WARREN, Ohio ‘- I miss my Austrian life. It’s small things that come to my attention every couple of days that really tear at my heartstrings.
Missing the Alps isn’t something all that small when it comes to size, but when I am surrounded by enough trees, I don’t really notice. It’s only when I’m out in the middle of Ohio farm country (I was doing a lot of country driving as I drove to and from Huron and Bowling Green twice this past week) and the trees fall away and I notice how much sky there is here. In Salzburg, my vision was always interrupted by something tall and mighty almost every way I would stand anywhere in town.
Other things are more subtle. My family drinks milk for dinner. I haven’t done that since I received a strange look from my host mother in summer 2006 when I asked for milk for dinner.
Nutella isn’t as creamy and doesn’t come in a glass jar, and rather than it dwarfing the peanut butter, the PB dwarfs it here easily twice as much.
There is no bus and there are no sidewalks. Nor do I have a bicycle. Even though my Austrian bike was terribly broken, I still miss having only left-hand breaks and having to put air in my back tire every two weeks.
The beer is nasty, and I just want some good old N’uuml;rnberger sausage.
But it has been nice to have raisin bran for breakfast and graham crackers with crunchy Jif peanut butter for a snack, brownies and ice cream sundaes that aren’t from McDonald’s and Taco Bell and way more hamburgers than someone should eat in three weeks. I admired the American grocery store as well, but I haven’t wanted anything other than Austrian things I can’t get here.
It’s also been nice to have signs with driving instructions that I understand and to print things for free at BGSU’s computer labs, though 4.5 Euro cents per page did cut down on any waste.
Most of all, though, I miss daily interactions with Austrians and the German language. I’m listening to German music and watching my three German-language films like crazy, just so that I can hear some German as part of my daily routine.
In contrast to my whining about missing Austria, I did have a new travel experience last week. I was on vacation in Huron (though my family liked to remind me that I had nothing to have a vacation from), but it was a vacation none the less.
One day during the week I went to Kelleys Island, one of the islands in Lake Erie, about a mile or so from Put-in-Bay.
Kelleys Island, accessible by ferry, is home to one of the world’s largest glacial grooves, a roughly 400-foot trough cut into solid limestone by glaciers around 18,000 years ago.
The grooves are free to look at and surrounded with informational plaques. My parents and I rode bikes across the island to the grooves from the ferry dock with stops at the state park camp grounds and a marshy area with a boardwalk serving as a nature trail.
We had lunch at The Village Pump, which has a reputation for the best perch sandwich in town. My parents agreed the perch was one of the best they’ve had, while I had a hamburger. We ended our day there with a leisurely bike ride along the southern coast of the island, which awarded us with views of picturesque, waterfront homes and Perry’s Monument on Put-in-Bay.
It was nice to do a bit of traveling, even though it wasn’t as epic as the cross-Europe trips I planned this past year. Traveling is traveling no matter where one goes, and for that, I am grateful.
