The Reunion(s)

My home town, November 8, 2004, 7:10 am

THE REUNION(S)


Today is the day of departure. I got up early to bring my thoughts and impressions to paper while they are still fresh. Saturday was the day of the big reunion. What a thought – getting together with a bunch of former classmates, most of whom I had not seen since graduating from high school. 20 years is a really long time.

A reunion stirs up strange feelings, feelings of curiosity, mixed with a little bit of nervousness and apprehension. A reunion forces one to think about one’s life, the last 20 years, the decisions one has made, and their cumulative effect. Time to take stock and reflect.

In high school I hung out with a group of 3 girls. The four of us had a lot of fun, we spent a lot of time together, we were all pretty good students, and sometimes we bugged the teachers and provoked them with silly questions, just to distract them from covering the material as required by the curriculum. We played volleyball together, attended choir practice together, went away together on various school trips and shared our first steps into young adulthood together.

But I for one had lost contact. I left my home town at the age of 20 and started a new life on a new continent. I also felt quite ambivalent about my home town since the small-town way of living and thinking had never been my cup of tea. In addition, life in Toronto kept me pretty busy and as a result I didn’t really keep in touch with anybody back home. So the prospect of reconnecting with people from my distant past was exciting and nerve-wrecking at the same time.

I had already connected with 2 of the 3 women who were part of our little posse and we had already spent many hours discussing our lives, philosophies, experiences. Now it was a question of convincing the 4th member of our high school gang to join us. Three phone calls later and a meeting was arranged. The four of us decided to get together at noon on the day of the reunion which was to start later at 2 pm in a little mountain village outside of my home town.


The reunion: 4 old friends from high school reunited.
Our meeting was great, seeing people I hadn’t seen, whom I had been really close to during an important phase of my life was amazing. None of us had really changed all that much visually, everybody was still slim and decent-looking. People now had careers, family, children. We talked about old stories of mischief and harmless juvenile errors in judgement. We shared tidbits of our youthful ways of looking at life, our teenage torments, and the twists and turns of our lives since then.

We finally convinced the fourth member of our group to join us in going to the big reunion and we headed off to our meeting in the mountains. Our class reunion was set in a beautiful mountain restaurant in a quaint little alpine village. Unfortunately the fog that had hung in the whole week was still hovering above the landscape and no rays of sunshine were to be seen.

When we entered the restaurant we saw 2 tables full people, about 20 people or so and we started making the rounds, shaking hands, introducing ourselves. I immediately recognized almost all my former class mates. There was only one person whose hair colour had changed and who had gotten a bit bigger who looked very different from before. Once we had exchanged photo albums and once my school mates had showed me photos of what this person looked like in the past it finally clicked and I realized who this person was.

What followed was a long evening of chats, of reminiscing, one of our school mates had brought super 8 movies that were filmed more than 20 years ago at various social events, dances and of course our big prom. Two of our teachers were invited and they participated actively in the discussions and shared their impressions of our teenage (mis)behaviours. It was amazing how people’s lives had turned out. There were engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, architects, computer scientists, senior managers and I guess I was a bit of a special case since I was the only person who had emigrated and lived overseas for the majority of my adult life while most of my colleagues had stayed relatively close to home.

The atmosphere was great, very relaxed and joyful and everybody looked like they were having fun. People were sincerely happy to see each other. Plans were made to do this again in another 5 or 10 years, address and contact information was exchanged and friendships were rekindled. All the nervous anticipation was converted into giddy silliness and exuberance over reconnecting with so many people from our shared past. I finally headed home at 4 am after an evening of laughter and reminiscing and this reunion turned out to be the crowning touch of my trip.

SQ.

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Reflections of a New Writer

My home town, November 5, 2004, 7:30 am

REFLECTIONS OF A NEW WRITER

When I set out to write my book about budget travel and slapped a few pages on the Internet to get motivated and to get started, I didn’t realize that writing would become so addictive. I spent half of last night mulling over my experiences in my home town, thinking I needed to get my hands on a computer to write them down as soon as possible. Connecting with your roots is indeed a rather intense experience. I crawled out of bed at 7 am this morning, just to get on my brother’s computer to get my thoughts on paper.


All these thoughts going through my head. 

But writing and publishing on the Internet and sharing one’s innermost thoughts with an anonymous faceless audience, possibly all across the world is a different story. On one hand it’s a real thrill to think that my humble, simple thoughts might be read by other people, and possibly even inspire some reflections of their own.

On the other hand it’s downright scary, to grant access in some way to one’s personal inner sanctum, to the private thoughts between my ears. There’s a definite sense of vulnerability and doubt about how much to share, what to write about, what people might think when they read over my reflections.

Funny enough the concern became greater when I started sharing my website with people that I knew. I had no problem writing and publishing personal thoughts to a truly anonymous audience of strangers, but once friends and acquaintances started looking at my material it started to feel a bit funny.

On the other hand, the opportunity to get out there into the ether of the Internet and share one’s reflections feels good, feels cathartic. To feel that my writings might resonate with other people is gratifying, and the adventurer, the little rebel in me says, the hell with what people might say or think, this is what you need to do right now, so go for it! It takes a bit of courage to expose so much of oneself to a potentially wide audience, but I guess I have always been a bit of a risk taker.

SQ.

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The Homecoming

My home town, November 5, 2004, 7:00 am

THE HOMECOMING

Home. What is home? Is it the small rural town in Austria where I grew up, the town that I left now more than 18 years ago? Or is it Toronto, the Metropolis, in whose bowels I have been living in for almost 2 decades?


The big baroque pilgrimage church in my home town. 

“Home” is a strange notion. I guess “home” is where you feel you belong, where you feel most at peace. That’s probably the closest definition of “home” that I can come up with.

I have spent the last 2 days around my hometown, taking care of some business issues, having meetings with people, dropping in on old friends, school mates, my old school, connecting with some of my old teachers.


View of my home town. 

It’s a strange experience. The place feels so familiar, but it has changed so much. Even the visual appearance of my home town has changed to the degree that the downtown area is hardly recognizable. People have changed, gone grey, gotten bigger, shrunk, faces have become more wrinkled, visible signs of aging have set in. Certainly more with some people than with others. You hear of deaths, yesterday I found out that one of my former teachers, one of my favourite ones, passed away barely a year after retirement.

I have sat down with people for conversations, and there is a definite sense of groundedness, of agrarian pride, of being connected with the countryside, with nature around them. Many people eat more naturally; appreciate the fruits of the earth that surrounds them. Much more so than in the expansive megalopolis of Toronto, where people are much more removed from the natural environment around them and go to the supermarket for super-processed food.


Rural landscapes close to my home town. 

There are also other conversations. Conversations about regretting past decisions, missed opportunities, barriers to doing what one really would have wanted to do. Whether we are talking about career decisions, relationship decisions, major life decisions,… I guess that’s not surprising, since people all over the world start questioning their earlier choices in mid life and later life.

What strikes me as different in some of these conversations is the sense of irrevocability and resignation. “Well, that’s just the way life is”, “That’s how it goes around here”, “You can’t change it now..”, “There is just nothing you can do about it, you just have to grin and bear it”. That sense of resignation and fatalism has made an appearance in various discussions with a variety of people that I have had in the last few days.

Being the dreamer that I am, the person that always sets out to capture a new inspiration, to pursue a new idea, to start something else up, this way of thinking strikes me as very foreign. Maybe there is a difference when you live overseas, that the “American (or to a lesser degree, the Canadian) way of thinking” rubs off on you, that “everything is possible”. Or at least you make yourself believe that.

All I can say is, as a person who’s gone out into the world and made a few things happen according to her own ideas, this sense of fatalism and resignation is strange to me and it makes me a little sad. Sad about the fact that people with talents, ideas and aspirations have given up striving for what they would really like to do, how they would really like to live. Sometimes I think it’s the small-town environment that imposes these barriers, whether they are real or perceived.

So for this dreamer, the metropolis, where many people believe that many things are possible, the big city with its diversity, its ethnic quarters, its broad entertainment offerings, its diverse and easily accessible adult education opportunities, its 3 universities and countless other academic institutions, with all its overcrowding, pollution, road rage and urban sprawl, with its gay area, the street people, graffiti-covered underpasses, this metropolis of Toronto, that has given me the chance to become the woman that I needed to become, that’s where my home is.

SQ.

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Hello from Graz

November 2, 2004, Internet Cafe Sit´n Surf, Graz, Austria, 2:05 pm


The "Uhrturm" - the clocktower, Graz' most well known sight 
I finally found Internet access here in Graz. Not the easiest thing I have to admit. Had to ask 3 people and finally went to the tourist info who competently directed me to an Internet Cafe.

The last few days have been interesting. The first day my sister-in-law and I took a little tour through my home town of Weiz, and in the 8 years that I haven't been here there has been a lot of change. New buildings, renovations, traffic reorganization. It almost felt like being in a different place.

On Saturday my brother, sister-in-law and I started our little weekend tour to Slovenia and Italy. We drove on the highway to Austria's border with Slovenia (only about 45 minutes from my home town). Then we continued on for about another hour and 15 minutes to the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. We parked the car by the river and took a little walk to the central market. The place was just packed and you can buy anything from fresh bread to meat, sausages, fish, vegetables, fruit, flowers. People were out in full force, even shopping for candles for the annual trip to the cemetery. After all it was the weekend of All Saints Day and people take their cemetery duties very seriously in Central Europe.

We walked through the old town with its cobble-stoned streets and then started the steady climb up to the castle hill. At the top is an old castle with a renovated tower that can be accessed. You get to the top through a really interesting winding staircase and once outside, there is a beautiful 360 degree view of the surrounding area, including the limestone outcrops of the Julian Alps.

After a brief lunch in a local pizzeria we continued our drive towards the Slovenian coast. I couldn´t keep my eyes open since I was so tired, so I missed a good part of interesting landscape. The Postojna mountain pass is always interesting and after that we got close to the Adriatic coast. We drove by the Slovenian towns of Koper, Strunjan and Izola and finally ended up in Piran.

Piran (formerly Pirano - in Italian) was a town that has changed hands many times among many people. Most of its core was built by the Venetians and on the hill above town there is a clock tower whose style is very reminiscent of the Campanile in Venice. Beside the harbour is a beautiful square with houses dating back several centuries. We checked into the Hostel-Hotel Garni Val, very similar to a youth hostel, where we could stay for Euro 20/night. My sister-in-law and I stayed in a room with 4 beds (2 of them bunkbeds), and washrooms/showers were in the hallway.

We went on a beautiful stroll through town, again nice cobble-stoned streets, the weather was gorgeous, we had blue sky with about 20 degrees. Of course we climbed the belltower which gave us a beautiful 360 degree view of town and the Adriatic coast to the north, all the way past Trieste. I almost got a heart attack when the bells of the clock tower started ringing right next to my ears. They were unbelievably loud.

We had a nice dinner in the evening in a restaurant called "Delfin". My brother of course had fish, one of the local specialities. I ended up picking up a stomach virus and on Sunday and Monday I was dealing with some very unpleasant symptoms. Sunday morning we checked out and continued our journey towards Italy.

After about 30 minutes of driving and basically no border check at the Slovenian-Italian border we ended up in Trieste, a city of 270,000 people, and a major industrial and port city at the north end of the Adriatic. Trieste used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the architecture is very reminiscent of many Austrian cities. We visited the main square with the City Hall, checked out the "Canale Grande", an outlet of the sea that stretches into the city.


Trieste's Piazza dell' Unita 

On the harbourfront there was some sort of exhibition by the Italian Navy, the Military and various police organizations. 3 war ships were parked in the harbour and apparently people were able to go on tour inside the war ships. All sorts of military and police vehicles were parked in the harbour area and sailors, soldiers and policemen and women were available to answer questions, pose for photos etc.

After our short stop in Trieste we continued our Northern Italian tour and stopped in the town of Cividale, a medieval town that was originally built by the Germanic tribe of the Langobards. It also has an old town core with ancient churches, narrow cobble-stoned roads and the most famous sight is the "Tempietto", the little temple that was built many hundreds of years ago by the Langobards.


Cividale and the "Devil's Bridge" - a beautiful ancient town in the foothills of the Italian Alps. 

After lunch (where I couldn't eat any of the Italian delicacies due to my stomach problems) we continued our way home through the Italian Val Canale, past Udine, Tolmezzo towards the Austrian border. It had been raining for several days and it was still pouring and all the mountain streams were very close to overflowing. Waterfalls overflowing with water were shooting down from all the mountains and the major river, the Tagliamento, looked like it was going to flood the area in the very near future.

About 3.5 hours later we finally arrived back home in Weiz, after driving through the pouring rain. Sunday night and yesterday I had to take it easy since my stomach was still bothering me a great deal. Today I finally took off, picked up my rental car at the airport in Graz and I have spent the last 2 or 3 hours rediscovering my university town. I checked out the castle hill (Schlossberg) in the middle of town, walked up to the Uhrturm (clock tower), the symbol of Graz, and looked at all the medieval remains of the old fortress castle on top of the hill. I also walked through the town´s centre, across the Hauptplatz (the main square with its market, which also houses City Hall) and finally, after some extended searching, ended up in this Internet cafe.

So the last few days have been quite exciting, Austria, Slovenia, Italy. The beauty of Europe are the small distances between all the various places. A perfect place for a sightseeing aficionado.

More to come.....

SQ. 2:30 pm.

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