Tag: <span>travels</span>
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I had to laugh when I read today’s prompt. Like the joke about traffic, when the truck driver on the radio shouts, “There is a car driving in the wrong direction,” and the other one answers, “What do you mean ONE, hundreds are driving in the wrong direction.”
The Cemetery of the Nameless is not easy to find. Only a few signs along the way point to this place only thirty minutes from downtown Vienna, the Capital of Austria.
I’ve loved animals since I was a kid. For the first 10 years of my life, I wanted to be a zoologist. And although I eventually decided to pursue a different career path, my love for animals has never waned.
The first time I visited Rome the Capital City of Italy, only 6 hours away from our farm in South Tyrol, I felt at home. I had never been there before, but had walked the streets of Rome for many hours in my mind at school, when we learned all about the Roman Empire. I had wept for the innocent and poor who were tortured, or were just a human toy in the brutal games the rich invented to entertain themselves and the masses.
I am an American and love this country with all my heart, but I also have a European Austrian-Italian soul. I am following Sunday Lyrics for a while but only posted once. My original splendid evening idea to post European songs every Sunday, didn’t seem to make too much sense the next day. Nevertheless, it didn’t leave me alone.
Sometimes, very seldom, I feel something like homesickness, even though it’s not for a home or family, but rather for a tradition and or perhaps rituals I remember so vividly. Right about now, at the beginning of summer, I was always called back home to our farm in Austria. I got an extra week of vacation, like so many of us farm-children who had to help.
Let’s go back 45 years and let’s travel to Bavaria, in the South of Germany -again. A girl in her robe, wearing Austrian knitted houseshoes, is on her way to the auditorium. In one hand a blanket, in the other a plastic cup full of gummy bears, she joins all the other girls and the nuns who watch over them when school is over and during the nights. The little girl sits down full of anticipation. During the day the room was used for music classes and the drama club. On special events, the parents and family sat in the audience and watched the children sing and perform.
I was born 4,500 miles away in a small village in the Alps. One foot one the Italian side, the other on the Austrian side my Grandma always joked. I met Gastarbeiter/Migrant workers), who were guest/gast in our country, invited by our government. Most of them came from the former Yugoslavia, a few Turkish men followed the invitation as well.
I recall so many great moments in my life, and many of them only happened because I trusted in the people around me and I trusted in myself.