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.