Bled

Yesterday, I went to Bled. My friend Tim Dodd is here in Klagenfurt right now. He's enjoying himself on a 3 week tour of Europe, traveling the whole way in a rental car. The nice thing about a car is, you don't have scheduled departures and arrivals like plains, trains, and buses. We woke up yesterday and decided to drive somewhere. He's taking photos along the way, so we chose to go to Bled, a city less than an hour away from here, but just happens to be in a different country, Slovenia. We weren't sure about the legalities of bringing the rental car into Slovenia, but we went anyways. The trip started at 11 am, and I had to be back by 2 pm in order to finish writing an essay. The drive was beautiful, passing through the Alps along the Loiblpass. I would highly recommend taking that pass if you ever get the chance because your mind will be blown by the beauty of mountains and hillsides unlike anything you've ever seen. We arrived in Bled, took some pictures of a castle at a lake, then turned around to get back to Austria. The trip was short, but it's pretty cool to arrive at class and say that you were in a different country that morning. I like it, at least.

16. Mai

Sorry sorry sorry. It's been two weeks since my last post, and I've received several messages asking for updates. I'm always surprised by how many people actually read what I write. It really puts a smile on my face when I get an email from someone saying anything about my blog, so thank you for the feedback (even if it's just you telling me that I need to write).

I can tell you that life in Austria is not slowing down at all, and the speed is picking up with the end of the semester looming in the distance, which seems to be creeping closer and closer everyday. One of the main reasons that the time here is flying by is because of the seemingly ever-constant movement of my body. I'm always going here and there, to one country or another, to football tournaments and practice, and to class. I'm not actually spending that much time on the campus, rather, I'm moving around it a lot. My most recent adventure was a trip this past week to Bratislava...the capital of Slovakia...the unlucky half of what used to be Czechoslovakia...a country you've probably heard of but had no idea that it was split up and the capital is now Bratislava.

Some of you may have heard of Bratislava because of a film that came out within the past few years, Hostel. It's a film about youth traveling through Europe, who decide to spend some time in a little-known city called Bratislava. They stay in a hostel, which eventually turns out to be the worst decision of their lives because crazy scary people are waiting at the hostel to kidnap them and kill them. Nice, huh? It's a fairly grotesque film, so I don't really recommend it. This film was the only picture of Bratislava in my mind when I arrived in the Hlavna Stanica (main train station). You may be asking why I decided to go, and the answer is simple: I had a free return train ticket from a friend. Why not?

After exiting the station, I searched for the correct cable car I needed to get to my own hostel. I must've had a confused look upon my face, or maybe I just looked innocent and naive, because a strange man, carrying nothing but little slips of paper in a large duffel bag, asked me if I was interested in finding a hostel. Upon hearing his question, I pondered the possibility of the film actually being true, but I decided it was best not to see the truth for myself. I politely told him no and headed off in a direction that I only knew was away from him. I thought that was a great start to my trip to Bratislava.

The thing about Bratislava is, it was under Communist control for quite some time. The roots of that so-called equality can still be seen today in the dullness of the buildings, the public transportation straight out of Orson Well's 1984, and the lack of life in the people walking the streets. Everything was a bit cold and unfriendly. I'm sure the people were great, but they looked like they'd rather stay inside in stare at the wall all day than crack a smile every once in awhile.

We wondered the streets, snapping photos of old buildings, strange statues of humans placed randomly throughout the city, and groups of teenagers celebrating their high school graduation. It was a quaint city with not much of an atmosphere. Nonetheless, it was beautiful, something very different than anything I'd seen before.

Only two day were spent there, before we headed home. As we waited to see which track our train was, the same man approached us with the empty duffel bag. He asked us the same question without a hint of recognition, as if we were blank faces with a mouth to speak and money to give. Strange. The trip was short, but sweet.

We made it back to Klagenfurt in time for the final leg of the University Football (Soccer) Tournament, in which my team was lucky enough to have made it to the quarterfinals. In our quarterfinal game, we played against a team from Chechnya, barely pulling through with a win after two halves, two overtimes, and five penalty kicks. The semifinal round was against a team of refugees from Afghanistan. Again, we squeaked by with a close 1-0 win. For the first time ever, the dorm I was playing with made it to the finals. Our opponents were a group of Austrian-Slovenians (I felt like it was a mini-World Cup with participants from every continent, including whole teams from Slovenia, Germany, India, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Austria). Our streak ended in the final, losing 3-0, but it was great to participate in such a tournament.

My movement does not stop here, though. In a couple days, I will be renting a car and driving to Budapest, Hungary. I'm traveling with 2 friends from Ireland and a crazy guy from England. We will be staying for a long weekend, returning to Klagenfurt for a couple days, then I will be making my way to Venice, maybe Berlin. Crazy traveling. I may also be seeing a couple friends of mine in the next couple weeks. Two of them are making separate vacations throughout Europe, and one is studying in Italy. So much to do, so much to see, and so little time left. Before you know it, I will be back in Cedar Falls. So fast. I wish all of you a wonderful week, and remember to smile.

Osterferien pt. 2

I realized today that I forgot to tell you about the second part of my Easter vacation. I remembered because I was in Munich this morning, which seems to be a fairly common place for me to be recently even though it's 5 hours away from Klagenfurt. I was only there for the airport, though, on my way to Herrnhut, Germany for the weekend.

I left off telling you about my Dad and I in Munich at the concentration camp. We left Munich the next day to head off to Salzburg. I was excited because it was the first time I was going to ride on the high-speed train. I had never been on one before because they are the expensive ones, and I always choose the cheapest option. Luckily, my dad was there, so we took the fast one. We spent one day in Salzburg walking around, sitting in the sun, and mostly just relaxing. That night, we met up with a friend of my Dad's, who he had met during a pilgrimage in Assisi, Italy 5 years ago. This was the fun part of Salzburg, at least for me. I don't know how they did it 5 years ago in Italy, but the only way for the two to communicate to each other was through me. It was my first experience translating for people in an actual conversation. Of course, there were things that I couldn't get from one language to the other, but it was fun anyways. We spent the evening with him, then headed off to Vienna in the morning.

Fun again. We took the high speed train one more time. I think it was traveling around 200 km/h. You can try to figure that out for yourself in mph. Vienna was absolutely beautiful. The weather was magnificent, which made for a couple nice days walking around the city, viewing the palaces, enjoying the parks, and wandering through the market. The city was seriously amazing. If you ever get the chance, you should visit it. After two nights in Vienna, we headed off to my hometown of Klagenfurt.

Klagenfurt is the capital of the state of Carinthia, but it is an awfully small town, meaning there's nothing really to do. I showed him the highlights of the city, and we headed back off to Munich in the morning. Our last day was spent walking around Munich again. This time we took no free tours, we just relaxed. My dad left the next morning, and I stayed in Munich for a couple more hours waiting for my train.

The whole two weeks were amazing, and I can't say that I ever expected to spend a week in Europe with my dad. I consider myself very lucky to even be able to have the chance to do that. We learned a lot about the dark history of Nazi Germany, saw quite a few century-old palaces from distant empires, enjoyed hours in the sun on the grass, and filled our bellies quite graciously.

My last couple hours by myself in Munich were spent exploring parts of the city we didn't see. My walk ended, however, at the very place where our free tour had once ended. It was a square where Hitler used to hold demonstrations. On one end of the square was a stage, guarded by two massive stone lions. To the left of the stage stands a large cathedral, and to the right stands the government. We were told how the leader used to rally the crowd with powerful words spoken from that very spot on the stage, so I went up to see what it was like for myself. Standing there, it was easy to see how a feeling of power could be absorbed from the pulsing crowd. There wasn't even anybody in the square cheering for me, but it was still evident. I walked down the steps of the stage towards the center of the square and thought about what it must've been like to stand in the crowd during those speeches. The words were presented perfectly, so perfectly that even the opposition bowed to the evil that spoke them. I looked up at the stage, and a song came to my mind. It's a song called "Pain" by Aaron Strumpel. The end of the song says:

It's just around the corner, when every knee will bow,
and the freedom will come.
It's just around the corner, when You'll come in the clouds,
and pain will be no more.

I imagined that the stage was once filled with a voice of pure evil, but someday soon, that evil will be replaced by the Voice of love. Someday soon, that square will be filled again with a crowd, and the people will be bowing. They will be bowing because the Voice will be taking away pain, hurt, loneliness, anger, fear, evil. It won't be just that square either, it will be every square on earth filled with all of us imperfect people. I have hope that that day will be very soon, and when it comes, there will be nothing better.

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!

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.

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.

I love talking.

Spring is here. The days are sunny, warm-ish, and the birds are singing. Tagging along with the arrival of Spring is the Easter Break. I'm fortunate enough to be studying in Austria right now, where the Easter holiday is much different than in the US. I mean, maybe the holiday isn't much different, but we get a break from school. Not just any break. It's nothing like Spring Break. It's two weeks; much better. My break started two days ago after my Thursday morning Linguistics course, and since then, I've had nothing to do except move to a new room in a new building. Let me tell you, there are no dorms at UNI as nice as the dorm I just moved into here. It's very high-tech, like I'm living with the Jetson's or something.

Other than moving, I've spent a lot of my time with friends. Today, we sat outside together, enjoying the beautiful weather and a couple cups of coffee. I was sitting at a table with a girl from Austria and a boy from Portugal when a very common theme found it's way to our conversation: languages. I say this is a very common theme because it is a topic that comes up in nearly every conversation; reason being, we are all from different countries with different languages. Conversations at one table at one time can be in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and so on, therefore, it's a common theme. We are always comparing our own languages to the other languages we know, and our own abilities to speak each of them. We talk about the differences between American English and British English, German and Dutch, Spanish and Italian, so on and so forth. In short, the conversation is always interesting because it's comparing not only languages but cultures and people, and in the end, we all agree that the most important aspect of any language is simply communication. It doesn't matter how great or poor you speak a language, rather, what's important is communication.

This is the answer that we come to time and time again. I love the topic, though, because it proves to me that somewhere inside all of us is a commonality. No matter how different we are, no matter where we come from, what we study, what we speak, or anything else, there is a commonality. That commonality manifests itself in these conversations.

Let me tell you, since I've been in Europe, I can't tell you how many people have told me that I'm not like the Americans they see in the movies or on television. Every time I talk to people, stereotypes that were created by music, television, films, and newspapers are broken. It's not just for me, either. In the same conversations as the language ones, people are saying, "Wow, you really aren't like the Italians I've heard about from my friends" or "You know, I always thought Germans were a lot meaner, but you seem to be different." Through communication, prejudices and false ideas seem to be tossed aside and replaced by truth. It's amazing how many ideas we have built up in our heads about people who are different than us just because of what we see in the media, or what our family and friends tell us. If your cousin told you that he met an Austrian one time who was the ugliest person he had ever seen, it wouldn't make sense to believe that the ugliest people in the world all congregated in Austria hundreds of years ago in order keep the ugly gene in their gene pool. That's not how it works, people are individuals and it is impossible to define a single person from a potentially far off idea you heard somewhere. How many people are there in the world with the potential to change your life, or you there's, because of an idea you have stuck in your head?

Take this down to an even smaller step. A couple weeks ago, I met a guy from Germany. The first question he asked me was where I was from. I answered, "America." He proceeded to tell me that wasn't possible because America is a continent, not a country. I figured that he was a jerk, so I turned around and stopped talking to him. Three days ago, I went to the kitchen to ask for help with a German grammar exercise. I asked a friend of mine who was in the kitchen, but when she didn't know the answer, it came from someone else in the room. The guy, who I had previously written off for a jerk, helped me with my homework, and showed me that he could not be defined by one line in one conversation. My earlier idea of him and who he was, restricted our current friendship from being several weeks older than it is now.

How many other people in my life have I written off because of something they said or did to me once? How many people have you stopped talking to because of one particular incident, or something one of your friends told you about them? I think it's a shame that we could go so long, even our entire lives, with thoughts about people that are entirely false just because of our refusal to seek the actual truth about them. It sucks to think that we could go so long missing something so good as a friendship because of a stupid idea that turns out to be false.

That thought scares me because I wonder the same thing about God. How many times has He been falsely represented by people? How many people are turned away completely from the only Person who knows anything because of something they heard or saw that isn't actually True? Think about it. How many people do you see on TV or in the news saying that they are doing something in God's name, but turn out to only be acting in the name of themselves? It's scary to think. Millions of people are turned away from eternal salvation because of prejudices and lies. People are not only turned away from Christ by the falsehoods, but they start to spread the lies themselves when they see people in city squares or college campuses preaching condemnation in the name of their savior. How many people are being saved by people showing signs saying Jesus hates gays, liberals, fornicators, liars, and so on? I would bet the answer is slim to none. I've seen those signs, and I've heard people preaching from benches saying that we all need to repent for our sins. But why not talk about forgiveness? Why not tell people about the compassion of Jesus? I think it would be so much better. Think of how many people would be brought closer rather than pushed away.

As always, I hope that this makes sense to you. I write in every blog that these are just my ideas, and that I hope you think in your own way, not mine. I am filled with prejudices, just like most of you, but I am trying to let them go. I want to give everybody a chance, and I want to make sure I'm not spreading lies like the ones I've written about. The most important thing, though, in not spreading lies, is knowing the Truth. We can't help people if we don't know that first. Try to point people in the right direction this upcoming week. Rather than telling them the negative things you just heard from your friend, tell them about something positive. We have to stay positive. We have to stop spreading lies. It's the only way for the Truth to be known.