Miss Euro Blogger - Bursting the Bubble

After spending the last weekend sick in bed and alternatively on the couch, I maxed out on Netflix documentaries, shows and movies. It made me realize how much I miss American trashy television. Yes, it's shallow. Yes, it's dumb. Yes, I like that kind of stuff sometimes. Binge watching endless reruns of The Real Housewives of Orange County, Beverly Hills, New York and sometimes Atlanta was an amazing guilty pleasure on the weekends. When I was on a business trip in St. Louis, Missouri, which included a weekend and I was done with sightseeing after 3.5 hours, I got myself a serving of quesadillas (the only vegetarian food I could find) and ate it in bed while watching Bravo. Reality show after reality show! I loved it! I spent the next day and a half on my bed-island with cheese stains in my jammies. It was an incredible weekend of wasting time and expanding waistbands. The other realization I had while being cooped up and watching Hollywood movies and shows was how much I mi...

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Fifteen years ago today, I woke up at my new 'home' in Santa Monica, California, USA. I was still jet lagged. It felt odd to see palm trees when I looked out the window. It was also much warmer than I was used to this time of the year. Helicopters circled over the buildings and along the beach looking for anyone and anything suspicious as the terror attacks of 9/11 only happened 11 days earlier. I was confronted with a lot of unknowns: Will I like living here? Will terrorists attack Los Angeles? Will I find new friends soon? Will I get very homesick? Will I be able to get into and through university? Will I stay here forever or will I go back to Europe in a few years? All of these questions plagued me for weeks after moving to California. I felt very lonely most of the time. Yes, I spoke and understood English. Yes, I lived in an amazing neighborhood just a five minute walk from the beach. However, all of that doesn't automatically make you feel happy and...

Nice is a lovely, touristy beach town in Southern France. Graz is Austria's second largest city and very quaint. Santa Monica is the representation of the California lifestyle. I've lived in two of those places and visted one several times as a tourist. And all three have one thing in common: they all were locations where vehicles were used as weapons. The incident in Santa Monica was the one that made me realize that this can happen anywhere. This is how I experienced it:   I heard the fluttering for the first time while sitting in front of my computer to do some research for a paper for college. It was around lunchtime on a regular sunny summer Wednesday in Santa Monica. The noise grew louder and louder by the second. I looked out the window in my home office but didn’t see anything. I walked into the living room where the windows were facing the city center. There, I saw the source of the fluttering noise. A cluster of several helicopters was hovering o...