Crossing limits

Sarina was one of the people closest to my heart over the years and my first friend at university. Even though she moved first to Lisbon and then to Warsaw after we graduated together, we still meet up in Salzburg every now and then and enjoy catching up. She loves to dance in front of the mirror, only wants the best for every human being and has gained work experience in more countries around the world than others can claim. Even as a teenager, she ordered from McDonald’s in French. She lives in Germany, but also considers Austria to be her home, even if the pretzels are not nearly as good here. As a regular cross-border commuter since childhood, Sarina feels very connected to Austria and Salzburg is her home. She tells me that her favorite place in this region is the Austrian Gaisberg. „I grew up as a German, but Austria was never foreign to me,“ she says. Sarina grew up in a very small village in Bavaria, which was an idyllic paradise. In her school days, she straightened her wavy hair every day, but now Sarina is almost only known with curls. She doesn’t like making decisions, which is why she doesn’t want to tell me clearly how many languages she wants to learn in addition to the six she already speaks and the two she is currently working on. There isn’t a language in the world that she wouldn’t be interested in learning.

“I am the same person in every language, but different aspects of my personality are brought to the shore in each of them ,” she tells me. Sarina explains that languages give her the feeling that she can get to know and meet people on a different level. One disadvantage: sometimes she comes up with jokes in the wrong language. Sarina wants to give others the chance to be themselves, no matter who they are, and tries to remove superficiality from her thinking. Everyone has a story that we don’t know and also struggles with problems that we have no idea about, Sarina explains. Even small things can change someone’s life for the better. As an example, she tells me that she was on a wrong bus in Colombia, completely lost and alone, with nowhere to stay at her destination. She didn’t know where to go, alone and at night, when the bus driver told her to pick up her things. He had spoken to a work colleague who was heading in the opposite direction to her destination. Without further ado, the bus driver stopped, escorted her across the highway and waited until the other bus reached her. Before she could say thank you, he made his way back to the bus full of passengers waiting on the other side of the road. So she says to everyone: Be kind to each other.

The story about the bus driver was new to me, and it fascinated me that I had experienced something similar in another part of the world, around the same time, but before we both knew each other. During my au pair year, I had missed a bus and had to cope alone in a strange train station until the next bus left in the middle of the night. Many strangers were willing to help me, I was not alone. Since then, I’ve had a motto in my heart: be nice for the sake of being nice.