The journey from London passed without any massive difficulties, which surprised me because I came by Ryanair. Once I got to Graz and was through passport control, obviously my suitcase was the only one which had somehow already made it’s way into the centre of the luggage carousel, meaning that I had to climb over a moat of passing baggage, much to the amusement of about two-hundred on-looking Austrians. After I’d negotiated the ticket machine and got on a train from the airport to the city centre, I entertained the idea of getting my money’s worth out of my travelcard by getting a bus. This lasted about 18 seconds before I chose a forgiving-looking taxi driver to take me to the flat. The weather could not have been grimmer – it was grey and raining heavily. The taxi driver may have been forgiving with regard to my poor German, but he was also very old and very unaware of exactly where we were going. He spoke with what I choose to believe was a very strong Austrian accent, so I only understood about 50% of what he said. Every so often he’d say something that I’d convince myself wasn’t a question and so just let it pass. When we began approaching the area of my flat, he pulled over as had no idea where exactly the road was, and naturally no map either. Fortunately I recognised the name of a nearby hotel from Google Maps and so managed to direct us from there. He was extremely impressed by this, so much so that he declared that he would now visit London.
Having never had to cook for myself before, I was excited about the Spaghetti Bolognese I made. It all went fine, except I forgot to put the mushrooms in and underestimated the meat-tomato balance, so had to improvise with half a bottle of tomato ketchup. It was delicious. Tomorrow will be lamp chops, new potatoes and petit pois peas. (This is the only other meal I can make. I have probably made it for you before). Tonight is going to be fish fingers and chips, perhaps with English breakfast tea and a banana as dessert. I might make something more Austrian-esque next week, like bangers and mash. Wurst und mash – I am quite good at that too, but am not sure whether we have an electric whisk (the mash gets quite serious).
On the first night I slept okay-ish. It was really windy and for some unknown reason the blinds are on the outside of the windows (double-glazed though, which is good), which meant that every few minutes when a gust of wind came, the blinds would fly up and hit the window. This was quite a petrifying experience, so I engineered a system for stopping the intolerable noise. I attached a dirty sock onto the blind outside the window, meaning that the blind would not hit the window hard any more. This event may sound trivial, but it was quite a big deal for me at the time.
In the morning I went to the supermarket. I did quite a substantial shop at the Spar about 5 minutes’ walk away. It was an okay standard, I would say equivalent to Morrissons. I had a brief and stammering chat in German with the girl working behind the butcher’s counter, who undoubtedly thought I was completely dense until I explained that I am a language student not a retard.
I’ve so far watched one episode of ‘Die große Chance’, which is basically Austria’s Got Talent. They don’t. Tonight I should start reading something from my reading list. With me I brought the full works of Georg Büchner, some pleasantly perverted book by Elfriede Jelinek (my favourite part of which being the articulation of sexual pleasure derived from pissing yourself in the woods), a history of Austria, and GQ-Magazin. Deffo starting with GQ.
