The above title is a quote from this blog, published by a former pilot and now journalist living in Iraq. Katy brought my attention to blogs written by people like you and me, with the earth-shattering difference that they live in Iraq, a country torn into pieces by a war that never should have been started to begin with and has dragged on way to long, leaving behind a completely destroyed country.

I had originally come online to turn on the radio, fall back onto my bed and read through a few brochures about Maastricht University and the bachelor courses. This, mind you, was after I had a talk with my dad about taking up a student’s loan and how I probably could pay for the first two months by using up most of my savings. How he had checked train and bus schedules online and was positive that we could just deal with it all when we went down there by the end of the months. Busses and trains run every ten minutes, anyway. How he would go up North to pick up my grandma’s other sister for the funeral next Thursday. And how my mom had finally booked the house we wanted to rent out in South Holland for a week-long vacation.

I read about these Iraq-based blogs after my dad and I had made plans. Plans about this week and about the near future and about three years from now. Now that I have read through some of these blogs, it seems impossible to go right back and do any of the irrelevant things in my life because that’s what my world always seems like in the big scheme of things: entirely irrelevant.

That sentence, I have no tomorrow to talk about because I live in Iraq but I have a mute yesterday I will tell you about, makes me not only tear up but cry and cry and cry because this world isn’t fair and I want to hug everybody who lives in Iraq (and neighboring countries facing similar problems) and loves their country but is driven out of it by foreigners who have no right to be there in the first place and I want to tell them how courageous they are, how I admire them for their endless strength and hope and faith.

I hate feeling this helpless and I hate knowing how helpless Iraqi parents must feel because their children have no future and how helpless children must feel because their parents’ eyes reflect the fear and the torture and the hopelessness and the destruction they’re faced with every single day.

Living in Central Europe or the United States, I guess we usually do a pretty fine job hiding from it all behind our wealth and our fast-lived lives but from time to time we halt and this world’s misery crashes down on us and I want to crawl under the covers and cry and get out there and do something at the same time.

Also, finally something is happening in the Darfur region. The Sudanese president has been charged with genocide by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

This is what my future home looks like from above. Well, not my apartment but the excitingly international heart of Europe I’ll be moving to - something I’ll get to in a minute. Now, note how everything is majorly confusing and just screams subway exhaust, headache, stuffy air, and GOOD GOD GIVE ME TIME AND SPACE TO BREATH.

Everyone has probably seen one of those public transportation plans, most likely on a school trip or a vacation to The Big City. I remember these from London, Paris, and Berlin.

Paris, especially, because I was caught riding le métro without a ticket since the ticket scanner ate my ticket upon checking in and my friends all still had theirs and so I decided to crawl in through the exit doors since, come on, people like me never do illegal things and surely I woouldn’t get caught, anyway. It’s not like they check each and every métro exit in Paris 24/7.

Turns out, that night they did. We walked right into a freakin’ wall of huge, black Frenchmen who immediately started checking everybody. Now, my French is good when I’m at home reading a text, it’s okay in class. But, as everybody found out soon, it sucks during crisis.

I kept telling one of the policeman - who really looked more like a Turkish nightclub bouncer - that, l’automat, il a mangé mon ticket!, il l’a mangé!, while gesturing wildly. And then I started yelling at my friend S who actually speaks French quite fluently to tell the swell French guy that THE SCANNER ATE MY GODDAMNED TICKET AND SO WHAT WAS A GIRL SUPPOSED TO DO?

I ended up being heavily scorned and, well, bitched at by what seriously appeared to be the French army and paying a fine of 36 euros ($56) which, as should be added, was all the money I had on me for my trip to Paris. This, I had realized long before, was an ridiculously small amount to begin with but that’s another story for another time.

This is where Aachen is on our lovely map. It’s in Germany and very likely going to be my future home town. It has 260,000 inhabitants and I can’t think of anything it is famous for right now except for the fact that it is located right there, smack dab in the middle of, uhm, the aorta of Europe. Or something to that effect. People in Aachen, as I’m certain you have guessed already, speak German.

This is Maastricht. Look very closely and you will find that it’s more or less across from Aachen, it’s on the same latitude as Aachen, only moved a couple of inches to the left. Or the west, actually. And not inches but kilometers. But I don’t have time for those kinda details tonight.

Maastricht is in the Netherlands and has 120,000 inhabitants and is famous for being the center of Europe. There’s a pattern here, I’m sure you can tell. Obviously, people here speak Dutch. It is also home to Maastricht University where I will enrol as a full-time student as of next fall.

Now, to avoid confusion on anyone’s part and clarify what in tarnation I’m talking about when I repeatedly mention the heart of Europe, I blanked out the complicated public transportation part. Only now, one can tell what a crazy place this really is.

There we have Maastricht and Aachen again. Aachen is really close to the Dutch/German border. Maastricht is close to the Belgian/Dutch border but it is also close to Germany because that weird little piece of land belonging to the Netherlands as seen above? It’s only 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) wide. With all this going on, we shouldn’t forget, though, that Aachen is also close to Belgium because it is actually situated right within that Dutch/Belgian/German triangle. And, you know, the Dutch speak Dutch, the Germans speak German and the Belgians speak French.

So, either way you look at it, you feel very unprepared.

But - WILD, right? Fascinatingly perfect and international, to say the least. And convenient, because from Maastricht Brussels (which is Belgium’s capital as any third grader knows) is only a short train ride away. France is a little farther than that but it’s close enough.

If only I will manage to figure out how to get from point A to point B using public transportation, I’ll be good to go.

Picture source for images used in graphics: here.

The Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland begins today - in exactly ten minutes, to be exact - with two games, Czech Republic versus Switzerland and Portugal versus Turkey. I haven’t payed any attention to soccer since the world cup in 2006 which was one of the greatest events of all times but I’m excited about the European tournament as well.

Unfortunately, England’s team played so bad that they’re not nominated which means NO DAVID BECKHAM THIS TIME. Let’s be honest, without him, it’s almost not even worth watching but the whole experience of people from all over the world joining together for the greatest and most popular sport there is on this planet, that is worth looking into it.

I enjoy watching soccer more than any other sport, as do most people. As you can tell, I have been influenced by the Americans arrogance of claiming the term football for themselves but, really, I’m okay with that. It doesn’t matter what it’s called and quite often, the actual game doesn’t really matter all that much, either.

This is me at an important game at the world cup of 2006 which took place in Germany and was a huge success. I can’t even get into how amazing the whole tournament was. ONE HUGE PARTY describes it pretty well, though.

I just went and googled pictures of the world cup and, seriously, you have to do the same: it was so unbelievable! Only soccer can do that!

Anyway, happy Euro 2008, everyone! To another great summer of soccer!

Picture source for graphic at the top: here and here.