A Royal Mess

Yesterday I was buying groceries... okay, no it wasnt groceries it was frozen wok, wine & cookies. But well, if you are 22, living alone in Europe & speak very little German in Deutschland, you kind of earn the right to call booze & frozen goodies "groceries".
So I was standing in line in this little supermarket, missing big corporate Wal-Mart when I noticed, to my shock, that the lady chasier was from... Austria!
Okay, so before you start thinking the build up of expectations led to nowhere fantastic, since ehm, well, Austria is just a few trains away and it aint a really big deal, to me it is and let me tell you why.

Every person I guess, with a little mental free time, has ever become infatuated with something ridiculous & a little embarrasing to share with the rest of the mortals, whether it is Star Wars for the nerds, Jeremy Scott for the fashionistas, Cory Kennedy for the hipsters or Woody Allen for the high-brow intellectuals, they all push a little button that realeses fair amount of dopamine in everybody's overloaded brain. In 2008 I met my dopamine enabler... European Royal History... you can start calling me boring any time you want, but first let me tell you that in this stage of my life I became especially obsessed with promiscuous Henry VIII & the lovely Marie Antoinette. It all came down to HBO-prime-time-like stories with more complicated attires & man heels.

Marie Antoinette was born & raised in Austria, you know before all that hum... awkward french beheading situation happened. History portrairs her as a beauty to be remembered and the image of class way before the Audreys & Jackies of more modern times. Smart, blonde, beautiful & a nice dresser, the only thing that made Marie Antoinette groan at the mirror was, as I learnt in a biography about her family, her Austrian chin.
Which is actually something called "Prognathism" or colloquially speaking "Austrian Lip". So since I read that I wondered to myself if Id ever be able to spot a person from Austria just by looking, which I think I might have been able to master by now (although not everyone who has that is actually from Austria, I've choosen to believe otherwise), and this is not a judging-a-book-by-its-cover kind of situation, it is more like... judgning-a-book-by-what-other-book-told-me situation.

Since yesterday it had been months since the last time I put my austrian-spotter abilities to use, it brought me a warm hearted feeling, like bumping into a friend whose ties to each other just keep existing through online social networks. Lately, after more than a year of living in Germany, I have felt as if I had changed so much into this unrecognizable person that enjoys nothing but frozen wok, portuguese wine & 59 cent cookies. I missed my voice in my natal language, the food that makes you want to lick your own fingers in public (with no actual risk of looking like a cave-person, because probably everybody would be doing the same), I missed, well, myself. I hadnt seen me in a while, and seeing that probably Austrian old woman passing my "groceries" through the scanner with the grace of Marie Antoinette, made me want to have a little catch up with myself. Now the only thing I have to figure out is just where the hell I left me. Im sure I am somewhere, probably in my appartment, it is a mess. A royal mess.