Miss Euro Blogger - Bursting the Bubble

The title of this post could also have been '5 weeks vs. 2 weeks'. Once you are used to having five weeks vacation (or even six weeks when I lived in Germany) it is very hard to drop down to two weeks of paid vacation. via GIPHY How do you not go insane on only two weeks of vacation? You plan your time off work very carefully and strategically - especially when you want to do trips overseas, which for me meant 'going home' to Europe. When you live abroad, going home is essential for not feeling gutted and not suddenly crying non-stop due to homesickness. It is one of the worst emotions I have ever felt. Yes, it gets better over the years but especially in the beginning those trips back home are necessary for the expat's/emigrant's well-being. Some companies that I worked for didn't even allow its employees to take these two weeks at once. Flying to Europe for a week is possible but very exhausting. Coming back and feeling relaxed after a one week trip ...

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...

I don't know what to write about these days. The repeat of the presidential election in Austria? The impending whacky presidential election in the U.S.? The increase of hatred and race-related crime in Europe and the U.S.? Brexit? Each topic seems to be too political to be discussed on what I consider to be a light-hearted blog. From a marketing point of view, I want my readers to feel good after leaving my page. I don't want them to feel down or reminded of how f-ed up the world is at the moment.  Image from Pinterest.com In the midst of all the 'heaviness of life' is the whimsicality of the Euro Cup finale playing on TV as I write this. Who will win? Portugal or France? Do be honest: I don't care. And I am sure a lot of other people also don't care but they dive into the unimportant distraction that is soccer. And why not? Does it make us bad people that we are not glued to the TV thinking of all the injustice that goes on in the world? I don’t think s...

  Daniel is reading LAlien in Vienna's Japanese garden   Sally is reading LAlien by the pool in Italy and Kirsty on her rooftop terrace overlooking Vienna

Check it out! http://neuh.com/die-oesterreicherin-cornelia-miedler-beschreibt-ihr-leben-in-la-im-buch-lalien/

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...