Kaisermuhlen

The Webster Vienna campus and the apartments they put us up in were located in the Kaisermuhlen area of Vienna, which is about 15 minutes northeast of the city center in Vienna’s 22nd district. Kaisermuhlen sits between two rivers that join at one end of it, so some people refer it as an island. It is a residential area full of apartment buildings that have shops on the first floor and residences on the upper floors. There seems to be a wide range of people who live in the neighborhood, from families to crazy people wandering the streets. On nice days on the weekends, bus-ful after bus-ful of people flock to area to laze in and next to the rivers.

My apartment is the nicest accommodation I’ve had during this program – it’s a third-floor, two bedroom apartment that consists of an entry foyer, a full kitchen, a little eating nook with a kitchen table, a bathroom with a toilet, and a washroom with a shower, sink, and washing machine. Why they decided to separate the shower and sink from the toilet I don’t know, but it works. I share the apartment with the same girl, Megan, who I shared my China apartment with and as she is clean and quiet she makes for the perfect roommate. I consider the apartment practically luxurious as it has a DISHWASHER and a FULL LENGTH MIRROR, two things I have lived without for the past nine months.

My room in the apartment is the mack-daddy of all the rooms I could have possibly been assigned. It is huge, with hardwood floors and crown moldings, and has lots of old-school European charm. It has five huge windows, three of which form an alcove as I am in the corner room. If I lived in this apartment as my real home, I would plop a big comfy chair in the alcove and make it a reading nook, but for the time being it’s empty since Webster didn’t provide me with furniture beyond the basics (bed, desk, armoire for storage). Two of my windows look out over the streets and into other apartments, but the corner windows overlook a church and its park-like grounds which sit caddy-cornered to our apartment.

The only bad thing about the apartment is that there is no air conditioning, which wasn’t bad the first month we lived there. Vienna had a string of unusually cold and rainy weather during late May and early June, which was attributed to climate havoc due to the Icelandic volcanoes. By the time late June and July rolled around, however, there were more cloudless, sunny days than I could count and the temperatures reached 90 degrees. It was hot hot hot in that apartment.