For a time I attended a small country college called Hiram College – great faculty, but a pretty provincial student body.  When I took the tour of the college my guide informed me of a local phenomenon called “the Hiram ‘Hi!’”  The college was so tiny (1000 people including faculty) that everyone knew everyone’s face, even if they didn’t actually know each other personally.  The result was that everyone felt obligated to greet pretty much every person they passed.  Walking across the campus – a walk that never exceeded an equivalent of 1.5 city blocks – one typically greeted three to twelve people.

This social mechanism still strikes me as bizarre today as it did then, but, being a city boy, I always assumed that it was simply a small-town-in-the-country thing; and to some extent it is.  Life in New York City (the next place I chose to hang my baseball cap) didn’t give me any inclination to think otherwise.  I didn’t have to say anything to anyone unless I wanted something from them.  There was a whole system of looking at people, but that is a matter for another article.  I thought that New York was the exact opposite of Hiram.

It wasn’t until I’d come to Vienna that I’d discovered my error.  NYC didn’t provide an antithesis to the Hiram “Hi!” The Big Apple simply discarded it; doesn’t have time for it.  It is the Viennese who have formulated the true yin to that American-small-town yang.  The Vienna “Goodbye” is so perfectly other from our obligatory greeting system, and yet so equally prevalent, that a needle driven through the Vienna end of a globe is bound to show it’s pointy tip in Northwestern Ohio.

Like smoke in a coffeehouse, no one realizes it’s there…until a loud-mouthed, fast-talking, thinks-he’s-the-center-of-the-world (read as “stereotypical American”) non-smoker comes coughing and blustering into the place and asks why all the waiters are dressed for a funeral. 

I’m not complaining, Vienna.  Smoke all you like, and bring the check for my coffee whenever you’re ready.  But allow me to warn my fellow Westerners:  Saying goodbye in Vienna is something you should know about whether you are visiting or are here to stay.