Miss Euro Blogger - Bursting the Bubble

Made in Styria - Improved in California I participated in a Writing for the Web-workshop recently and one of the exercises was to write an exaggerated 'About Me' for my product/services website. The class was in German and therefore, so is the result. Let me know what you think!  Mein Name ist Cornelia, aber seit der dritten Klasse Volksschule nennt mich jeder Connie, weil wir damals 'coole' englische Namen von unserer Englischlehrerin bekamen. Ich bin zu 100% aus steirischem Fleisch mit ungarischer Gewürzmischung hergestellt, jedoch wurde meine Fleischqualität unter der teilwiesen Aufsicht von Governeur Arnold Schwarzenegger über 10 Jahre lang in Kalifornien aufgebessert. Made in Styria - improved in California. Dort bekam ich auch das Qualitätssiegel der University of California-Los Angeles verliehen. Dieses Qualitätssiegel ist auch der Grund warum ich trotz meiner Kompaktheit im Hochpreissegment verkauft werde. Neben meiner Expertise im zweisprachigen Texte...

Sietar Austria invited me to hold a reading of my book LAlien-From the Austrian Alps to the Hollywood Hills at the Vienna Expat center on January 21. And so I did. Check out the Press Release by MyMorawa summarizing the fantatic evening: https://www.mymorawa.com/neuigkeiten/pressemitteilung-nachlese-zur-buchpraesentation-lalien-von-cornelia-e-miedler/

I recently read an article about someone who 'repatriated' after six months of traveling. The writer talked about how difficult it was to reconnect with friends after she (or he - not sure) had been gone for so long. First, I think that if you lose your friends after you have been gone only for six month, they may not have been real friends anyway. So... good ridance. Second, try reconnecting with friends from school after you have been gone for over a decade! When I made it known on social media that I was about to move back to my home country, I had a lot of people from school reconnect with me and wanting to meet up as soon as I got there. I was excited that so many of them were interested in what I had been up to. The first friend I met up with is someone I went to kindergarden and school with. We had brunch and talked about the old days and the new days. Over the course of eating some scrambled eggs and drinking a cappuccino, it became pretty clear that this frie...

LAlien-From the Austrian Alps to the Hollywood Hills got a 5* review on thalia.at !!!! More at https://www.thalia.at/shop/home/suchartikel/lalien/cornelia_e_miedler/EAN9783990498705/ID45116425.html

Today, my book-baby turned one year old! To celebrate LAlien 's first birthday, I was interviewed by fellow writer E. Rachael Hardcastle . Check out the interview here: http://www.erachaelhardcastle.com/single-post/2017/04/12/The-Author-Interviews-Round-Cornelia-E-Miedler

  via GIPHY A magical thing happens every year in Austria right around this time: people remember how to smile! When I lived in California, I was really confused why everyone was so damn happy all the time. I arrived in LA in the middle of September and my mood had already gone into hybernation ready for winter. But there is no real winter in LA. My body was confused - and my mood even more so. And then I got it: sunshine makes people happy! Eureka! Who knew?! Now as spring has sprung in Austria, I can see the same phenomnon. Yesterday, I ran into a neighbor. She smiled at me! And even greeted me! I was confused but immediately showed appreciation by smiling and greeting back. Of course, the springtime-miracle mood-lift doesn't work on everyone - my downstairs neighbor would rather bodycheck anyone in her way than crack a smile. Gee lady-no-smiles, give it a try, it doesn't hurt.  Nevermind the sourpuss face from downstairs, I love this time of the year! I know this sm...

So... I got married this year... twice... to the same guy - of course. As you know from my previous blog posts, I have been married before and was a happily divorced woman. In the years following, I didn't think I ever wanted to get married again. I had the 'been-there-done-that-meh-not-that great' kind of attitude. And why do something again that wasn't all that the first time around. Nonetheless, what I didn't think was going to happen happened. I met a boy. Boy was cute. Boy treated me right (respectful, loving and caring). Girl moved in with boy. Fast forward two years - boy popped the question on a cliff by the pacific ocean in Malibu. Girl said yes! And then... the planning phase started. I absolutely hated my first wedding. I hated the dress, the venue, the officiant, the atmosphere and the bored faces of the guests. At the time, I only had a few months to put a wedding together in a city that I just moved to. I had no clue what I was doing. That's ...

Today marks the 15th anniversary of 9/11. Do you remember where you were when it happened? I was in Salzburg at an Irish pub. CNN was running on the TV. Both towers were still standing. I asked the guy behind the bar what happened and he told me about the planes that hit the World Trade Center. "Was it an accident?" "I don't think so..." I only came to confirm a reservation but stayed to watch and find out more. The longer I watched the more scared I got. Why? Because I had a plane ticket going to America for only 10 days after this fateful day that changed the world. Soon it became evident that I was moving to a country that is about to enter into a war. What did that mean? More terror attacks within the U.S.? Fighting on the streets? Bombings? I didn't know what to expect. When I arrived at LAX, the airport was filled with guys holding guns. Helicopters circled above the city nonstop. It seemed like a movie. CNN was on all day and all night long. Loo...

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...

For those who have read my book 'LAlien', you know how much my time at the University of California-Los Angeles, better known as UCLA, meant to me. Those were my formative years, which for others often happen in their teen years. I started attending UCLA in 2004 after transferring from Santa Monica college. I was already in my mid-20s and therefore much older than most Bachelor students. I absolutely loved my time at UCLA. The campus is spectacular. I never felt more at peace than when I sat on those lush, green fields of the campus. This memory of a peaceful sheltered place was shattered this week when a gunman shot a UCLA professor in one of the engineering buildings. The years at university are supposed to be fun and careless - with the exception of caring about getting good grades. We meet new people, learn to deal with life on our own, have sleepless nights over exams (and parties), make friends for life and, most important of all, we get to know ourselves. On...

I must admit: I am happy to not live in the U.S. this year. 2016 is a presidential election year, which means that the circus started about 1 1/2 years ago. Anyone who has every experienced the full two years before a presidential election in the U.S. will know what I mean. Your entire surroundings are consumed by election news, paranoia and propaganda. You suddenly see your neighbor in a new, unfavorable light because he put a sticker supporting 'the other party' on his car. You realize you work in a company filled with voters for 'the other guy'. Everyone is cautious not to say the wrong thing trying to avoid starting a political debate about why their candidate is the right one. In 2004, when Bush was re-elected, I was a student at UCLA and experienced the presidential elections as a fairly new arrival in the U.S. for the first time. I was glued to the couch watching TV in fear of missing something. I was captivated by the aggressive, dirty politics. In 2008, ...

California has more to offer than sandy beaches. A little glimpse into the 'other' California....

--> 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...

People back home - or even Americans living outside California - often ask me if I'm not scared living in area with such frequent seismic activity. I can honestly admit that I am terrified of earthquakes - especially because I work in downtown LA on the 31st floor of a skyscraper. The icing on the cake is that there is a fault line that runs right underneath downtown LA. In late July of 2008, just before lunch time, the leaves of my potted plant on my desk started to move suspiciously. Next thing I knew, the ground under my chair was shaking. I know it was only seconds but it felt like forever. I sit nowhere near a window but looked through my coworker's office outside and thought I could see the ground. He told me stand in the doorway. I was determined not to cry - not to show weakness - but there came the tears. Soon after, the shaking stopped. The elevators were out of order for quite some time. So were the landline phones. And even cell phone service was unrealiable. Peop...