Love Letters from Vienna was begun with a very narrow purpose. I've chosen to live in the city I fell in love with at first sight, despite the inevitable difficulties such a choice entails such as learning a new language, overcoming cultural differences, finding work as a foreigner. The world has many interesting cities, but what makes a place unique lies in the thousands of small, concrete peculiarities, the terrain of its many histories, a certain singularity of style in the people who live there. A truly fascinating city, in my estimation, is one in which you feel there is always a new mystery lying in wait for you around every corner.
Love letters from Vienna is, first and foremost, an apologia for a city I love. My intentions in the various entries will be to highlight some of the many enchanting details that come up in the course of my life here.
As a more pointed corollary to this, I will be writing as an American expat, who also loves my country and follows its issues from afar, but who, having been through the transformative experience of adjusting to an entirely new culture, has come upon fresh perspectives. Sometimes I will be writing to gently correct American misperceptions about Europe, which in recent years has undergone severe and sometimes unfair thrashings from the politicians and pundits. Occasionally I might weigh in on what I have come to consider a myopic quality of the American media, caused by the 24 hour news cycle and an unhealthy alliance between moneyed interests, the political class which understands the nature of spin better than anyone, and a whole generation of journalists who are either too cowed by the powerful or too blinded by postmodern thinking to sort the facts from the lies.
This is not to say that I haven't noticed the issues Europe faces in my three years of living here, or that I'm of the opinion that "anything European is better." But this blog is not the place where I'll weigh in on Europe's problems. My singular purpose of this website will be to share with other Americans what I've learned while living here, and perhaps also to speculate on things that the USA can learn from Europe.
