Lucija told me about the bracelet she bought for her niece’s first communion. She wanted to have a message engraved on it, something that will give good advice to the young woman at any stage of her life. She was desperate – she read tons of  books and websites with proverbs and quotes but found nothing that really touched her and was in the same time simple and short. She asked me about my opinion. I started thinking about one piece of advice I would give a young woman on her way (ugh, I again sound like I was 85, don’t I?). I told Lucija that the most important and valuable lesson, which I had to learn the hard way, through my own mistakes and victories was to always stay true to yourself. Be it a choice of future career, boyfriends, jobs, friends. Be it trying to be clever, to make rational decisions, using tactics and strategy. Be it missed chances, wrong choices, cowardly moments, or brave victories.

Unfortunately, as clever as we both are, we weren’t able how to put this together into something “engraveable”. So we decided to take time and think about it. I hung up and opened the MSN messenger. And there it was, next to Andreas’ name, the perfect piece of advice:

“Listen only to your own heart. That is your only teacher.”

I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, waiting. And thinking. I looked at the beautiful surrounding: the view at the lovely 8^th district, the elegant entrance area, antique furniture, classical music in the waiting room and friendly nurses. There was only one other patient waiting: an older gentleman in a handmade suit. I was thinking about how perfectly Austrian health system is organized: all costs of the treatment were covered by the public health insurance. And then I remembered the contrast of my last visit to an orthopedist recommended to me by my company doctor. His office was in one of outer Viennese districts, “Ausländer-Bezirken” or “foreigners’ districts”. Looking like another city, those districts could as well be outskirts of Bratislava. The house was a 50’s grey cement mutant, the waiting room full of shabby 70’s brown furniture and horrible grey wallpapers that were once yellow. It was so full of patients, there was no place to sit. All of them were foreigners, as the color of their skin showed. And all of them belonged to the working class, as the tortured looks on their faces told. The contrast of those two ordinations made me wonder about the soft, invisible wall that divides people in Austria. Because theoretically, which doctor one chooses (as most of them are covered by the public insurance) is purely one’s personal choice. Still, there is a strict division. And it obviously functions on a self-regulating principle.