Thursday, April 29, 2010
Castle
Hey, somehow I made it back to that magical castle I was telling you guys about a couple months ago. Remember, the one in a little village in Germany? I'm there again, and it's still amazing. It's completely different, though, because the last time I was here was in January. There was a lot of snow. Now, the weather is beautiful, and the people in the castle seem to be even more beautiful than before. I'm spending the weekend here then heading back down to Klagenfurt. Just thought I'd let you know that I'm back in Narnia. Auf Wiedersehen!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Osterferien
So, I guess I should tell you guys what I've been doing for the past two weeks. I've been away from Klagenfurt. Over the past 2 weeks, I visited 5 beautiful cities in 3 amazing countries, and I got to see and meet many wonderful people, including a few Iowans. It was one of the most fabulous trips I've ever had because it was filled with many things I never expected to experience.
The reason I went on this trip was because my school had two weeks off for Easter. Studying in a country dominated by Catholicism is a very nice thing when it comes to breaks for religious holidays. I started off my vacation by moving out of my old room. All of the students in my dorm were told to pack up our stuff and move to the building next door. The thing about the building next door is that it is brand new. Sometimes I fear that the building is going to raise off the ground and fly away because it seems to me like I'm living in a spaceship. It's the most technologically-advanced dormitory I've ever seen, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. The building is filled with technological ideas that some guy thought of behind a desk but never actually realized that people would be living there. I mean, I don't need a safe in my room, and I definitely don't need to be protected by 3 levels of security in order for somebody to get into my room. I could go on describing the silliness of the building, but you'd get bored. The point is, I moved into a new room right before I left. A couple days after I moved, I was on a plane to London Stanstead with a British friend of mine also named Tom. He took me around London for a couple days before we parted ways. He headed to Oxford to visit his girlfriend, and I stayed in London. I had never been to London, and I will say that it was a major culture shock. You wouldn't think that, but after being in a German-speaking country for the past 3 months, it was weird to be in a place that spoke English, weird English. I made the joke that I would need a translator, and at times, that was a true statement. After I split ways with Tom, I headed to a friend from high school's dorm. The next day, I got to see Mike DiMarco again. This was the first unexpected thing: Mike woke me up bright and early by arriving right at my doorstep. We walked around rainy London, got totally drenched, and ended the day by eating fish and chips in a pub with several other girls from Iowa State. That was the second unexpected thing: my entire time in London was spent with Iowans that I never met in Iowa.
I left London after 4 days because I had to get to Munich to pick up my dad at the airport. I arrived in Munich the day before my dad did, so I went out to see the city with 14 Brazilians who were staying in the same room as me. That was the third unexpected thing: touring Munich with a large group of Brazilians. Saturday night, I set my alarm early in order to catch a train to the airport to find the lost American saying the only German thing he knew, "Ein Bier bitte!" Unfortunately, I set my alarm incorrectly, woke up an hour late in a state of panic, but grabbed the first train to the airport. The whole way I was thinking that my dad was going to be lost forever in Munich, but we eventually found each other. Whew. That first day, we went on a walking city tour. Let me tell you, my dad was a real trooper that day. I don't know how many of you have ever traveled abroad, but if you have, you know that upon arrival you want to do only one thing, sleep. Dad didn't have time to sleep. We only had one week together, which meant that immediately upon arrival in Europe, we would be doing a 4 hour walking tour, with our bags. I don't know how he made it, but he did. It was a very cool tour with a lot of history that I had heard once in Humanities but somehow seemed to go in one ear and out the other in that big lecture hall.
The next day we experienced the fourth unexpected thing: we got to visit the site of a former concentration camp. I never in my life thought that I would be standing in a place where thousands of people were tortured for their beliefs. We met in the Munich city center to catch the train to Dachau. If you've never heard or learned about Dachau, look it up. Read about it, it will change your life. I really had no clue what to expect before we got to the memorial. I had learned about WWII, Hitler, Nazis, Concentration camps, but what did I actually know? Had I ever really imagined that those were real people in the war, in the camps, in the graves? When hearing the information in Cedar Falls, Iowa, it is very easy to simply think that it's just history. It's easy to somehow let the emotions slip by. I mean, it was so long ago and so far away. I would love to tell you everything I experienced in that former camp, but that would be far too long. I will sum it up briefly. Outside the facts, figures, and pictures presented to me were the real life feelings I felt while walking through the "barracks" where people were forced to squat in a box not big enough to sit down or stand up, causing them to squat for hours, building up the pressure on their bodies, and eventually gravity crushing their backbones. Teachers can't teach you what it's like to see for yourselves where 10-12 people would be forced to sleep on a twin-sized wood mattress. You can't learn in school what it's like to walk through the crematorium and gas chambers where experiments were done on living breathing people like they were rats in a maze. I have never felt so cold or empty inside as I did while I was walking through the barracks and crematorium. It was literally a bone-chilling experience.
The thing that hit me the hardest was the end of the tour. We were taken to a sign that said "Nie Wieder". It means "never again". Our tour guide explained why she hated that sign. You see, genocide didn't stop when the doors to the concentration camps were taken down. Mass killing didn't stop at the end of WWII, and it didn't begin at the beginning of the war either. Genocide has been around the world, and it still is. A little over 200 years ago, it was in North America with the Native Americans. It occurred in the last 50 years in the killing fields of Cambodia. Ethnic cleansing happened in the former Yugoslavia not even 20 years ago. It is happening today in places like Darfur. You see, "Never Again" is not right. It's still happening. The reason it's still happening is because people aren't stopping it. The tour guide made a statement where she said the greatest problem in the world is not ignorance, it's apathy. People let killing happen because they don't care, or they think they are too far away or too small and insignificant to do anything about it. That's just it, though. We're not too small. In fact, if people worked together, they could do just about anything, including stopping genocide.
So that's the biggest thing I took away from my tour of Dachau. I have power to change the world. You do too. We may not be able to make a huge difference, but if a bunch of us make a bunch of small differences, they add up fast. As I was standing there at the Never Again sign, I remembered a post card I got once from a place that I really love on the west coast. The postcard had a saying from Mother Teresa, and it said:
"We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."
As my dad would say, you never know what you can do until you try. I don't know if you know it, but you have a lot of power. You can change the world. While we're alive, we should all make tiny changes to the world. It's what we're supposed to do, and it's what we have to do. It makes me excited to hear things like what Mother Teresa said. I love to think that someday we could rid the world of genocide, infanticide, AIDS, prejudice, hatred, evil. It just takes a lot of small steps. Try to take one of those steps this week. Get involved by volunteering, get informed by reading about a world issue, just be a part of changing the world.
I'll stop there for today. I wrote a lot, and I will continue with the rest of my trip tomorrow. Have a good day. Smile and be happy. Talk to you soon.
The reason I went on this trip was because my school had two weeks off for Easter. Studying in a country dominated by Catholicism is a very nice thing when it comes to breaks for religious holidays. I started off my vacation by moving out of my old room. All of the students in my dorm were told to pack up our stuff and move to the building next door. The thing about the building next door is that it is brand new. Sometimes I fear that the building is going to raise off the ground and fly away because it seems to me like I'm living in a spaceship. It's the most technologically-advanced dormitory I've ever seen, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. The building is filled with technological ideas that some guy thought of behind a desk but never actually realized that people would be living there. I mean, I don't need a safe in my room, and I definitely don't need to be protected by 3 levels of security in order for somebody to get into my room. I could go on describing the silliness of the building, but you'd get bored. The point is, I moved into a new room right before I left. A couple days after I moved, I was on a plane to London Stanstead with a British friend of mine also named Tom. He took me around London for a couple days before we parted ways. He headed to Oxford to visit his girlfriend, and I stayed in London. I had never been to London, and I will say that it was a major culture shock. You wouldn't think that, but after being in a German-speaking country for the past 3 months, it was weird to be in a place that spoke English, weird English. I made the joke that I would need a translator, and at times, that was a true statement. After I split ways with Tom, I headed to a friend from high school's dorm. The next day, I got to see Mike DiMarco again. This was the first unexpected thing: Mike woke me up bright and early by arriving right at my doorstep. We walked around rainy London, got totally drenched, and ended the day by eating fish and chips in a pub with several other girls from Iowa State. That was the second unexpected thing: my entire time in London was spent with Iowans that I never met in Iowa.
I left London after 4 days because I had to get to Munich to pick up my dad at the airport. I arrived in Munich the day before my dad did, so I went out to see the city with 14 Brazilians who were staying in the same room as me. That was the third unexpected thing: touring Munich with a large group of Brazilians. Saturday night, I set my alarm early in order to catch a train to the airport to find the lost American saying the only German thing he knew, "Ein Bier bitte!" Unfortunately, I set my alarm incorrectly, woke up an hour late in a state of panic, but grabbed the first train to the airport. The whole way I was thinking that my dad was going to be lost forever in Munich, but we eventually found each other. Whew. That first day, we went on a walking city tour. Let me tell you, my dad was a real trooper that day. I don't know how many of you have ever traveled abroad, but if you have, you know that upon arrival you want to do only one thing, sleep. Dad didn't have time to sleep. We only had one week together, which meant that immediately upon arrival in Europe, we would be doing a 4 hour walking tour, with our bags. I don't know how he made it, but he did. It was a very cool tour with a lot of history that I had heard once in Humanities but somehow seemed to go in one ear and out the other in that big lecture hall.
The next day we experienced the fourth unexpected thing: we got to visit the site of a former concentration camp. I never in my life thought that I would be standing in a place where thousands of people were tortured for their beliefs. We met in the Munich city center to catch the train to Dachau. If you've never heard or learned about Dachau, look it up. Read about it, it will change your life. I really had no clue what to expect before we got to the memorial. I had learned about WWII, Hitler, Nazis, Concentration camps, but what did I actually know? Had I ever really imagined that those were real people in the war, in the camps, in the graves? When hearing the information in Cedar Falls, Iowa, it is very easy to simply think that it's just history. It's easy to somehow let the emotions slip by. I mean, it was so long ago and so far away. I would love to tell you everything I experienced in that former camp, but that would be far too long. I will sum it up briefly. Outside the facts, figures, and pictures presented to me were the real life feelings I felt while walking through the "barracks" where people were forced to squat in a box not big enough to sit down or stand up, causing them to squat for hours, building up the pressure on their bodies, and eventually gravity crushing their backbones. Teachers can't teach you what it's like to see for yourselves where 10-12 people would be forced to sleep on a twin-sized wood mattress. You can't learn in school what it's like to walk through the crematorium and gas chambers where experiments were done on living breathing people like they were rats in a maze. I have never felt so cold or empty inside as I did while I was walking through the barracks and crematorium. It was literally a bone-chilling experience.
The thing that hit me the hardest was the end of the tour. We were taken to a sign that said "Nie Wieder". It means "never again". Our tour guide explained why she hated that sign. You see, genocide didn't stop when the doors to the concentration camps were taken down. Mass killing didn't stop at the end of WWII, and it didn't begin at the beginning of the war either. Genocide has been around the world, and it still is. A little over 200 years ago, it was in North America with the Native Americans. It occurred in the last 50 years in the killing fields of Cambodia. Ethnic cleansing happened in the former Yugoslavia not even 20 years ago. It is happening today in places like Darfur. You see, "Never Again" is not right. It's still happening. The reason it's still happening is because people aren't stopping it. The tour guide made a statement where she said the greatest problem in the world is not ignorance, it's apathy. People let killing happen because they don't care, or they think they are too far away or too small and insignificant to do anything about it. That's just it, though. We're not too small. In fact, if people worked together, they could do just about anything, including stopping genocide.
So that's the biggest thing I took away from my tour of Dachau. I have power to change the world. You do too. We may not be able to make a huge difference, but if a bunch of us make a bunch of small differences, they add up fast. As I was standing there at the Never Again sign, I remembered a post card I got once from a place that I really love on the west coast. The postcard had a saying from Mother Teresa, and it said:
"We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."
As my dad would say, you never know what you can do until you try. I don't know if you know it, but you have a lot of power. You can change the world. While we're alive, we should all make tiny changes to the world. It's what we're supposed to do, and it's what we have to do. It makes me excited to hear things like what Mother Teresa said. I love to think that someday we could rid the world of genocide, infanticide, AIDS, prejudice, hatred, evil. It just takes a lot of small steps. Try to take one of those steps this week. Get involved by volunteering, get informed by reading about a world issue, just be a part of changing the world.
I'll stop there for today. I wrote a lot, and I will continue with the rest of my trip tomorrow. Have a good day. Smile and be happy. Talk to you soon.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
on the move
Hello Everybody, I'm sorry that I haven't written anything in awhile, and I'm afraid that you might be disappointed by this short blurp. I'm in Munich right now, listening to music in the lobby of a hostel in the center of the city. I just arrived here this morning from London, where I'd been for the past 5 days. I left Klagenfurt last Tuesday with a British friend of mine, and we flew with Ryan Air (worst airline ever, but cheap) to London. I spent a couple days with him, then headed to the other side of town to visit a couple friends from high school. My time there seemed so short, and now I'm in a different country. My dad is coming tomorrow, and we're going to go around Austria for the next week: Salzburg, Vienna, tiny Klagenfurt, then back to Munich to ship him back to Iowa. Who knows what we'll do, but it should be fun. I'm excited, but I have to go. This week should definitely be an adventure, especially because my dad thinks he can speak German. Talk to you all soon. Happy Easter. I guess that's something important I should've written about, but I didn't. Tschüs.
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