Chilling blast from the past

So there we were, Mischa and I. Out on that long walk I had promised him for ever so long. And we’d reached that field by Margareten Gürtel between the Burger King and the U4 station. Mischa was having fun biting holes in his latest toy, greeting other dogs and wrestling with me. Along the path running next to the field a group of rather loud teenage boys made their rowdy way towards the Burger King.

Nothing unusual there.

But suddenly the rowdiness broke into a loud chant. A chant I have only heard in films, TV news, read about in history books.

“SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!”

And without hesitating, in total agreement, the group changed the chant to

“HEIL HITLER — DEUTSCHLAND — DEUTSCHLAND — DEUTSCHLAND!”

Back and forth, back and forth until they disappeared into the Burger King.

I doubt they knew the full implications of the chant. But by their age — by the time a boy’s voice breaks — he should know the history of WWII, be thoroughly informed of the horrors of Hitler and his Dritte Reich and the Final Solution, whatever country he is from.

Someone has neglected their duty in teaching those kids history. I don’t know who — I don’t know why. I only know that today, I seriously doubted my choice of new homecountry.

Monday morning and all is well

It’s a national holiday in Austria. I’m still in bed, Mischa is pacing the flat being bored (I should of course be sensible and jump into my running gear and run around the neighbourhood with him, but…) and I’m having a cup of tea and listening to Radio Wien. Mostly music, not too much of a strain on my German. And yes, I am sitting in bed with my little notebook on my lap Skyping with Thomas who is on a crazy 72-hour call for his job and there has been lots of problems the last 36 hours. Poor man. He’s totally exhausted.

Went to a jazzclub with Kevin last night. Porgy & Bess in the 1st district, where we heard Christian McBride Trio. It was great! And of course when we have to listen we can’t talk too much about things that might be sore… still hurting, both of us.

I can hear Mischa complaining about lack of attention. I guess I should finish my cup of tea, get into that running gear and pretend to be young and fit. And then… The day beckons with a flat that still wants me to pay attention to its ugly walls that desperately need a lick of paint and some pictures. Perhaps I should just paint the whole place white and chuck all my pictures up all over the place? I had great plans to paint the living room blue and make it truly stylish, but I can’t find the EXACT blue I want — except on a Toyota Prius and that’s damned hard to bring to the DIY place as a colour sample especially since I’ve only seen one parked in the neighbourhood and… sorry. I’m rambling.

Perhaps I will at least paint the toilet.

Boys and their toys

Today, Thomas and I and his boys (who are thirteen and sixteen, respectively) went to a model-fair or whateverthey’recalled. Lots of model railways, little mountains and houses and mini cities with mini people and tracks and wheels and plastic bits and smaller and bigger engines and things that were remote controlled to go either on tracks, freely drift here and there or fly. And of course your usual staple diet of various length sausages, beer and apfelsaft. And lots of men who take this sort of thing seriously.

I am now the happy owner of a small helicopter I am totally unable to control and which I have had bouncing off walls and ceilings, Thomas, Mischa and some friends which dropped by. It’s supposed to be shatter proof. So far it has been. They watched my useless attempt at trying to get the helicopter to stop spinning wildly and eventually Howard commented drily that he could hardly wait for my YouTube clips to come out and I should try to film the wee chopper before I smash it completely to smithereens.

Mischa was clearly fed up with being alone all day (dogs not allowed at these fairs — just as well with all those little bits flying around), so he’s spent a fair amount of time trying to get my attention away from the chopper and over to his pink rubber pig which he eventually decapitated and pulled the stuffing out of. So now he needs a new rubber pig. Why are dogs so like kids in that sense? Oh, I nearly ruined Thomas’ new toy when he lent it to me. It’s a remote controlled car and on my slippery floors it really skids around like mad. Great fun. I had it run into Mischa’s tummy which he was not too pleased about but then I also ran it through the pig-stuffing on the floor and nearly ruined it with stuffing getting stuck around one of the wheel bearings.

And from this you can gather that there has been a certain amount of chaos here since our return home. From time to time I did play with Mischa and the rubber pig. After all, how could I not when he turned up under my desk like this?

What's fun about a helicopter when you can have Mischa and a rubber pig?

Romania and its dogs

I had great plans to write this post AGES ago. Just about the time I came back from our board meeting in Romania. Which now seems a lifetime away. September. Last month. When it was still summer. Sigh.

Anyway: our board meeting took place in Cetate in Romania, on the farm of Mircea Dinescu. He’s nuts. And I say that with not a small amount of admiration. It was amazing and wonderful and I want to live there! If it wasn’t for one thing.

Farm staff with puppies. The puppies were thrown the odd tidbit which they then fought over.

The dogs.

Romania is drowning in stray dogs. Belonging to the farm itself were around fifteen dogs (it was hard to count them to be honest), and in addition there were several strays that roamed the area in search of food.

I am fairly convinced there are more dogs in Romania than people. Neutering is an exception, and I can guarantee there is not a dog anywhere in Romania as spoilt as your average working dog in Austria.

My personal little favourite with a sore eye

I fell in love with several of the farm dogs. My favourite among the adult dogs was a quiet male Border Collie cross with an eye infection. The Dr. Doolittle/Florence Nightingale in me burst forth and I spent my entire time there trying to nurse its eye better using Chamomile tea to gently wash it several times a day. He was understandably sceptical, not being used to that sort of attention, but it didn’t take him long to accept it.

The other love was for seven puppies, especially the runt of the litter who may well be dead by now… I know, that’s not a cheerful outlook. But it is very, very likely. She simply could not compete with the others for food and was already too weak to fight for it if the other puppies decided they wanted what she had. Yes, I fought valiantly on her behalf while there (i.e. hand feeding her while keeping the others at bay). I am fairly sure I only managed to put her death by starvation off with a day or two.

The little brown one at the back was much smaller than the rest

I still couldn’t be angry with the other puppies. They merely did what’s natural, and they were all incredibly sweet. If poorly fed, full of vermin of all sorts and mucky as hell. I couldn’t stop cuddling them and playing with them and… if it had been at all possible I would have put them all in my suitcase and taken them home with me. I would have loved to see Louise’s face.

As it were, I took to my senses. It takes about 5-6 months to clear one dog for the trip, with all the papers, inoculation, blahblah. A weekend is just not enough. Funnily enough. But at least now I know why there are so many Romanians in Austria who sell puppies out of the back of cars — totally illegally; no paperwork, ill, traumatised and sad. At least the dogs on Dinescu’s farm received food and a minimum of care. And to his credit — when the Danube one year flooded the farm and Dinescu and his wife had to evacuate, he returned with a boat to rescue the dogs. Widely broadcast in the country’s media as eccentric and unheard of behaviour.

Ready for play

On our return journey via Bucharest I saw a badly injured dog outside the offices of our host. She had been hit by a car, survived, but now lived with two broken, incorrectly healed legs on one side, limping painfully and slowly between the shade and a bowl of water the parking attendants had given her. The number one road-kill in the country is, of course, dogs. I lost count of the carcasses on the side of the road, and no one brought them to my attention knowing just how sentimental I am about dogs.

On the morning we left the farm I was a little late coming down to the waiting bus. The others were already seated in the silence of the misty pre-sunrise morning, but the moment I arrived so did two of the dogs. My sore-eyed Border Collie friend whose eye had finally cleared up, and one of the puppies flipping herself over on her back in enthusiastic submission.

You have no idea how close I came to scooping them both up in my arms to take them with me. Damned close.

Romanian wiring. Apropos of nothing.

[you can click on the images to see a bigger version]

The face of hypocrisy

I take pictures all the time, but mostly totally harmless, somewhat uninteresting and, well, it stays on my computer. Mostly.

Lately, however, the need to use the power of the image, the power of photography, has reared its ugly head. And I mean ugly. Because I want to use it against some people I am unable to respect or empathise with in any way.

A bunch of Viennese “pro-lifers”.

The only good thing one can say about them is that they are not violent, at least not physically violent. But they hang around outside an abortion clinic near my house, rock back and forth and pray (that rocking… like watching someone brain-damaged banging his head against the wall in frustration). They each display a large colour picture of a featus at eleven weeks. And they all have that shut-off look, the look that tells you that they have had the thoughts they are going to have in this life and nothing, NOTHING is going to change that. Their world is purely black and white.

Oh, if only. If only life was that simple. One right and one wrong and nothing in between.

I’d love to be more open minded than them. I would love to say that I’d be willing to walk that mile in their shoes, that mile they are unwilling to walk in the shoes of the women forced to make that termination decision. But I don’t understand them at all. I don’t understand that need to force their beliefs on someone in an extremely vulnerable position.

If only one could sentence them to work for the people who are already here. For orphans. For homeless people. For battered women. For organisations trying to help those traumatised from sexual and other forms of violence from childhood.

Adding further misery to the life of someone whose already in a miserable situation is nothing short of evil.

Forgive them for they know not what they do. Or do they?

Dawg

Shouted from across the road:

“Do ya want another dawg?”

“Pardon?”

“Do ya want another dawg? That one is not very good at cleaning and tidying and stuff. I’m good at that. I’ll be yo dawg.”

“Ah. No. Thank you. I have enough — ‘dawgs’ — already, thanks…”

The holiday in Norway

I’ve lived in the 15th district since February, and though the district itself leaves a little to be desired I absolutely love living here. Mainly because of Louise and the flat and, well, Mischa, of course. I just had to mention the obvious there, right?

When I went to Norway in July, Mischa went to stay with his old family which was back home on holiday. By placing Mischa with them when I go away myself he sees that the connection to all that was is still there. But even they discovered that Mischa has made his own choice, and towards the end of my holiday I got the message from Livia that Mischa was depressed and when would I come pick him up, again? So the same day we returned I went there. As I entered the Hof (an Austrian backyard surrounded by buildings) they let only Mischa out to meet me. It was the quietest of reunions, as if he wanted to demonstrate his depression: he walked towards me with a slowly wagging tail, then leant against me and just stood there. “Don’t leave me again.” Of course, I have no idea if that is what he was thinking. Perhaps he just recognised me as peace and quiet after three weeks with Knickers and four kids.

Me in the train cell. Keep in mind that I am 152 cm only. (Photo: Thomas Schluet)

Our holiday went to Norway via Hamburg and Copenhagen. Hamburg didn’t really count; we didn’t stop to take in its beauty, not even of Reperbahn. We took the train with our bikes from Vienna. We had a sleeper for two, and it’s the most insanely small space I’ve ever been in with two beds (?), seats (when not beds), table-cum-sink and freely improvised storage space.

Table w. sink. For our inconvenience.

As we could not leave the luggage on the bikes the way the car drivers could, we were not just cramped by our own presence, but also by a load of motorbike cases. And just to help the situation, the night train to Hamburg did not (does not) have a restaurant car where we could enjoy a beer while waiting for bedtime. Which was never 8pm for me. Also (I’ll get past this soon, I’m sure) the AC system on the trains require that all windows stay firmly shut with the result that you get boiled alive while being denied the relief of an open window. Please bring back the old-fashioned trains with no AC but windows that can be opened! Admittedly not as bad as being transported per cattle train to Treblinka. I did not just draw that comparison. You are imagining things.

I did observe an elderly couple who’d clearly done this before and knew how to enjoy themselves. Within minutes of leaving the station the wife was standing in the narrow corridor swigging glass after glass of wine while enjoying the landscape. We only discovered how expensive the wine was (which had to be ordered from an overworked stewardess) once we were captive on the train. A mistake we only made once.

Lene gave us the master bedroom while we were there. We noticed that the painting in our room was missing an essential part. Insects.

That aside, I was nervous about the long ride, but it all proved a doddle, as Colin says, and we arrived in Copenhagen at a lovely house my cousin Lene and her former partner Ray were looking after. The house came with a garden, barbecue and a dog which did all the usual doggie stuff: begged for food, jumped on the bed, and humped me.

Things to do in Copenhagen: walk down Strøget, eat giant ice cream cone, visit Tivoli. We had to visit Magasin and Nyhavn on the return journey as we simply ran out of time. The last time I was in Denmark was for my grandmother’s funeral. This is the last picture ever taken of her. She was 94 and had no idea who I was:

My grandmother from Odense, H.C. Andersen's city.

It’s also been years since I saw Lene. She speaks this amazing semi-cockney English with a slight Danish accent, and Ray who is English has also developed an accent and chucks the odd Danish word into his sentences. Lene has lived in England, and she has also spent a considerable amount of time in Israel where she worked in a kibbutz. I had forgotten just how much fun she is and spent a lot of time laughing. Ray said that listening to us talking Danish/Norwegian together was like listening to two people singing to each other.

The drive through Skåne in Sweden was tiring. The landscape is flat and offers no protection from the wind. No problem for Thomas who rode a big sturdy bike, but for me on my little Ninja it turned into a bit of a battle to stay on the road.

Saab after sudden meeting with moose

My last memories of driving through Sweden was with my parents on the way back from visiting grandma for the last time. I had been the driver most of the day so when dad took over I promptly fell asleep. I woke with a start when a moose jumped out of a ditch and hit the car. The moose lost and had to be put down, but the car was a little mangled. Of course, the Swedish police could not contain themselves and had to crack jokes about Norwegians going moose hunting in Sweden, and then they gloated that it was a good thing we drove a Swedish car or we would have been killed like the poor family of four who’d driven the same stretch the previous week in a VW Golf. Such consolation at a time like that.

No mice this time. Don’t think we would have fared equally well with our bikes.

Kaisa and Thomas staring out across the lake Fisjeløysa (Fishless) in the rain.

First few days were spent with Hanne (my sister) and her family at their mountain cabin. My vain hopes for good weather failed miserably, but we did manage to drag ourselves out for a wet walk and scare poor little Kaisa when we meet some horses that wanted to say hello to her. Stig (brother-in-law) did his impersonation of a true Norwegian to perfection and served a mish-mash of alcoholic beverages that he pressed upon a pressable Thomas. It was this thing of opening a new bottle of high-octane booze and throwing away the cork that did it. It’s a Norwegian thing. It also impressed Kevin when first confronted with this. We’d given Stig a bottle of Jamiesson whisky which was emptied the same evening. Cork gone, no choice. We lived to regret it.

Dad and Thomas painting. And painting. And -- you get the picture?

From then on we did even less. Well, we painted my cabin. Which is now a much bigger cabin. It was really strange; the tiny little cabin was still there with the “outline” of the new exterior walls around it, not yet filled in with floors and walls and in short the rooms that are going to be there. It’s my favourite place in the whole world and I have every intention of retiring there. Even if it means getting some sort of chair-lift installed to get my arthritic bones up the rocks to get to it. I am trying hard to forget what winter and snow will do and how I am likely to freeze to death and be found many months later when my corpse thaws out and starts to smell. OK, so the anti-depressants are only working so well. Fine! Get off my case!

We managed a couple of trips to civilisation as well — Oslo. That is not to say that my parents don’t live in a civilised place, I’d be far from making that claim! But… I lived there for all of six months before I gave up. In the course of that time I experienced the unpleasantness of taking the last train there from Oslo with a drunken middle aged man with some bizarre inferiority complex. He spent the trip shouting abuse at me eloquently spiced up with a string of less flattering names until a Real Life Hero, a young man doing his army service, had enough of listening to it, picked the man up bodily from his seat, carried him out to the exit and said very, very quietly while dangling him in mid-air “you are now getting off the train”. Once done with the task he returned to his seat, nodded unceremoniously and resumed reading his book.

Sadly, there were not always knights in uniforms around to do gallant deeds.

Another thing that had me somewhat miffed was when the local paper claimed me as “theirs” in an interview when I directed the local review. Six months was all it took. And by then I didn’t even live there any more. I guess they were desperate for fresh blood to end the frequency of large ears and crooked noses.

Meeting old classmates from AGES ago. Not telling. Am feeling old and tired.

Oslo was as always lovely, though. And meeting people I had not seen in over hrmff years — some of the guys I went to primary and secondary school with — was just amazing. Including my first kiss… another Thomas. Ahh, the memories!

Anyway. It was a memorable holiday for so many reasons, not least because it was without Kevin and with Thomas instead. But that is something I will come back to at a much later stage. Because it’s —- complicated.

We remembered to get wine before getting on the train in Hamburg, and while we waited to board the train we had the best beer I’ve ever, ever, ever tasted. And experience had shown us how to bend and squeeze ourselves into the cell and even get a little sleep. In the heat which was just as unbearable as the first time.

Now, as I write these last few sentences, I should really be in bed instead. I am supposed to get up in about four hours to get ready to go to the airport. We’re having a board meeting in Romania and I’ve been looking forward to going there for months now. But I can’t sleep. And the only reason I can’t sleep is because the plane leaves at 7.15 in the morning and there’s sort of no point in even going to bed when it’s like that. So here I sit. Sleepless in Vienna. Waiting for the hell of a much too early morning and what is likely to be a much too long day. Before a back-to-back board meeting in a country I have been wanting to visit for the longest time.

Short exchange

Me: My period is making me feel totally drained.

Thomas: Yeah, just like my nose when I have a cold.

Me: Yes. That’s exactly the same.

Saturday and no swine flu

None of those who have had contact with Louise contracted swine flu. I’m almost disappointed but not all that surprised. I feel a little like a cheat having spent the entire week working from home just in case. It’s been great — I love being at home! I love my flat and having Mischa sleeping under my desk and occasionally wandering around while getting inspired… ok fine, having a break, more ore less deserved. But it did feel as if I were cheating. After all, I was and am as fit as a fiddle. But colleague panicked and insisted I stay away. Honestly? I think this entire swine flu thing is a total rip-off and that the press has done a fine job of giving people like me extra time off. Thank you, Press!

Anyway; Burgenland is calling! “Quarantine” is officially over and we are allowed out among people. So that’s where we’re going — if Burgenlenders are people? Just thought I’d ask. After all, they don’t have a language like other people, just strange noises. I really don’t think they understand each other any more than I do.

Nuff! Sun and fun is to be had! Hugs and kisses to all!

Swine flu days

On Friday Louise returned from her well-deserved Malta holiday with a less deserved case of the swine flu. As we were not aware of this we hugged long and hard, she complained of a cold and went to bed.

On Saturday she got a call from one of the guys she’d met there and was told he was in hospital with said flu-strain. “Get checked” he said.

Sunday morning she toddled off to work at the hospital after advice from her boss and got tested. Sunday night it was confirmed; she was indeed H1N1 positive.

Hm.

Today I am off work in case I start showing symptoms too. None so far though, in spite of having spent a lot of time with Louise since she got back, including emptying a bottle of bubbly together last night while cuddling a very content Mischa between us. (We tend to sit on the floor during these “sessions”.)

I’m working from home, though. Coding and putting our review together and such. And writing. And tweeting which seems to have become my latest obsession. Quite fun for now but I’m sort of hoping I get over it… Mischa is roasting down in the Hof with a bowl of water and a “bone” — one of these slightly synthetic looking knots — next too him. He seems happy now too. If hot. I just don’t get why a part husky wants to spend hours roasting in the sun.

The part husky strikes again. Roasting in the heat. At least he is in the shade here.