#homeiswherethelakeis

This Hashtag is one I frequently use on Instagram, just like a previous colleague who is from a ski resort town in Styria likes to post photos tagged with #homeiswherethemountains are. Well, the latter is also something I identify with, but this lake really has a special place in my heart and despite the fact that I left Kagenfurt, the town where I was born, aged 18, whenever I see the turquoise blue water of the Wörthersee, I get flooded by a special kind of happiness and so many warm and fuzzy memories of childhood summers spent sprawled on a towel reading books and begging for ice-cream. 

I don't think it makes a difference how much time you spent at a certain place in order for you to fall in love with or get to hate it. It's all a matter of context and what you associate with it. The "endless summer holidays" of my youth were in fact two months long (not bad either), but in retrospect feel like half a year, every year. The lake always played a central role in them and no matter that my family went on summer holidays abroad, too, and also spent a significant amount at our weekend house near Lake Ossiach, my nostalgically fogged brain has recorded the equation: summer = Lake Wörth indelibly on its hard disk, never to be erased or questioned. As soon as the gates of Strandbad Klagenfurt open in May, summer has officially begun for me.