Trans­ves­tis­mus?

I am in school until eternity today. I am teaching a class of teachers who want to improve their English at 3-4.30. One of the teachers is going home to bring me his son's suit for the leavers' ball tomorrow night. His son is eleven. How humiliating. Less humiliating, however, than trying on the Italian teacher's clearly female jacket to the whole stafroom's judgement of size. The whole palaver is seeming to be more trouble than it's worth. I don't understand why i dont just go without the jacket. They know im the foreigner, the English assistant, obvs I didn't bring my bright silver dinner suit to Austria.

Austrian supermarkets

Austrian supermarkets (regardless of chain, branch, cashier – tried them all) only value you as a customer until the moment your shopping reaches the barcode scanner. After that they cannot wait to get you out. The rush to have your bag packed by the time the cashier finishes scanning the items gets me hot under the collar every time. As soon as the items go on the conveyor, the adrenaline starts pumping - it doesn’t matter how you pack the bag, you just have to get the stuff in and go. If you’ve paid but haven’t finished packing, the cashier won’t wait – all of the next person’s items get shoved down the packing area amongst your stuff, which often proves to be a nightmare for the very privacy-conscious Austrians who are ever so reluctant to engage in any social interaction with strangers. Those who are slower with their packing are persecuted harshly with sharp, directed sighs. They may even try to mobilise you with a snarl. God help you if you forget to bring your own plastic bag. In fact, due to supermarkets’ refusal to make any more than about ten shopping baskets available, I have even seen old women unpack their shopping onto the conveyor belt from an old plastic bag, only to risk a stroke when trying to repack it with furious speed seconds later. 

'Feier'tage

I am currently enduring several consecutive bank holidays, during which apparently the death of all fun must take place. With a typical arse-lick of some depressive romanticised view of medieval life, of course everything has to close on religious bank holidays in Austria. I mean absolutely everything – not even the freaks in Spar can amuse me today. I’ve been told that these days are meant to serve as an opportunity for some healthy relaxation, reading a good book or taking a gentle jog while enjoying the colourful autumnal weather. Shame I’m not a complete twat close enough to my deathbed to want to do any of that. It’s at times like these that I wish I were back in the UK, recklessly pissing away my student loan, followed by my student bursary, followed by my student overdraft, on hi-tops in Topman and phone covers in Tesco. I suppose the same rampantly capitalist desire for a hit of Westfield on a Sunday just isn’t that common amongst Austrian people. The only people I’ve seen from my window today have been the man collecting the fallen leaves from his lawn by hand and the woman opposite who has been polishing her car for an hour and forty-five minutes. The whole place has become like a mass care home (without the excitement of the brutal beatings from staff). I have no money either, as am still waiting to be paid, but even if I did, I’d be lucky to find anywhere heathen enough to let me spend it. Hitting the absolute limit of my budget for the rest of the week by going to Vienna for a couple of days was an option, but I can’t be doing with sharing a room in a hostel with a load of Mozart-fanatic nerds at the moment, and I don’t like to live that dangerously anyway (I can’t even have my headphones full volume for fear of missing a call). Dinner tonight will be whatever was left from lunch yesterday, and lunch tomorrow will be whatever was left from the meal after that.

Eine kleine Nachtmusik

The other night I went to the opening party of a new academic festival, taking place in Graz. The festival consists of a series of public lectures and seminars about issues like Globalisation, the Arab Spring, and the work of students who call themselves ‘artists’ (usually defined by a cheap SLR and a reckoning that they see true beauty in mundane aspects of life). So I should have expected the amount of intolerable intellectual posers this party would attract. Retro, large-framed paedo-glasses and those eco-friendly cotton shopping bags were in revoltingly pretentious plenitude. Refusal of a good deodorant also seemed to be the way to brag about your artistic and academic ‘independence’. In fact, the other language assistants and I were so clearly dressed for a tidy night of Pitbull and Lady Gaga that we almost fitted in, hitting these kids’ penchant for irony right on the head. Having said this, it was a really fun night and I would definitely go again, but Lady Gaga and Pitbull there certainly was not. With regard to the music, most of the time I felt like I was having an attack. We arrived to a laser show on the dancefloor, set to music that can only be described as interference. The nerd responsible for said laser show was definitely the type to spend too much time in his bedroom in the dark, self-consciously posting that dubstep shit on the internet every five minutes. Since the whole thing was quite experimental, the crowd loved him. (More like an experiment gone wrong in my books though. See http://robinfox.net/projects/laser/. Not quite Flo Rida). When the DJs began their sets, it got a bit less weird (despite one of the DJs carrying his own parasol, even though the venue was deep in the cave of a large hill and it being pitch black and 4C outside). The music was trance and dancing trends were unusual: most people were alone and throwing about their hottest drugged-up aerobics moves, which, frankly, are nobody’s business. To be fair to them, it is hard to dance to Morse code. I definitely had the impression I wasn’t appreciating the music on the profound level that most of them seemed to be, but thought it was fun anyway. The really hard-core ones were wearing earplugs, I suspect to feel closer to their own superior thoughts. 

More Graz

Nothing much is new. After nine hours of work, the novelty of wearing smart clothes to school, making me look dashing and professional, has fully worn off. I once again no longer care what I wear, and would like to return to my ever-so-standard black jeans and plain t-shirt combination, plus that navy cardigan which is almost crawling off me but definitely going nowhere soon. In the interests of consistency, however, I think I’m going to have to keep the Mr Bean look going at least until the end of the week. This is also because I am anxious to give the three ties, purchased from a Uniqlo bargain basket for 90p each, the debut they deserve.

Food shopping is my least favourite chore ever – I have absolutely no idea what to buy. Yesterday I did the full circuit of the same shop about four times, holding an empty basket throughout, and then left with nothing for the shame of being seen empty handed five times by the same shelf-stacker.

Tonight I will add to the unending string of my culinary difficulties/disasters; dinner was meant to be chicken breast with a mixed salad. Owing to my severe incompetence and lack of general knowledge, however, dinner is actually going to be a chicken thigh. But as a matter of fact I am very much looking forward to this anyway. The salad idea is out the window too, as what I thought was lettuce turns out to be a cabbage, so I’m just going to have new potatoes with cucumber sticks and a tomato. I am certain it will be absolutely delicious. 

HyStyria

I just love when all cashpoints and tills in Austria reject your only bankcard. It really helps facilitate one’s capacity for intellectual development, linguistic intrigue, and relaxed cultural reflection while starving hungry in Spar. I’m actually really pleased that all bank clerks go home at lunchtime on Fridays too – I think we should all experience the exhilaration of having no access to funds and pushing one’s landlord’s compassion right to the edge over the weekend, facing the consequent possibility of eviction. I’m glad that many businesses do hungry and working consumers the inadvertent favour of closing for the majority of the weekend, yet being open from about 4am during the week. I even think it’s really good that about 50% of shops in central Europe don’t accept Mastercard anyway, just cash. It makes you feel such a love for people in general, so much closer to nature. I feel like I can identify with young Werther now.  

First Weekend

I am still on the lookout for more German-speaking friends. So on Saturday I walked from the bus stop into town via the park, where, unfortunately, the only youth seemed to be the large group of goths sitting around the bandstand, and I gave talking to them a miss. 

I then went to the city museum, which was okay. Graz doesn’t have much of a history, but seems to be very proud of how the main town square looked in 1900. Highlights of my visit included experiencing the wall-size display dedicated to the Graz-native who’s credited with the triumph of photographing Miss Austria’s successful 1969 campaign (???), and waiting alone in the front row of a pitch black film room for five minutes before realising the projector wasn’t working. The building is also famed for being the birthplace of Franz Ferdinand, whose death is of WW1 fame. The room commemorating him was quite bizarre because it inexplicably had hot-pink wallpaper, blacked out windows, and masses of hay on the floor, like a weird animal boudoir. 

The next day, continuing to allow my year abroad to resemble retirement, I decided to go to the Eggenberg castle. Spending my Sunday afternoon in what is basically a national trust park, wandering the gardens alone while waiting for my guided tour made me feel depressingly like a bitter, middle-aged woman. The tour lasted an hour and a half, and was mainly attended by flatulent old people. Dinner was mushroom soup, BBC recipe.  

Ikea

On Thursday I went to Ikea. Maybe this counts as my first excursion – the standard retail park miles away from any concept of urban centre. Excitingly, it was set out exactly like the one in Croydon but with fewer spitting gypsies, so I felt a bizarre sense of belonging. Ikea is absolutely amazing, they have clearly thought about every tiny thing a house could ever need, sprayed it a nauseous bright green or blue, and then they sell it for an irresistible price. My entire bag of stuff came to only €28, which I was obviously pleased about (especially as I have recently discovered that Oxford considers a year of its complete absence in my life nearly two-bloody-grand), and my favourite purchase was a blob-shaped rug in said nauseous blue, which looks more like a hallucination than soft furnishing. It was either that or a white shag pile carpet, which was obviously a difficult decision. The way back featured some recently pensioned bitch and her mate grimacing at me in disgust as if I’d smashed in their dentures. I should have - all I did was gently nudge one of them by accident with my bag of pillows and blankets while getting on the tram, after which I clearly apologised. No wonder so many of them end up locked in basements round here.