony, and the different types of pieces that classical composers wrote. I learned the difference between atonal and tonal music, and the difference between opera buffa, a comedic opera and opera seria, a serious opera.
Classes were broken up nicely by a gelato after lunch every day, and every night I dressed up and went to a symphony performed by some of the greatest musicians in the world. I even made weekend trips to Florence, Paris, Vienna and Munich.
I saw the Mauthausen concentration camp, which was, to say the very least, a life changing experience – to see the evil mankind was capable of made me a more compassionate person. And to see the conditions people lived in made every problem I’ve ever had feel insignificant.
When I wasn’t touring a historic place, I was doing things like climbing the Alps and conquering my fear of heights by riding both the steepest and longest cable cars in Europe. I drank at beer gardens and ate schnitzel.
This is not my normal life. I found myself forgetting that I had another life back at home – and that calories counted. Maybe it was that I was only able to contact my family a handful of times. Or maybe it was tutoring my 13-year-old Austrian host brother, Stephen, in English. It could have been my other host brother, eight-year-old Felix, running up to me everyday when I got home to tell me what his day was like, speaking 800 words a minute in German that I couldn’t understand.
Whatever it was, my other life didn’t seem real anymore. My new life was so much more cosmopolitan – attending operas at the Vienna Opera House and then discussing it over coffee with friends, learning how to bake apple strudel and shopping on the streets of Europe.
And suddenly, it was over. I was taken out of my sophisticated European life and thrown into Charles de Gaulle airport, lugging two 50-pound bags and sweating as I ran to catch my flight home.
When people ask me about my time abroad, it’s difficult to respond. I go with the generic “amazing” or “great,” but really, I can’t put my experience into words that do it justice. I haven’t touched the souvenirs I bought for myself, or really gone through my pictures with anyone, because it would be impossible to describe or relive the experience of being thousands of feet in the air on top of a mountain in the Alps, or what dinner with my host family was like. And I could eat strudel here, but now all I can think of is how many miles I’ll have to run to burn it off.
It’s almost like it didn’t even happen, like my time in Europe was a dream. I’ve adjusted to being back home, but when I’m having a bad day I’ll revisit my time there and remember it wasn’t actually a dream, and someday, I just might be able to return to my other life in Salzburg.
