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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Don't buy Gummy Bears in Budapest


A number of people – including Melissa in Paris - have told me that I can indeed get good coffee in Budapest. So next time we go there we will be well prepared.

In exchange I can tell you that the best place to buy Gummy Bears is not from the man outside the old castle on the hill. Even at the very favourable Euro-Woggle exchange rate they still cost more per ounce than plutonium.

A few months before we left Sydney I signed up for a new mobile contract with Three and acquired a new Motorola telephone. When we found that we were moving to Vienna I asked Three if we could transfer the 2 year contract to Vienna. You know what the answer was don’t you!

Drei in Vienna won’t give me a contract as I haven’t been living here long enough to qualify. They trusted me in Sydney but are much more suspicious here. I guess they can’t work out why anyone would willingly come into a Drei shop in Wien and try to get a contract. Drei says 6 months is the minimum residency before I can be trusted. So I have a top up sim card with Drei which I can replenish by the very sophisticated means of going into a Tabak and buying more time.

T Mobile will give me a contract provided I have a passport, Meldezettel, Credit Card and a written reference from Barack Obama. So I have decided to shower them with my business and plan on going in to buy an iPhone. I have watched the demonstration video about the iPhones and it is the most amazing thing (apart from Sarah Palin) that I have ever seen.

I imagine that it will not work quite as well as the demo but am prepared to give it a go. I will report back.

Today I was making Rogan Josh when the electric frying pan hurled itself onto the kitchen floor and exploded. I have removed most of the stuff from the ceiling, walls and cupboards and my clothes but my runners are another thing all together. The only way I have been able to get them reasonably clean is to wash them on the boil-trash cycle for an hour or so. They are a bit smaller now but at least are no longer bright orange.

Cate was quite good about this incident and was happy to spit out the crunchy bits of frying pan she encountered while eating her dinner. Well I was hardly going to throw it away given how hard it is for me to buy meat here.

I imagine that as walk down Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse people will be looking around for the Indian restaurant.

The turntable was not working this morning so I had to back and fill for some time to get the car out of the garage. When I got home from dropping Cate at work I did not get the car in as neatly as I should have and tonight the passenger side rear view mirror committed hara kiri by hurling itself against the side of the hoist. I have reassembled it after fashion and hope it holds together long enough for us to get the car back the Budget.

However – they have not started building our car yet (Shriek!). It was ordered on 1 September but apparently there is a problem on the assembly line. Why didn’t they tell us? They probably thought we wouldn’t be interested. I have a suspicion that Telekom Austria are involved in this!

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