Could it be? One semester down, one to go. Yes, winter days in particular can crawl by. But where did the first semester go? I don't know how my students feel about it, but it seems like they had just arrived.Students come for all kinds of reasons, including ones they don't even know about yet. I walked into a German Club meeting in the fall of 1987 and looked at photos from students who had just come back from Salzburg. I knew I was going to have to go someday, but that wasn't the reason why I was meant to go. I went to Salzburg in June of 1989 to visit friends who'd spent the school year there and knew that I was going to have to go to spend my own year here. But that visit wasn't the reason I was meant to go, either.
As you may have read in my post about Frau Ballwein, I really loved my year 1990-1991 as a student in Salzburg. But it was also so HARD at times. I owned a bike produced during WWII and in one school year had about a dozen flat tires. The Moos-Strasse is a great place to live, but it's not close to anything. So on days when I had no bike, life wasn't good. It meant walking a looong way to the Universität in either the cold, the snow, or most likely: the rain. Historically, Salzburg gets a lot of rain, but that year was particularly bad. They call it "Schnürlregen" in dialect which means "raining in ropes." I destroyed shoes by leaving the house in that rain--it was merciless.
Then, of course, there are relationship issues with people before you meet the person you marry. I mean if every woman was the right one, you'd marry them all, right? That's not allowed in Austria or Maine. Enough said about that.
Then there was the financial side of life. Historically, the kids who take part in this program aren't rolling in dough. They come from families that work hard to make ends meet and do what they can to help their kids out. Whereas students many times work a job or two while they go to school, that option isn't as readily available here. Working officially is, well, illegal and working under the table is, well, illegal. Babysitting and tutoring, things like that, are no big deal. Some of the kids in my group worked many hours at a paper warehouse outside the city packing boxes for shipment. That was probably more on the illegal side of things.
I didn't work at all so I was on a tight budget (ok, I worked one night--I tended a bar at a friend's nightclub in Regensburg on New Year's Eve--I made so much money on tips, I considered quitting school...until someone reminded me that every night is NOT New Year's Eve). I worked at my dining commons at home, but I didn't have that income here. So here I was with no meal plan (they don't do that here), buying my own food (stress), cooking which I'd never really done before (stress), trying to make money last until the end of the month until I got my next installment (stress). I was smart enough to have my family send money in installments because I would've spent like a nut like the rest of my group.
I watched friends have a much harder transition than I did. Three went home within the first three weeks of the semester. Another went home in April. For many different reasons, being here was not what they were meant to be doing. When someone left early, the people left behind went through a period of mourning. We wondered who's going to be next. This despite the wonderful directorship and friendship of Herr and Frau Roggenbauer who were the best Resident Directors a kid could have.
I think I must've been carrying on about my friend who had just gone home in April due to a nervous breakdown when an Austrian woman I'd met in the spring named Klaudia let me have it. I think I was saying, "Why are we here? Why did any of us come?" She told me to get real, that I had chosen a fork in the road that was called Salzburg and there was a reason for it. So what if I didn't know what that reason was in that moment? I might find out the following day or the next year or even further down the road. At the time, that was much too philosophical for my 23-year-old brain. What reason could there possibly be why I was in this city, one that was tough enough to make four of my group go home before they were supposed to?
But I told you in Frau Ballwein's post what my ride was like the day I left. I didn't want to get on the bus that took me to the train, I didn't want to get on the train that took me to the airport. And I didn't want to get on the plane. I didn't want to go home as much as I loved my family and friends. The moment I stopped off the plane, I wished I could rewind my year and start over. I had to go back. But how?
My following year at UMaine was spent much like Christopher Reeve's character at the end of that cheesy movie "Somewhere in Time." Somehow Reeve had propelled himself into the past where he falls in love with Jane Seymour. But when he finds a modern coin in his pocket, he flies through some portal back to present day. Separated from his love, he's absolutely useless until...well, rent the movie!
Anyway, all I could think of was Salzburg and how I had to get back. I was even willing to take a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Gmunden, a town an hour-and-a-half away just so I could sometimes travel to Salzburg. Luckily, through a connection with Herr Roggenbauer, a man named Bob O'Donnell, who had in 1985-1986 been a student in the same program also under Roggenbauer, took a chance on me without interviewing me in person. He hired me to be a dorm parent at a boarding school right down the street from where Frau Ballwein lived.
I told the Fulbright people "no thank you" and packed my bags for Salzburg! I was going back! This time to work (legally).
I found myself at my Oma's in Regensburg before heading to Salzburg that first fall. I hadn't seen my new place of work and I was feeling anxious about it. In a way, I felt like I wasn't doing the "grown-up" thing and getting a "real" job. I mean my job description read like a summer camp: play sports with the students, take them on trips.
But I didn't run away. I got on the train a week later to the city I'd been obsessing about for over a year. In Salzburg, I made quickly very good friends with the people I worked with, a couple in fact are life-long friends, the kind you email and talk on the phone with.
It wasn't until my second year at the school in 1993 when I met Jenny. As Forest Gump says in the movie Forest Gump, "My Jenny." Suddenly, all the angst (German word!) about relationships disappeared. I'd had no idea that question my friends and I had always asked, "How do you know if she's the right one?" was answered just by meeting a person. Klaudia, wherever she is now, was right--I'd chosen the fork "Salzburg" for a reason. I had no way of knowing that the reason was waiting for me two years and three months down the road. And we had no way of knowing that little Nikolas would walk (ok, although he's amazing, he couldn't walk when he was born) into our lives close to 12 years later.
Incidentally, in two weeks, Nikolas will have spent his first and his fourth birthdays in Salzburg. How will Salzburg play into his life someday? Hard to say, but it will.
The second semester has begun, and I have four new students to join the other nine students who are part of the 2008-2009 school year. Only time will tell as to why they came. Any fan of the ABC series Lost knows that...everything happens for a reason....
