My Colorful Life

My name is Verena Hemling and these little pots say more about me than you might think. They are filled with the vibrant colors that you can see on my hair. Often people claim that I am just in a ‘punky phase’, but my hair color is an expression of my personality. In this post, I will explain why.

Two of my favorite hobbies combined:
photography and music

I love creativity and I hate emptiness, so I dye my hair over and over again. When there is silence I need to fill it with music. Blank papers and my skin get filled with paintings. As I can’t accept boredom I’m a bit of a workaholic.  I also visit an evening school for photography and multimedia art. AND I dye my hair because I get bored of my natural hair color very often. I’m always looking forward to my ‘hair-coloring days’. I take my time for it and I really enjoy the dyeing itself. It is one of my favorite hobbies.

Colourful hair can also be very useful as I only get to know the most friendly and open-minded people. Why? Because all the superficial people that judge me only by my appearance just stay away from me. Therefore I don’t need to waste my time on them. Of course there are sometimes bad reactions when strangers see my hair, but I learned to ignore them.

At last my hair color is a clear sign of the fact that I’m not afraid to be different. That was not always the case. I have always been a shy person and when I was younger, I generally tried to go with the stream. Look at this picture. Can you believe that this was me? I’m glad that I gained enough self-confidence to wear whatever I like. And this doesn’t only relate to my appearance. I also learned to openly speak my mind, without being afraid of the reactions. I think that this is very important.

Of course there is more to know about me than what I have written here. But it is very hard to explain a character in a blogpost. So if you want to know more about me, just ask. I’m the girl with the colorful hair ;)

Who Am I?

Hey Guys :)

Being born and raised in the beautiful South of Styria, and possessing an Austrian passport technically means that I am Austrian. Nevertheless, I never called myself Austrian. My parents were refugees of the Bosnian War when they came to Austria in 1992. That means that I am Bosnian, but somehow, I do not consider myself an fully Bosnian as well. So, who am I? A question, I often asked myself and others my entire life. The answers to my question did not simplify anything, on the contrary, they even increased my confusion:

Austrians used to call me names such as Jugo or Kanake, which are used to insult people of former Yugoslavian origin. Actually, many people do not know that Jugo is rather a common expression, than a swear word in those Southern countries. Jug means South in Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian. Therefore means Jugo: The man of the South. Whatever.

Opinions of  Bosnians, even of some of my family members, did not make it easier for me to understand who I really am. They used to call me Švabo because they have always considered me an Austrian, rather than a Bosnian. Švabo means Schwabe in German and Swabian in English. Swabian is a historical and political expression for people from a certain geographical part of Germany. People from former Yugoslavia erroneously use this word for both, Austrians and German people, and, apparently, for me!

But that is still not all: For reasons of history and religion, Serbs, for instance, call me Balija. This term used to describe descendants of Turks of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. In most cases, this word is used in a derogatory way.

Turks in turn, at least a number of them, do not consider Bosnians one of them. Perhaps this is because of the language. Although Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian contain a huge number of Turkish elements in their languages, they are still Slavic. That means, that Bosnians who never learned Turkish only understand a few words. Additionally, just like many Arabic people, some Turkish people do not regard Bosnians as being real Muslims, because they do not seem as strict as Turkish people do. - Believe me, they are! At least some of them. I think that every country has its firm believers, regardless of what religion!  

Finally, after a long time of asking who I really am and getting these answers, I decided to consider myself all of that what people called me. I am a Jugo, a Švabo, a Balija and even more! I am an open-minded girl who does not judge anyone because of his belief or nationality. I love travelling. I have been to Asia, Africa, North America and many countries in Europe before. I loved it everywhere and I want to explore even more!

In conclusion, who cares where you are from? It is about who you are. And Guess what! Now I know who I am! ;)

Hmmm… quite kitschy ending, isn’t it? whatever :D

Good Bye

Successful Irish Food magazine articles

In no particular order, here are some of the articles that I liked for various reasons.  While they are certainly not all perfect, there are aspects of each that I quite like.  What about you?  Which of the articles below do you like best and why?  Are there any that you don't like much?  If so, why?

• The Irish Tea Debate: Barry's or Lyons?
• Simple, Easy to Prepare and Fresh Every Day: Soda Bread
• What the Irish really eat (By taking an Irish family as an example)
• Are craft beers taking over Ireland?
• Debunking the myth of alcohol as a common ingredient in Irish dishes
• Ireland – The “Green Tiger”
• The traditional Irish breakfast?!
• Irish-Austrian Breadventures
• Popular Irish food bloggers
• Forget Murphy's law, here comes Murphy's Ice Cream
• Around the world at dinner time!
• The cross-border shopping madness of the Irish by Sabine Pajic
• Irish Stew by Dominik Berger

Inspiration

One thing we learned both from discussing blogging with you and from reading your blogs is that you sometimes have problems coming up with topics to blog about.  For this reason, we have created an inspiration tag on this blog, which we will use every time we are posting about topics that might inspire you to blog.  Anytime you're stuck for an idea, click on the inspiration label to the right and read through the posts for topics you could write about.
Our very first piece of inspiration is coming at you right now.  Ready?  This piece by blogger and author Molly Greene lists 101 Fabulous Blog Topic Ideas.  It's one of the best lists I've come across, and I really think there's something for everyone on there.  Which category do you think you'd be most interested in using ideas from?

Feedback on SUK1 WS14 blogs

What made the successful posts successful?

• personal topics -- If, for example, you write a book review, tell us about YOUR experience of reading the book.  If you write about giraffes, don't tell me how tall they grow to be - I can find that on Wikipedia - tell me about your experience of seeing giraffes on a safari.  Your reader is interested in YOUR thoughts, experiences and ideas, not in a rewritten version of an article they could read elsewhere.
• new information --We're all here because we love learning.  :)  Tell us about something you know but that we may not yet be familiar with.
• well-written
• honest
• humour
• carefully-chosen pictures and videos
• links to further information
• correctly labelled posts - With our new course blog, make sure that you not only use the labels we have requested you use, but also label your posts with key words from your post so that others with the same interest can easily find it.  There is no limit to the number of labels (tags) you can use.

Here are a couple of things that drove us crazy:

• posts that were not spellchecked
• posts that were clearly not original
• posts that were Wikipedia-like/encyclopedic
• posts that were an extremely long brain dump