Touching Down

I met Barry at an Irish pub in Munich, Germany, on St. Patrick's Day 1999. He was seven years older and I was captivated by his life experience. He was an exotic American, and I was fascinated, although I always had more of a thing for British guys. It didn't matter to me if he was from Idaho or California. It was all the same to me: America. He wore suits to work. He stood with both feet firmly on the ground. He took me out to dinner. He asked me if I wanted to visit museums with him. He treated me like a lady. Barry bought me flowers and opened the car door for me. No one had ever done that before. I was twenty years old when I met Barry. I was not of legal drinking age under American law. Good thing we started dating in Europe.

I had moved from a village in the Austrian Alps to Munich, Germany, just a year before a friend introduced me to Barry. I wanted to get away from the small Austrian farming town with a lack of perspectives and discover the world, which I was certain, had a lot more to offer than finding a husband and milking cows. Barry was in Munich for a work project. He thought my British school-English was really cute. And, Barry also liked that I invited him for a drink after he took me out to dinner. He told me that he wasn't used to girls paying for anything. Just like he was a novelty to me, so was I to him. What also brought us closer was the fact that we both were foreigners in Germany. He spoke some German but was, by no means, fluent. My dialect always gave away that I was an Austrian. We both had to deal with learning to get around a new city and a new country. We started discovering things together by trying out new restaurants and traveling around Bavaria and beyond. It was an exciting time.

Before I met Barry, the few dates I had been on were to bars or someone's house. Maybe there was an occasional night out at the movies, but most dates were group events. This man wanted to talk to me, wine me and dine me. We spent every weekend together, and nine months into the relationship, I moved in with him. After about a year and a half, he found out that his work project in Europe was over. He asked for a different assignment in order to stay longer but his request was denied. By contract, he was required to go back to Los Angeles. I was devastated. Although I knew that going to America with him would be a huge risk, I asked myself whether I would regret it if I didn't at least try. I thought that I would. So when he asked me to marry him, I said yes.

I had visited Los Angeles with Barry twice before moving there. My main memory from these visits was my butt hurting whenever we were in the car because we had to drive long distances to go anywhere and the roads were in really bad condition. The second memory was about Barry's dad putting us in separate bedrooms because we weren't married. I thought that was odd because Barry and I had been living together in Europe. It certainly couldn't have been for "moral" reasons, as his dad was on his fourth marriage. Did he not like me? Was he afraid of "noises" he might hear at night? In the end, I found out it was, in fact, for moral reasons: unmarried couples were not allowed to share a bed under his dad's roof. I must have time-traveled back to the 1950s.

I moved to the U.S. on September 21st, 2001. Ten days after 9/11. It was an odd feeling to move to a country at war. Growing up in Austria and also living in Germany for a few years, I had a certain "idea" of what war meant. Elderly neighbors and family members were witnesses of World War II. I grew up in a house that had – as was required by law – a bunker you could go to in case of an air raid. Sure, my parents used it to stock potatoes and it lacked a door – but it was there.

My now fiancé was not allowed to drive up to the Los Angeles airport, LAX, the day I arrived. He had to leave his car at a nearby parking lot and took a shuttle to the airport. There were police everywhere. Men dressed in black uniforms with stern looks on their faces, holding weapons I had only seen on TV before, were patrolling the airport. I landed after dark and LAX seemed like a ghost town in a zombie movie. Under normal circumstances, LAX was a bustling place with lots of honking cab drivers and lost tourists desperately looking for the train going to the city center. Soon, they would learn that there wasn't one – no airport train and no city center.

When Barry picked me up with a bouquet of flowers in his hands at the LAX arrival gates, I had already been on two flights: Munich to Philadelphia and Philadelphia to Los Angeles. On the first flight, a bunch of drunken Germans caused a ruckus and the air marshal had to step in. After the 9/11 terror attacks, air marshals were a new sight on flights to give passengers the illusion of safety. A funny and at the same time scary fact: the air marshal on my flight was way over sixty years old. The drunken guys were in their early 30s. The air marshal's presence did not make me feel safe at all. I was crying for most of that flight holding onto a stuffed animal for dear life. I was so scared of moving to a "war zone" that I felt no shame about seeking comfort the same way a toddler did. The stuffed animal I was clinging onto was an orange mouse from a famous German kids' TV show. The middle-aged German man sitting next to me – who by his own account liked to wear a suit and a tie when flying - tried to involve me in a conversation by saying "Ah, I see you are also a fan of 'the mouse.'" We started a nice, long talk about the TV shows we grew up with and where we were going in the U.S.

Going through the security check in Philadelphia was a long procedure. There were armed security guards everywhere. The airport was nearly empty. Any sharp objects were removed from people's suitcases. Smokers had to fly without lighters or matches. You could cut the fear and the tension with a non-TSA-approved knife. I was scared. Growing up on a farm, I saw pigs and cows slaughtered, but I had never seen that many weapons before. I was afraid to say the wrong thing, despite that I had nothing to hide. So when the TSA guy asked me if I had any food on me, I told him I had some cookies in my backpack. He looked at me as if I had just told him that I was chewing gum and making a mockery of his job. "I said food!" I then asked if cookies weren't food. He looked annoyed and waved me through. I was confused. Cookies were not food?

The second flight was nearly empty. I had three seats to myself and the rows in front of me and behind me were also empty. It was a luxury I would never experience again. The same goes for the absolute silence on the plane, as well as the friendly passengers and flight attendants. It weighed heavy on my mind that all of the planes that crashed on 9/11 took off from the east coast and were bound for the west coast. But I had my one goal in mind: to be with the man I loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

So there we were: him, me, my luggage, the flowers, my tear-soaked stuffed mouse, and a big bag of unknown on my shoulders. After taking a shuttle out of the heavily-guarded airport to the parking lot, we finally arrived at Barry's car. We drove to Santa Monica on a freeway with four lanes (in each direction!). About thirty minutes later, we were at the two-bedroom/two-bathroom apartment just a few blocks from the beach. For quite some time, I did not appreciate the close proximity to the "edge of the world" — a quote borrowed from the city's most famous band, and my new homies, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. To me, the beach was just a bunch of sand and water. What's the big deal? I realized many years later, it was quite a big deal!

There was a huge welcome basket from my in-laws-to-be waiting for me at the apartment. That was so nice. It included a beach towel, a toy convertible, a headache-inducing perfume, and most importantly, a Thomas Guide. This book of street maps would get me home many times. Since L.A. was not a city that fits on a simple fold-out map, the Thomas Guide was a letter-sized, horizontally-formatted book with about 100-150 pages. First, I thought it was a map for all of California, but soon, I found out the map for Orange County was just as voluminous. At the time, it was not very common to have a navigation system and since the streets in L.A were a simple grid pattern, a navigation system was not really necessary. Going towards the ocean meant going west. Going towards the (Hollywood) Hills meant going north. Going towards the skyscrapers meant going east. And if I ended up in the hood, I probably went south or southeast. Since I was living by the beach in Santa Monica, I always knew I had to go west.

The first six months, I refused to get a car. I figured I did not need one and could get around using the public transportation system. After all, I managed to survive without a car for 23 years. However, after nearly six months of hardly getting out of Santa Monica without Barry's help, and sitting on the bus with grocery bags and potted plants, I gave in and got my very first car. It was a little silver Honda Civic. I named him "Kenny," after Kenny from South Park, because the car had a salvaged title. Just like Kenny, my car came back to life after an accident. He was going to be my trusted steel companion for the next six years.

On my second day as an American resident, we took a stroll down the popular Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, which was only a short walk away from where we lived. The Promenade was a pedestrian zone lined with shops, restaurants and whimsical dinosaur fountains. It was featured in every guidebook. We sat down at an outdoor cafe and I ordered a veggie burger. Seeing those pigs and cows slaughtered on the farm had a lasting effect on me. I became a...