Month 10. Dip into Austria.

Austria somehow gets more beautiful every time I see it. Maybe I'm just getting uglier.

Sometimes it happens that a thought comes out of nowhere, grabs you like a leech and won't let go. I was sitting on the train, minding my own business, then… bam! A thought, saying, "Think me! Think me!" The thought was simple: Austrians are sweet. They are sweet in a way that Croatians and Italians and Americans never will be.

When this thought came into my head, I didn't really know what it meant, or whether I even believed it. So I had a chat with the thought to try to figure it out. It comes down to details (as always). Austrians pat people on the back. They wink at you. They sing. When you pass them by, they smile at you. The smile is sometimes mischievous but always sweet. And you know what? It feels good to be smiled at for no particular reason. It makes you feel sweet yourself.

People have often told me that I'm tiny, gentle, cute. I've always thought it was a patronizing thing to say, as if I were a pet. Sweetness is meekness. But now I realize that if I've made anyone feel good just by smiling sweetly at them, then I've done pretty well. And just because someone is sweet doesn't mean you can get anything you want from them. Austrians are just as hardy as Croatians. They don't let themselves be trampled upon.

After I dealt with this thought, another one came into my head. We're seldom what we think we are. Once we realize we're something, we often cease to be that thing. So true self-awareness is impossible. For example, drama queens are never really that dramatic. Their lives are seldom tragedies. Smart people are often only aware of all the things they don't know. Generous people often only give things away because they feel they're too selfish. Once a generous person realizes that he's generous, his guilt is relieved and so he stops giving things away.

I have never thought of myself as sweet or tiny in any way. But now that I've witnessed the sweetness of my relatives and friends in Austria, I'm wondering if maybe everyone has been right all along, that I'm just a sweet little girl who enjoys a sweet pat on the head by someone smiling sweetly at her. So if I finally accept this identity, will I turn into a bitch?

I realize that most of these blogs deal with heavy psychological business, like self-awareness, personality, and, well, me. Sorry about that. I can imagine it gets boring for the more practical among you. But anyway it's my blog, I can write what I want and you can't trample on me (especially since I'm in Croatia and you're over there). And the truth is that I'm only capable of writing about certain things. It bores me to write about architecture or wildlife. People are just more interesting. Of course there's always sex, drugs, and food, but those are also boring to talk about unless you're participating.

I could talk about linguistics if you like. Austrians in the southwest replace "s" by "sh" in the coda position of syllables (the final position in a syllable). For example, "Kastanien" (chestnuts) becomes "Kashtanien." Slovenian somehow sounds exactly like Austrian. "Exit" is "izhod" in Slovenian but "izlaz" in Croatian. Albanian sounds a lot like Italian due to a large amount of word borrowing. Many Croatian words come from Turkish, such as sat "hour" and kutija "box." I noticed that neither German nor Croatian has a locative clitic similar to the Italian ci or the French y. Actually German doesn't have any clitics, which is a shame because clitics are pretty cool. And even though Croatian doesn't have determiners ("the," "a"), definiteness is marked on adjectives modifying masculine nouns. For example, "star pas" means "an old dog" whereas "stari pas" means "the old dog." Austrians elide pre-consonantal liquids, resulting in compensatory lengthening (check out my link above if you're curious). For example, "alt" (old) becomes "oit" and "Karte" (ticket) becomes "koate." But I will never be able to tell you why German is just so much goddamn harder than any other language I've worked on.

And just to round it all off, I'll finish this entry talking about landscapes. The most beautiful place on earth is in the Dolomites. I don't care if I haven't seen everything. I don't care if generalizations are forbidden amongst anyone with an intellectual conscience. There is nothing more beautiful than the Dolomites. That's all.