Like Life: Last

As I sit typing this, staring at the flat, dry, brown, endless land below me, I feel pretty awful, to be honest. It might be due to 40+ hours of travel without sleep behind me; starting with frantically cleaning, packing and running to the station, just making the train to Frankfurt and leaving my iPad on the train in my absent-mindedness. Followed by a plane to London, navigating the maze that is Heathrow, another plane to Dubai, endless security checks, 14 hours to Melbourne, customs and sniffer dogs, and now, finally, the last stretch to Sydney. I wished I could somehow extend my stay in Austria, but after I couldn't change my plane ticket, confirmed that I wasn't allowed to work with my current visa, and finally saw my bank account, it seemed like it was a clear sign to come home.

(Sorry about the negativity of that ^ I was very tired and something about sitting in planes makes me overly sentimental.)

I wouldn't be so deeply sad to be leaving if it hadn't been such an amazing year. I'm proud of what I achieved; fell in love with running, or rather, the place I was running in, did a few half marathons, cycled to Copenhagen from Berlin, actually got okay at skiing, did an internship in another country, studied in another language, visited amazing places. But actually the things I'll miss most from Vorarlberg are the everyday things; cooking dinner together with people you deeply connect with, like-minded thinkers, looking at the view from the mountains from class, morning runs in the hills above the fog that often settled low over the town, going to the market on Saturday mornings.

Highlights of 2013 (some are bad phone photos, but you get the idea):

Starting in Potsdam, revisiting my first European love (the place)

The distracting view from class. I loved my university; the work was much more practical than in Australia and we were given a lot more group
work and self-directed study.