Comment on this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.I was given the following:
Tourism, travel writing, making a home in Germany, the Balkans, and wondering about your wife's thoughts on all the moving around. I know that last one is a bit wordy, but that's what I associate with your writing.
Tourism First, I need to make a plug for a favorite destination:
Actually, I have a love / hate relationship with tourism. I love to travel to interesting places and discover new people, places and cultures. On the other hand, tourism carries with it such a herd mentality. When my wife and I are abroad, we like to sneer at the other Germans we find amongst us.
Travel Writing
My writing about travel - at least in this space - focuses for the most part on Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are several reasons for that:
1. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a beautiful place with a lot to write about.
2. I often have thought about what can be done to generate commerce in Bosnia and Herzegovina to improve quality of life for its citizens. Having been an industrial buyer for years, I get depressed at the thought about Bosnia perhaps becoming another low cost manufacturing country ... and I don't really see a future in that for this country. But the tourism industry, that seems to me to be the best fit solution. Bosnia and Herzegovina has a wonderful and unique combination of nature, culture, history and adventure.
3. I long to be the one who puts Bosnia and Herzegovina on the map as one of Europe's best tourism destinations. But in that, an individual tourism destination, not a grazing field for the herd.
Making a home in Germany
As of this spring, I will have been in Germany for ten years!!! Something to celebrate. The seed of my move here began something on the order of 26 years ago, when my partents took us on a skiing vacation to Austria. Then I didn't know the difference between Austria and Australia ... and was afraid that mom was taking us to someplace where it wouldn't even be winter in February. Two weeks in Europe began with a week and a half in
Kitzbühel and then continued with a trip through Germany to meet friends that my mom knew since she worked for Kodak in Stuttgart in the 60's. I was dreading this leg of the trip, spending afternoons sitting in someon's parlor with coffee and cake while my mom and our host ramble on in some language that I don't understand. That pretty much fit the description of the trip until our last stay, in
Dornau. There we spent the night with a family with three kids, including a son a bit older than me, a daughter just a tad bit younger than me and another younger son. I have remained close friends with this family ever since.
After that trip, I stopped taking French and started learning German. Sixteen years after that, I would move to Germany, meet my wife and stay.
The Balkans
My experience in The Balkans is overwhelmingly dominated by my time and travels in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Other places that I have been to or through include
Slovenia (if you indluce sleeping on train platform in
Ljubjana and being questioned on the Austrian boarder if I was carrying Hashish as qualifying to say that I have been there),
Croatia (a little bit of travel in
Zagreb where I stayed with a Jesuit priest that I know from
Sarajevo, an overnight stay in
Plitvice Lakes National Park, an overnight stay in
Glina with a group of
Jesuit European Volunteers - which was my ticket to Sarajevo -,
Split, and a weekend trip to a small coastal town not far from Split).
I am still uncertain if Romania really counts as really being part of the Balkans (
reference this link), but I have been there, too. Once, I traveled to a wedding not far from
Bacau. During my year in Sarajevo, the group I lived with included a young man from Dresden and a woman from Romania. They fell in love and got married in Romania and lived in Dresden. They since have had two kids and later split up when he felt the calling to become an Orthodox monk. She is back in Romania living in some kind of mother / child convent, the last I knew. Go figure. My other travel to Romania was on business, which took me to
Timisoara.
wondering about your wife's thoughts on all the moving aroundHmmm, it is interesting that I left that impression, considering that we really have not moved around that much since we have been togetehr. But, I do give a lot of consideration to my wife's thoughts. A happy wife is an important component to a happy life together. As far as moving around goes, we are now in our third flat together. Not long after we met, my wife successively moved into my flat on
Wilhelm Dahl Str. 15 in Würzburg. A two room, 56 m² flat with a walk through living room was a bit too cozy for the two of us, so we moved to
Semmelstr. Then, after I had been in Würzburg for around eight years, and my wife had been there for over 17 years, work moved us to
Nürnberg, where we now live. Our brand new street is still not listed on Google maps.
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