Badger takes a break

This is Muffin in the morning sun in my study upstairs. She is taking a break from her busy schedule - and so am I. Back soon.

The cats have never vomited into my coat pocket

Sometimes when I am on my hands and knees dealing with the kitty litter I reflect on the fact that I used to be a director of a merchant bank and have a staff of 120. Now I have two cats who are much more trouble than my staff ever were. Well that's not quite true - at least Muffin and Bill are not drug-crazed psychopaths masquerading as currency traders - and neither of them has ever vomited into my coat pocket.

I have told the cats that Cate will be back tomorrow and they are very excited. Muffin has borrowed my crayons and is making a Welcome Home poster and Bill is crocheting a new door mat.

I have booked a hotel in Salzburg for the weekend and we will head off on Friday evening. I would like it to be Friday afternoon but inevitably there will be a crisis in Ouagadougou or some such similar place and Cate will be held up. So we will leave late and hammer down the A-whatever in the thickening fog in a 60 tonne leviathan hoping that nothing substantial gets in our way.

We are supposed to be in a boutique hotel in the middle of Salzburg and the website makes it look very attractive indeed. However, I am not good at picking hotels so will be a bit restless until I actually see it.

The crushed look that Cate gives me when she sees the rooms I have chosen always depresses me for the weekend. She always makes it worse by saying 'never mind - we are only here for two nights and I can go to the Apotheke and get ear plugs and a sleep mask'.

However, they are not all bad. On the face of it the medieval nudist camp in Verdun was a very bad choice but the room was fantastic and we had a balcony the size of the Stade de France. The bed was a gigantic four poster that looked like one of those that came down in the middle of the night to suffocate the occupants - so to guard against this we slept with our heads hanging out the side.

Liverpool, cultural capital of Europe

The pictures still have to be hung but this is almost what it is supposed to look like.

I am not sure why but Halloween seems to be big in Wien – not just amongst the American expatriates but all over. There are many shop displays and pumpkins everywhere. I know it was originally a Celtic festival and I am sure someone will enlighten me as to why it is so popular here.

They sure like pumpkins here. Since we arrived in early September the Pizza restaurant has had a sign on the blackboard out the front saying Kurbis Woche (Pumpkin Week). I have some chalk and will soon change this to Kurbis Jahre. They do make an excellent pasta with pumpkin.

I usually have a bag of stuff for Trick or Treaters but won’t bother here – it is unlikely that anyone will be able to find their way to my door. And if they do I will give them a brace of cats for their trouble – because I am sick of the little blighters.

They start prowling around at about 5:30 AM which is far to early for anything at all to be moving – even imaginary mice. Muffin likes to do her ‘Vasco da Muffin’ thing and circumnavigates the bed non stop. Bill snuffles and tries to dig his way into the bed by tearing at the doona.

They do this until I become hysterical and get out of bed to feed them. Then they sit on the bed and lick themselves from top to toe. This is a very noisy process which would bring out murderous tendencies in those who do not have cats.

Well the books are all packed up and are downstairs again – along with 8 boxes of CDs. I looked long and hard at the boxes of CDs and decided they could wait for another time. Most of the music is on the iPods and it will be a gruesome task to go through every box and find out what still needs to be uploaded to iTunes.

There are far too many types of bread in Wien and I am having trouble learning their names. I have found that the bread in the shops is often not above the right label. So when I like the look of something and ask for it by the name on the label I am often told that they don’t have any.

I then have to ask what the thing is that I want to buy and am told it’s name – but cannot retain this sort of information. And as I buy bread by how it looks on the outside – rather than knowing what is on the inside – I get some very strange things indeed. Last week we had some bread with carrots in it – unusual – but quite interesting. I wonder if they make bread with Brussels Sprouts (Kohlsprossen) which is my favourite vegetable. Anything is possible in Wien.

The buying of fruit and vegetables is also difficult. We have had some outstanding fruit and vegies from the markets in Landstrasser-Hauptstrasse – but also some of the worst we have tasted. The best strawberries we have tasted so far came from Spar – and they were half the price of the ones at the market.

I saw on TV a documentary entitled ‘Liverpool, cultural capital of Europe’. They are apparently talking about Liverpool in the UK. The documentary is in two parts. I didn’t watch long enough to see if Mozart lived there – or indeed played with the Beatles in the Cavern.

Kris in Vienna, Virginia sent me a hilarious video which I just have to share with you.

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=tmGP9G.wzRTXhWjKhYDNbDUzOTY4MTk-&referred_by=11781949-nXn015x