An alumna of a study abroad program in Vienna jumps at the opportunity to attend a gala in the Austrian capital, where she ditches the guidebook and gives her husband a tour of her youth, dragging him between shabby apartment blocks and horse training sessions, while he wonders if and when he’ll get to marvel at the city’s main attractions.
In retrospect, I can see that introducing my husband to the beauty of Vienna by marching him first to a nondescript, graffiti-covered apartment building was not a conventional choice.
But it was not just any graffiti-covered apartment; it was the place I–and my four American roommates–lived with a Viennese hausfrau during our semester abroad back in 1987. Back then, it was an elegant, if shabby, apartment building near the Danube Canal, along which I would take pounding walks with my Walkman blasting music to ward off homesickness or general study-abroad overwhelm. I knew I had to place my back against that door, graffitied or not, to get my bearings in Austria’s capital city–a city to which I had not returned in almost forty years.
For younger readers: someday you will be astonished at how quickly four decades can pass. I certainly never expected to stay away from Vienna that long. So when the study abroad program I had attended announced its 75th anniversary gala in 2025–and invited all its alumni to return–the speed with which I RSVP’d “yes” was measurable only in nanoseconds.
My husband must have been clear from the start that this tour of Vienna was going to be a nostalgia-fest for me. He had overheard my months-long, fervent, and determined Duolingo practice to regain the German fluency that had rusted over like a creaky gate. But he couldn’t have fully foreseen what retracing my Study Abroad steps would entail.
After that welcome march to my old digs at Werdertorgasse 17, I led him to the next obvious (to me) location: a wurst stand, to buy a sausage served in a bread roll that has been impaled on a metal warming spike, then filled with mustard and ketchup before slipping the wurst in. (It’s as cheap, delicious, and smutty as it sounds.) We ate our currywurst as we wandered up and down the Kärtnerstrasse, the city’s crowded main shopping artery. Was it so overloaded with homogenous global luxury brands back in the ‘80s? I don’t think so. But then again, I blew my entire semester abroad shopping budget on a pair of leopard-print Doc Martens in my first month in Vienna, so shopping wasn’t a primary activity. And yes, the shoes were worth it.
I couldn’t contain my excitement for what came after wurst: a visit to see the Lipizzan stallions, Vienna’s world-famous, high-flying horses that have performed choreographed equine patterns set to classical music in the same chandeliered ring since 1735.
I figured out early back in my pfennig-pinching Viennese student days that a horse girl like me could watch the elegant stallion’s weekday training sessions in the same chandeliered ring, with the same riders, and the same classical music, for a fraction of the cost of the performance tickets. When I realized that bargain training tickets are still offered today, I was delighted.
After 45 minutes of watching magnificent grey and white Lipizzans mainly trot around in a circle, my husband leaned over and gently asked, “Will they…do something at some point?” It was a reminder that reliving my own sepia-toned memories didn’t necessarily guarantee that my husband would create new ones on his first visit to Vienna. “I guess I was hoping the horses would do some fancy footwork,” he sighed as we filed out after the training.
Luckily, I had arranged at least a few of the splurges that were out of reach back in my student days. Instead of waiting patiently in line for Standing Room tickets for the Vienna Opera, we had actual seats (with armrests and everything!) to see a laugh-out-loud performance of The Barber of Seville. We sank into couches to absorb a bit of Viennese kaffeehaus culture at the venerated Café Hawelka, which I had only visited once during my Austrian semester–when my parents came to town and could pick up the check.
Still, most of our visit was doing exactly what I loved thirty-eight years ago. Long strolls in the easily navigable and bustling city, a visit to the cabbage-domed Secession Museum to see the stunning Beethoven frieze by Gustav Klimt, and a rainy afternoon poring over historical maps at the Wien Museum. Both my remembered German and city navigation skills improved each day of our visit.
The highlight of the adventure was the aforementioned black-tie gala, with 300 alumni from around the world converging at the gorgeous Palais Ferstel to celebrate the program’s long legacy. Alumni from classes stretching back to the 1950s mingled together along with staff and faculty, comparing notes about our experiences and lives since the program–and whether our German had survived. It being a Viennese ball, current students processed out in black-and-white ballroom attire to dance a waltz accompanied by a live orchestra, and then all of us joined them to spin around the dance floor. When I realized that both my German teacher and my internship advisor were not only still teaching but also claimed to remember me, I was speechless in two languages.
It felt like the 20-year-old that I was four decades ago was peeking over my shoulder in delight the whole time I was in Vienna. I think that’s why, on a day we were given a tour of our old program offices and classrooms, I lingered at the end to meet current students and ask them about their studies, their travels, and their ambitions. I wanted them to understand that their semester abroad could be one of the most important inflection points in their lives. As it had been for me.
In the most practical terms, my semester abroad gave me the language fluency to land my first post-college job in Germany, where I worked for two years. Those two years of work experience overseas made me a shoo-in for the international graduate program I applied to back in the US, where, in my first semester, I spotted a tall, dark, and handsome fellow student in cowboy boots. Reader, I married him, and together we raised two beautiful daughters who are the central anchor of our world.
The intangible impacts were equally meaningful. In the age before cellphones and email, with only airmail letters or an expensive landline call to reach my parents (which I did only a handful of times that entire semester), I was on my own to solve any problems that came up. It left me with a heightened sense of resilience and confidence that I could handle hard problems.
The semester also gave me a valuable perspective on what it feels like to be a newcomer in someone else’s country, and empathy about how very difficult it can be to navigate unfamiliar customs and languages. It stoked a deep and abiding curiosity in other peoples and other cultures. I try not only to keep those qualities alive in myself; together with my husband, we made those values a cornerstone of how we raised our kids.
On our last afternoon in Vienna, meandering in a part of the city we hadn’t walked through yet, my husband stopped in his tracks at the view. “What is this building? It looks like Versailles!”
“It’s the Hofburg,” I shrugged as I kept walking past the dazzling white palace whose 2,600 rooms stretch 59 acres. “It was the imperial palace of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrian president works there now.” I added, “When we went to see the Lipizzans on the first day, we were actually on the very far side of this building, by the stables.”
He stayed rooted in place until I turned around to look at him. “Nancy. Do you think maybe we should have started our sightseeing in Vienna here?”
Well, probably, sure, now that I think about it. But nothing in that palace can compare to the treasure of my long-ago experience abroad that had guided our steps all week.
