Living History

Growing up in North America, you study world history in school.  Well, at least America's version of it.  You flip through your text book and see pictures of knights from the Middle Ages, you memorize the maps from World War I and II, and try to remember if Napoleon was before or after Alexander the Great.  (For those of you smarter than a 5th grader, that should be an easy one.)  But at the end of the day, it was still just a story to me.  Even modern events, such as the conflict in the Middle East, become just like white noise in the background because every day you hear some story about a place you don't know doing the same violence every day.  It never feels real in the way that Michael Jordan & the Bulls felt real, or like the way MC Hammer felt real.  You could at least see those guys on TV.

History became slightly more vivid living in Italy last year.  We visited the Colosseum in Rome, gazed up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican, and walked through Greek temples in Agrigento.  But still, all of that still felt distant, as if we were merely archeologists verifying facts.  It was interesting, but there wasn't a strong personal connection like there is with modern events.

However, in our brief time in Austria, we have had a number of unique experiences talking with people that have really brought powerful world events into a new light.  

 Marco Heinrich, sportswriter, pictured here at the Beijing Olympics.  He took pictures from the blog to use in a newspaper article, so I am returning the favor by stealing a picture from Facebook.  Haha!

One such event was meeting Marco Heinrich, a local sportswriter who covers the Swarco Raiders for Tirol's largest newspaper.  He wrote an article about me last week (using pictures from the blog - I will post it next week), and over the course of talking with him, I learned some very fascinating things.  Marco is from Berlin, and he was 13 years old when the Berlin Wall was torn down.  He told us incredible stories of traveling into communist East Germany and seeing the differences in lifestyle between the two places when they were divided.  At that time, West Germans were allowed to cross the border freely but Easterners were not.  You had to change currency, and the East Germany money was worth so little, that even changing something like $20 would leave a family of four with plenty left over at the end of the day.  He told us stories of people sneaking through the border, and all of a sudden it felt much different than watching a movie about it or reading it in a textbook.  Very cool.  

Even a late night Pizza run can lead into interesting conversation.

A second instance of living history occurred last night when we stopped to get a pizza.  The place - from what we could translate was called "WHICH IS WITH YOU PIZZA" (see the box) - is owned by two brothers who are about 22 years old.  While we waited for our Hawaiian Pizza to cook* we began chatting with them.  It turned out that Mario and Nicco are from Croatia, and came to Austria around 19 years ago when conflict broke out in the former Yugoslavia.  Their parents did not want to risk them getting hurt, so they fled north.  As in, real life refugees in a sense of the word.  They have since made a completely new home here in Innsbruck, with their father owning a car dealership and the boys starting a pizzeria.  In America, you hear about people doing this, but they are always older than your grandparents or just different.  Never do you sit and talk with them, and hear such stories.  Again, very sweet experience!   

BOTTOM LINE: ONE REALLY COOL PART ABOUT TRAVELING IS MEETING PEOPLE, HEARING THEIR STORIES, AND UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD IN A NEW WAY.

I look forward to many more experiences like that this year!

~ J. Twice