Only a few more weeks of work. Then finally buying a campervan and enjoying travelling, freedom and the Australian spirit for a few months. That’s the plan.

But, to my defense, I haven’t been completely lazy in regards to blogging. I transformed one of my assignments for uni, a cooking book, into a blog: The Backpacker’s Guide to Cooking.

It’s a blog for travellers and backpackers in Australia, full with recipes suitable for being cooked in a campervan; with shopping & cooking tricks and hopefully, as soon as I start travelling, some good pictures and travel stories.

I really hope to get out of Surfers Paradise soon, this place is the Australian Ballermann, it’s really disturbing. A weird place. It’s time to MOVE!

…who think it’s funny to shout, scream, laugh, or honk loudly at pushbike riders at the side of the road while overtaking them: Not only are you fucking stupid, ignorant, desperate, childish assholes, no, you are potential killers and dangerous to others and yourself. Some poeple, me included, are just so jumpy that one day I will surely lose control over my pushbike and crash into your car, and then you will hopefully be so surprised that you crash into the next wall or a truck that’s coming your way.

I don’t know why but that somehow seems to be an Australian thing, never experienced that before in such frequency.

Seriously, stop it, it’s just stupid.

I am easily persuaded. I am weak. I admit it. Just after publicly whinging about expensive face creams, I buy beauty products (a face cream among them) for $120 at a Arbonne-party at our house.

Why? How could that happen? I learned about all the theories of persuasion that are used in marketing and PR, and I am still buying things that I don’t need.

What a dark and mysterious thing, my mind, and not rational at all. Scary.

You may think you get what you pay for, generally. But you don’t.

I always used really expensive face creams and cleaning gels and similar stuff, Vichy, Roche-Posay, and what not, with all their research, and studies, and special ingredients, that promise a less oily and clearer skin, less blackheads, less zits.

As all those cosmetics are incredibely expensive in Australia compared to Germany, I decided not to buy my usual creams, but use the cheapest available Nivea stuff, for 5 Dollars.

And you know what? After 3 months of using one of the cheapest available face creams, my skin is not even a tiny little bit worse than with those expensive creams. Quite the contrary. My skin has never been that good, clear and unproblematic since I entered puberty (and got out of it again).

I’m not saying that those creams are not working in general. But they were definitely a waste of money in my case.

My conclusion: Don’t stick with stuff that doesn’t work for you, and may it be the most expensive cream with the most persuasive advertising campaign in the world. Try different stuff and let your skin decide what’s good for it and what’s not.

Finally. It happened. I have been waiting for comment #1000 for quite a while now. But it just stopped at 999. Nothing but spam comments for ages! So Rene, thank you for the latest comment, you didn’t win a prize unfortunately, but you’ll always be honoured on this blog. Thanks to all the 999 other commenters who brought this blog alive and into existence, even if it might be in a slight hibernation mode at the moment.

Still little signs of life twitching through it, like a very old ancient fish stranded on a beach, already with rudimentary lungs, but the feet haven’t grown yet. Bear with me please.

In fact, I think there are probably no islands among us at all.

Not that I wouldn’t agree with the metaphor as such, but I think it misses a vital point: Islands are just too small. Of course, you could argue that even Australia in all its vastness is one, huge island, but the average island (and thats what the metaphor is about) is usually rather small, explorable in a few days or less.

In my opinion it would be much more accurate if we would say everyone is a continent instead.

I think something like this happens when you meet someone new: It’s the year 1769, and while you sail the ocean on your three-mast ship, there’s new land on the horizon. You start chatting to that person for the first time, which means you casually sail along the coastline. If the coastline looks promising, the chatting continues, and if it looks green and fertile, you may decide to throw your anchor and stay in a nice, sheltered beach or a creek for a while. You take a closer look at the soil, the land, the vegetation, and if you still like it, you may consider setting foot on the new continent you are about to discover.

You get to know each other better and better, but all you do is basically exploring the rainforest on the fertile coast. You can only progress very slowly, and sometimes you will discover unknown surprises. You might get stung, bitten, poisened by an unfamiliar animal or plant, which makes you turn around in a hell lot of pain and leave those shores forever. Or you might leave and come back later, better equipped for that particular rainforest.

Nonetheless, the rainforest is usually pretty huge. Sometimes it might only be a small strip of fertile land with just a desert around the corner. But usually, it takes a lot of time to get through that dense forest. You might decide to settle down in a nice space you’ve found, but there remains a big piece of unexplored land. Always. Everyone is a terra incognita, and you can never be sure how much you actually know about it, what part of it you have already seen, and what other parts you haven’t.

Is there a little piece of paradise that you may find, somewhere in that forest? Even after years and years of exploring, is there a particular nice spot of land, a hidden reasure somewhere? Or is there a vast, dry desert hidden behind the colourful, blinding coastline? Is it just plain rocks, or a garden of eden? Is there a vulcano lurking under the surface? A deep crater somewhere, where you could fall into? A mountain, too high too climb, but high enough to fall off its steep walls?

I guess you never really know.

I’m wondering why I have such a hard time writing in this blog lately. So many things and places I have seen, so many photos I would like to share, but nothing in my blog.

Is it because it needs more time than quickly writing something on facebook? Or is facebook already becoming everyone’s personal micro blog? Is facebook the über-app, that combines everything from twitter, myspace, flickr, youtube and blogging? It is just so temptingly convenient and easy to use – take uploading pictures for example:

Facebook: Create album, upload. That’s it, easy, quick, no restrictions. Flickr lately told me it would only display the last 200 images if I would not pay for it, and the webspace where my blog itself is located is equally restricted. Of course, facebook cannot replace special interest or photo blogs, but the personal blogs I think are facing a great threat.

And in my individual case, it just gets harder and harder to find words and sum up all the many things I should have written in here, that at one point, you don’t know where to start anymore. And then leave it alltogether. It is like not being able to decide between to dishes and then ending up eating nothing to avoid the decision.

Maybe I try to be less ambitious with this blog, and just put things on it when they come to mind or from my camera.

I’ll try.

That semester went by really really fast – and it was a lot of work. The last weekend before one of my big assignments was due I was working straight for days to finish it, with only a few hours of sleep and a lot of V’s (energy drinks). And no shower.

Anyway, time to present some more things I did during that semester, for example my final website (an online portfolio) we had to create for our Writing for the Web class. It was my second website done in Dreamweaver, with the layout done in Photoshop. I ran out of time to make some Javascript work, but I might implement that later.

The last thing we just finished on Friday was our music video we had to do for Music Video Production. It looks harmless, but it is pretty dirty, so please make sure everyone who is watching it is old enough for some serious (animal puppet) sex:

That was it for today, I hope I can give some more updates during my semester break (and hopefully travel at least a little bit!).

A little story I wrote for one of my classes:

How the Tree came into the Water

There once were two trees. One of them woke up in the morning to find two little, weird objects at his roots. He woke up the other tree to ask him what those things were, and the other tree said “Mate, those are shoes. The little humans use them to walk around.” – “Walk around? I would like to do that. I think I’ll try them on”. The tree stepped into the shoes, and started walking. He saw old, dead trees, animals he has never seen before, flowers in a boat, and the end of the forest. He followed a grey pathway, and it became dark. He came to a city, and he couln’t find any place to rest and put his roots into the ground again, as the ground was sealed and there was no earth. Everything was moving so fast and confused him.  He started running, running so fast that only few of the humans in the city could perceive him. At last, he found an ancient, sacred spirit, that was trapped in a Tiki-statue in the city that was called Paradise. He asked the spirit where he could go to find rest, and the spirit showed him a direction. “Kepp walking, and you will find peace”. The tree followed the advice of the sacred spirit, and kept walking. After a while, he felt ancient water at his roots. When he finally stopped, refreshed and happy, he fell into a deep sleep. The water washed away the shoes, and the tree could move no further.

I think a lot about home, homeland, cultural and national identity here. Who I am, who I want to be, where I want to go, what I call home, or homes.

There is this German word, Heimat, that kind of means home, but in a different way than usual, different than in “I’ll go home now”. Hard to describe or to define, but Heimat doesn’t have to be where you are at ‘home’ right now, but maybe where your heart belongs to (so ‘homeland’ might be the closest translation you can get). That word has a flaw though – there is no plural in German. It is always one.

And that never really worked for me. I always had several homes. Bavaria is one of them. A huge part of my heart lies in Austria – everytime I see my beloved mountains my heart takes a leap, everytime I leave, leave the landscape and the people there, it feels like a part of my heart ripped out, left behind.

And somehow, everytime I live somewhere new, a part of myself attaches itself to it. A little bit of it may lie in Düsseldorf and Cologne, a big chunk of it belongs to Erlangen and Ingolstadt, and right now Australia reaches for a huge part of the rest. How much is there? How many homes can you have?

I think one of the reasons how I could actually leave all my friends and beloved family behind, was because I always had more homes than one, and seeing one home again always meant saying goodbye to another. I always had to deal with that, and with thinking about where I live and what would have happened if I would have lived there longer.

It is so good to have people I absolutely love everywhere, and meet new people I love, and the experience of finding love and friendship, soulmates, everywhere. But I still miss them, and regardless where I am, there is always something, someone missing. Sad and happy, happy because I’m sad – happy because those people are out there, happy because there are so many wonderful people in so many places, happy that I found them, happy that I’m able to find them.

Yes, I am happy, happy to have those strong bonds to my family and my friends, regardless where I am, regardless if we talk every day or once a year, you are all a part of me and my life. And I’m glad about that.