Miss Euro Blogger - Bursting the Bubble

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...

--> To kick-off my new experiences in this strange land, something very distinct to California happened only a few days after I arrived at the end of September 2001. It happened on my first weekend in L.A. right around 8 AM. We were woken up by a moving bed and rattling windows. What seemed like several minutes of movement was probably only a few seconds long. It was my first earthquake! Welcome to California! My fiancé assured me that this was just a small one. Oh great, that’s comforting! What’s a big one like then? He told me that during the big Northridge earthquake in the 1990s he fell out of bed. That’s a big one! This just kept getting better. A million thoughts shot through my head. There is no bunker, so where should we go? Outside? I don’t think so since the electricity wires were hanging old-style in the alleyways. So we stayed inside – away from large bookcases and windows. For a second I also thought that the war was now not only in Afghanistan but had also b...