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The New Year had just turned when Martin Sajdik arrived in New York City with his wife and daughter to begin his new posting as Austrian ambassador to the United Nations – surely a big change from Shanghai, where they had spent the previous four and a half years. 

“Tirol isch lei oans, isch a Landl a kloans, isch a schians, is a feins, und des Landl is meins.” – “Tyrol is unique; small perhaps, but beautiful and fine; and it is my country.” And no, I did not hear this at a football game in Tyrol or a Tiroler Schützen parade. It was on the U4. 

It didn’t really dawn on me until recently, after living in Vienna off and on for a decade, just how deeply seriously the Viennese take their musical legacy. In fact, it isn’t that it is taken seriously, but it is so much a part of life here that it takes on a series of forms, some imbued with a mordant sense of humor, which after all is quite Viennese. 

I was sitting on the tram at Westbahnhof waiting for it to leave, when I looked at the departure time screen and realized I would be sitting there for 20 minutes unless I wanted to walk ... some sort of delay or other.

Bored with Sudoku on my cell phone, I looked out the window. Standing outside the Tabak, dressed in U.S. Army garb and smoking a cigarette was a man moonwalking. 

Anneliese Rohrer didn’t mean to start a revolution. She was just trying to cope with the flood of emails that had swamped her inbox.  

But we’d better go back a step. It all began with a radio interview…. No, maybe even further back:

Allan Janik began teaching in Vienna in a Kaffeehaus.  That was in 1989, and space was in short supply. He didn’t even get a classroom, much less an office.  But this suited Janik just fine. He’s a philosopher and intellectual historian, and a Kaffeehaus was where he belonged.

Satellites posing as falling stars linger in the night sky as headlights, rushing to fade into oblivion, illuminate the open spaces with a yellowish glow for tiny brief moments before leaving them with an even lamppost tan. Droplets from a first autumn rain tumble from rooftops to the ground, and the air is damp. Fresh leaves on the trees neatly planted all down the line by human hands, begin to display little signs of life, making it evident that winter has moved on.

A door slams shut behind me with a loud thud, and I find myself on the street, feeling the planet shifting.

It’s past midnight and you’re in the bus on your way home. It’s only you and another girl, and strangely enough, you’re sitting next to each other. It’s quiet but for the roaring engine of the bus and – can this really be? – her energetic typing on her phone’s keyboard. You sneak a peek to the side and squint at the sequence of abbreviations and smiley faces on the screen that you find neither entertaining, nor comprehensible.

As the next stop approaches, the girl shuffles in her seat and types even faster than before.

Her fingers go:

“its l8, gotta run. bbm me.”

Having grown up in an Austrian family where traditions are cherished, it is the magical playing out of the ritual of Christmas that still makes up my fondest childhood memories.

Every year on Dec. 23, my younger brother and I would go to my grandparents’ house – so that the Christkind (we do not, I emphasize, we do NOT believe in the Weihnachtsmann here in Austria) could decorate the Christmas tree that my uncle had chopped down in the forest of his farm in the weeks of Advent.

“I hate this Facebook!” my friend said in a private message – although of course she was writing on Facebook. “Everything is so banal; all we do is rake over what’s happened in the past month. It’s just not enough.”

“I know.”

It wasn’t exactly a sensitive answer, almost insulting, in fact. But I simply had nothing else to say. At some point you have to ask yourself whether a friendship is worth fighting for. The answer is not simple and depends on the character of your friend as well as on the relationship. In my case, the person was worth it, but the relationship was not.