Do we have enough owls?

Monday was an absolutely glorious day in Wien. It was almost balmy and the sun was shining, birds singing, ducks quacking etc. I went on a fruitless search to get a particular type of Chanel lipstick for Cate but it was – surprise – not available here. Or indeed anywhere – a search of the Internet revealed that they no longer make this particular type.

The workmen have almost finished repaving the Graben and Kärntnerstrasse and it looks really good.

The Christmas decorations are being erected and I guess it won’t be too long before the lights go on. There will be an official ‘light switching on’ day just as there is a ‘start of Christmas tree selling’ day and we will find out what this is in due course. It’s time to do a stock take and find out if we have enough Christmas decorations – including owls and hedgehogs etc.

We did buy some Polar Bears (for some reason this spell winter for us here even though we are a zillions miles from the nearest Polar Bear) and of course I will let you have pictures as soon as the bears go on display.

The problem with buying real wood is that is very…..well…..woody. It comes in 13 kilo bags and leaves a trail of dust and splinters behind it. I can only fit 10 bags in Billy and can only take 2 of these on Dolly at each time. Which makes 5 trips to get 10 bags of wood into the apartment. And the whole load is only enough for about 4 nights because real word burns like…well….wood.

Sushi rolls are much better. They are easier to handle and carry around, they burn for longer, are a whole lot cheaper and make almost no mess. Cate unfortunately likes real wood so I have to have some to start the fires off and then I can throw Sushi rolls on when she is not looking.

The cats don’t mind much what is on the fire so they are much easier to please. Muffin and Sissi are now almost friends and often touch noses. They met on the stairs recently and Muffin starting licking Sissi’s ears. Good Grief!

Bad men problem solved for €15

I have not fixed the dishwasher after all and have had to call for reinforcements. I have stemmed the flow somewhat and can wash dishes if I put a large towel underneath the dishwasher door.

Cate arrived back from India on Saturday at the crack of dawn and is not going away again for weeks. She has to go to Istanbul in December and we have decided that I will go with her and we will spend a few days mooching about - and also go to Gallipoli.

We walked through Stadtpark on Saturday night and there was a cat stalking the ducks. I assume it was feral cat as cat owners are not likely to let their cats roam the streets.

Now I understand where all the baby ducks went this year. One day there were hordes then just a few bobbing about with their mothers.

There must be local agency that attends to feral animals. Merisi?

On Sunday night a woman came to the door and said that she lived in an apartment downstairs and needed to borrow €15 because she was in danger from three bad men. She said her mother would come by and return the money in half an hour.

I thought it was such a good story that made absolutely no sense at all that it would have been churlish of me to refuse – so I gave her the money.

Cate wondered why I did this but I pointed out that €15 to save a lady from three bad men was not such a bad investment – I mean it’s only €5 per man. But what sort of bad men problem can be solved with the amount of money? They are probably from Eastern Europe and just don’t know yet how expensive Vienna is.

Cate asked me a lot of questions about the woman and why she needed the money (Cate didn’t believe the bad men story) and why €15. This is a good point – what can you do in Vienna on a Sunday night with €15? Nothing is open and if it was you wouldn’t get much for that amount of money.

The most exciting thing about the transaction was that Sissi escaped and hurtled down six flights of steps in a (failed) bid for freedom and was taken back upstairs in the elevator (to avoid any bad men on the stairs)

I just don’t understand many of the weird things that happen to me and just have to let them wash over me.

And another thing. The gunman at Fort Hood in the USA was shot (finally) by a police officer from the local police force. This was on a army base. Aren’t they supposed to have guns there? If they don’t have guns at Fort Hood it would be the only place like that in Texas. If this dude had tried this in the local shopping centre he would have been filled full of lead in seconds.

Now – if that woman’s mother would pop by with the €15 I can go shopping.

Looks like an empty baked bean box to me

Melissa and I went to MAK – which is the design museum in Vienna – and just across from Stadtpark which is good for Melissa who turns blue after 2 minutes outside. She is definitely the wrong sort of person for Europe and should live in somewhere like Morocco.

Anyway MAK is quite wonderful – and has the most stunning collection of chairs I have ever seen. It also has lots of my favourite things – like lace and crockery. (Ugh!).

The best part of the exhibitions is the descriptions that the artists give of their work.

What to me is a empty baked bean box turns out to be a post-modern representation of life in a modern Gulag in which workers are imprisoned in cubicles with fluorescent lighting and where they are verbally beaten by neo-imperialist guards. The open flaps of the box represent the only escape but cannot be reached by the workers unless they band together to build the way out - but their essential intellectual shallowness makes this impossible because of the crushing emptiness of their lives and the worry about what is out there. The empty tin in the bottom of the box may be the shrugged off shell of a single escapee who now runs a deck chair rental shop on the beach on the Costa del Sol – or it may be an empty tin.

The dishwasher started leaking so I attempted to fix it by removing, cleaning and replacing the seal. After an hour or so with the mop and bucket I had another go which was much more successful. I have told Herr Dorfelmutzer downstairs that I am sure that his insurance will cover most of the damage but not to put his Dachshund on the balcony while it is wet because it is too cold out there and Fritzi will ice up.

News day and back to one of my old favourites (groan) smoking. The Austrian Times reports that, according to a Vienna Doctor - Austria has the highest percentage of 15-year-old smokers in Europe - a staggering 25%.

It is an interesting article so I will quote it in full (mainly because I don’t have anything else to write about).

“Manfred Neuberger, the head of the preventive-medicine division at Vienna Medical University, added today (Weds) that the number of Austrian youth who smoked had been steadily increasing since 1997 and that 145,891 Austrians aged 11 to 17 smoked.

Noting the average age at which young people began smoking had fallen to 11, he said: "The younger one begins, the worse the consequences will be."

Neuberger claimed the government had been doing too little to get young people not to smoke. "It is easier to buy cigarettes than groceries," he said, adding the government should use the 60 million Euros in cigarette taxes that young smokers paid annually to pay for a campaign of prevention of smoking.

He called protection of non-smokers in Austria "a health and political time bomb" and said the country was on the level of the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Albania and Serbia in that regard.

The doctor cited polls in Styria and Upper Austria that had shown 91 per cent of people who visited nightspots felt harmed by secondary smoke and 60 per cent of them wanted the law on smoking toughened.

Tamas Fazekas from Vienna’s St. Anna Children’s Hospital called for "an absolute ban on smoking in public areas. We are already finding illnesses in children that previously occurred only in adults." She warned that pregnant women’s exposure to secondary smoke could lead to premature births and development of asthma in young children.

She also claimed exposure of children to secondary smoke made it more likely they would start smoking and noted 80 per cent of children of smokers became smokers themselves.

"We need to make it clear to adults that nicotine is not only a poison that harms children but that they also need to set a good example by not smoking," she added.

The doctors’ announcements came on the occasion of an event promoting the EU campaign "HELP – For a Smoke-Free Life" in Vienna. The campaign featured more than 300 events in all 27 EU member states today”.

I laughed out loud at the last sentence. This place is poisonous – it is impossible to escape the smoke.

Melissa and I had lunch in Pizzeria Grado. Six tables were occupied and there were smokers at four of them. In our favourite Fish Restaurant - Dalmatia – last Friday night there were smokers all around us and a cigar smoking woman behind us. Given half a chance in restaurants Austrians would probably light their own farts.