Let's assume it is a sickness, a bug you can catch. I like to think that it is a bug that not everyone can catch, that it’s definitely not something that everyone on the face of this earth is born with, because I've encountered many people who have never felt the urge to just leave this country and who maybe never will feel it. They are usually more, well, normal than me. Normal in the sense that ... they will one day be very happy to be living in the same little village they grew up in, married to the boy next door, working somewhere local. Maybe the local supermarket. Or the local hair salon. They will be happy to have one or two kids, name them something mundane like Pascal. And they will paint their house a boring light green color. And put kitschy garden gnomes in the front yard to make sure everyone understands what a boring, perfectly normal, happy world they live in. (Wait, do I sound arrogant and condescending? Reminder: this is my own personal horror scenario for my future. I hope I'm not offending anyone. It is entirely fictional and it comes straight from the area in my head where other people keep their brains. Any similarity to real people in the real world is only slightly intentional.)
Years ago, when I first came back to Austria after being gone for a whole year, I made a promise to myself to never ever end up that way. But I'll start at the beginning.
Personally I think that this bug was given to me by my Dad. Let's call it the fernweh bug rather than the travel bug. Fernweh to me is one of the most beautiful words in the German language. It basically describes the feeling you get when you are longing to go away, longing to leave home. Anyway, my Dad. I got lots of things from my Dad. The short lower legs (thanks, Pops), the ability to distinguish between a spruce tree and a fir tree, the sense of humor ... and the chronic fernweh. The first violent outbreak of fernweh struck me when I was maybe nine or ten and my Dad was showing me the pictures from a hunting trip to Alaska he did back in 1985. He had set up the slide-projector and was telling stories of wolves and crazy Alaskans while he went through pictures of endless plains, pictures of snow and ice, pictures of mountains and pictures of, well, dead bears. I didn't care too much for the dead bears, but I vividly remember a picture of Mt. McKinley at sundown. It must have started then. I was in awe. I knew there was a world out there I had to discover.
Soon after I was going through my Dad's e-mail inbox (don't let your kids do that, it might have fatal consequences) and came across a few e-mails in English from a woman called Debbie. I was a little brat so I e-mailed her, asking her who she was. That woman would turn out to be my Dad's ex-girlfriend from the 70s. And my second major cause of fernweh.
When I was 15 (which would have been in 2002 ... time flies) I was allowed to go and live with Debbie in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area called Stockton. It was one of the best years of my life and the resulting culture shock and the (much, much more intense and painful) reverse culture shock I walked away with that year managed to turn my then occasional fernweh into a severe, chronic, constant fernweh. My theory is that once you have lived abroad for a while, once you have soaked up a culture the way I soaked up the Cali way of life, if you've gone to school there even, there is no going back. You are marked for life. Hella marked for life.
Dramatic, isn't it? Years later, long after I had returned to Austria, gone back to California to visit, returned to Austria again and so forth a few times, I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was constantly missing out on the good life, on the interesting life if I wasn't constantly traveling and catching up with people on the other side of the world. Most of my Austrian friends could never understand that. I think I almost lost a few good friends when I first returned from abroad. It wasn't fun to hang around me because what I felt was a deep longing for a place that wasn't Austria, that wasn't my high school in Austria, that wasn't Gutenbrunn, the tiny village I grew up in. And I was angry because I knew it wasn't easy to get to that place again, moneywise or timewise.
My time in California and especially the experience of getting over an intense reverse culture shock (to the point where I started defending the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something that I now look at as an act of despair that I never ever would have done, hadn't I felt the need to stand up for a country that I loved so much, a country that I felt my friends didn't understand) fueled my fernweh throughout my last years of high school until I finally graduated.
After graduation my wonderful Grandma said to me: "Granddaughter, I spoke to your father and I told him to use his connections to get you a job as a secretary or something at the county coucil." She was serious, too. I loved my Grandma dearly and would have maybe considered ... who am I kidding, I had fernweh and the lady was being ridiculous. I went to Spain instead and worked there for a while, then to Scotland, back to Spain, then to Australia. My family had to half force, half beg me to start a degree after I had bounced from here to there for two entire years. It wasn't like I didn't want to go to college. Just the thought of staying in one place here in Austria for four whole years at the very least horrified me. It took a while to get my fernweh under control. (Short trips to Spain and Scotland keep it in check.)
I'm not stopping here. Well, I am; I'm stopping the post here because I'm rambling. But I am not stopping my life here in Salzburg. I'm already prepping my cat (mainly mentally) for the big move. The big move Down Under. If everything goes according to (the admittedly non-existent, as usual) plan and Kitty passes everything on the list of 17 (!) requirements for the import of cats to Australia ... and I pass the four items on the list of requirements for a permanent residency visa then the fernweh bug wins yet again.
Next destination: Melbourne, Australia.
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