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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Scary Things Day


This is me after the first read of the Reebok Heimtrainer Manual.

We went to Keszthely in Hungary – the largest town on Lake Balaton - and saw Festetics Palace.

There was no explanation about it anywhere we could find - except that it was built about 1745.

However as Palaces go it was a fine example and full of the usual old stuff. It does have an excellent coffee shop – with astonishingly good coffee.

It has delightful gardens and we took many unmemorable photos – one of which will grace this Blog soon. Merisi has probably been there so there will be much better photos on her Blog.

For reasons which we don’t quite understand we didn’t take the camera to Tihany village so were not able to record the fish on sticks performance. This is probably an annual event to coincide with the start of winter. I have put a note in my diary to go back there this time next year – provided of course that Annabella has been able to find the name of that restaurant.

This is serious – Some Truly Scary Things

Scary Thing 1

Cate employed a young woman lawyer from Germany. The woman is married to a black American and has two children. She has started work in Vienna and is looking for an apartment. She looked at one with her children – the person renting the apartment looked at the children and said:

“We don’t allow Negroes in here – if everyone stayed where they were supposed to there wouldn’t be so many problems.”

This flabbergasted Cate but Rozalin pointed out that there is much racism in Wien. It did not surprise me and reflects the many comments I have read about this type of thing on the Virtual Vienna Net which is an expatriate chat site.

Scary Thing 2

There is a report in the Austrian Times “Number of Austrian Holocaust deniers hits lowest level.”

This should be a good thing right? But….. “The number of Austrian Holocaust deniers occurred has fallen to its lowest level ever - five per cent, according to new research.”

5%?

The population of Austria is about 8 Million. Let’s assume that there are at least 4 Million functionally literate adults. That means that there are at least 200,000 Holocaust Deniers in Austria.

Holy Toledo!

They had concentration camps in Austria – I have been to one – where do these people get this information. How can they believe this in 2009?

Scary Thing 3

I have just finished reading Richard Dawkin’s latest book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. It is a wonderful, elegant, and beautifully written book about Evolution.

A table in the back of the book shows the percentages of people in Europe who responded to the proposition that ‘human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals’.

In Austria the percentage of ‘True’ responses was 57 – a good result compared to, say, the USA. But – 28% said the proposition was ‘False’ – and 15% said ‘Don’t know’.

I just don’t know what to say about this.

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