Lost in transit

Kellergassen

My wife, our youngest daughter and I went to a wine-cellar-street festival in a village about half an hour's drive from where we live, out in the country. It is a region of Austria with good earth both for growing vineyards and digging deep wine cellars to store the wine, and they have hillsides with narrow streets running along them, more like broad ditches fifteen feet deep dug or worn down over the years, lined with small houses that lead down to the cellars.

This particular village has seven such streets, and once a year two or three of those streets get together and hold a festival, where they set up picnic tables in the street, and serve food and wine. It was was a hot day and the event was well-attended. We walked from cellar to cellar, eating and drinking. Most of the cellars were serving traditional specialties like various cold-cuts and breads and cheeses, but one had calamari on the menu. It looked good, like onion rings, deep-fried in a batter, but eh, seafood in a rural village in a land-locked country in Central Europe? We had cold cuts.

Finding a toilet was the biggest problem. One waitress suggested my wife go in a vineyard like everyone else. We finally found a restroom and waited in line.

At one cellar there was live music, and as luck would have it the musician, an old man in Lederhosen, playing an accordion and singing, sat *on* our table so we had the best seat in the house, so to speak.

Events such as this, and the similar but less-elaborate "Heurigen" where individual farmers run wine taverns in their barns for a couple weeks a year selling their wines and other products (coldcuts, usually) are among the things I enjoy most about living in Austria. One can have something to drink, and a glass of wine, with friends while the children run around exhausting themselves, petting the animals, falling off swings onto cobblestone courtyards and generally getting filthy.

As an American, I initially found this practice of drinking in public with children on the premises exotic and charming. I am getting accustomed to it, but it hasn't lost its charm.

Here are a few more photos, sorry they're so small etc. In the landscape photo you can barely see the Kellergassen in the distance, among the vineyards. The photo of the small house, a shed of some sort, I've included because the colors were so nice. A man was urinating against the wall on the other side of it as I took the picture.

SunDumb

It's summer in the city and I've never seen so many acres of bare, exposed flesh in my life. Every lunch time there are literally hundreds of people spilling out of offices and into the parks, where they strip off so much clothing it's practically indecent. They then lie down in the full heat of the midday sun to bake themselves to a glorious crisp. There's narray a slick of sunscreen or a hat to be seen anywhere.

My poor little Australian "SunSmart" brain can't comprehend the stupidity of it all. I have seen so many people walking around like scorched tomatoes recently, that it's not funny. I want to tell them that maybe they should just save themselves a lot of time and trouble and drape themselves over a barbecue instead; the effect would be much the same and they wouldn't have to waste their whole lunch hour doing it.

Growing up in Australia, it's hard not to pay heed to all the advice - - originally stemming from the Cancer Council of Victoria way back in 1980 - - that acquiring a tan isn't healthy: it's downright dangerous.

Here, in England, acquiring a tan is an obsession.

When I first moved here, almost five years ago now, I was always constantly amazed at how crazy people went whenever the sun came out. I used to forgive them for acting so mad, because I knew that the sun didn't come out very often and, hey, you have to make the most of a good thing, right?

But seeing people doing stupid things -- like laying out in the middle of the day, soaking up UV rays like big, fat, sponges -- makes me realise that part of the problem is that no-one has ever told them about the dangers of skin cancer. In fact, many have been told it's healthy to get "a touch of sun"!

Hopefully, things are about to change. There's been quite a bit about the inherent risks of skin cancer in the media lately. In fact, the UK now has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, higher in fact, than Australia. Why? Because the Aussies have learnt (over the past 20 or so years) to protect their skin when out and about in the sun, whereas the Brits haven't.

Sadly, judging by the numbers lying out in the sun without protection, the spiralling rate of skin cancer and associated mortality rates in the UK will continue for some time to come yet. And all because so many people desparately wish to forsake that gorgeous English Rose complexion for a leathery tan!

Removeable feast

While midsummer may be on the B-list of holidays in Austria, it is probably the No. 1 celebration of the year for many if not most Swedes. Which is strange for me, since it is a holiday that didn’t exist, as far as I was concerned, until about four years ago.

Dancing around a leaf- and flower-covered pole, eating lots of cold herring and drinking lots of beer and schnapps while singing drinking ditties, wearing wreaths of flowers and leaves on your head, then playing silly children’s games and finally slow-dancing in the evening on a jetty (if you’re somewhere near the sea), are all part of the rituals of midsummer. As is moving between the inside and outside to avoid the cold and rainy weather.

It’s a holiday I can take or leave, mainly because I have no feelings about it, good or bad.

Unlike the Swedes, who seem to have a teeming host of conflicting hopes, longings, disappointments, happy memories and miscellaneous emotional baggage when it comes to midsummer. I suppose that’s what a holiday is at heart: a day full of expectations that are difficult, at best, to meet.

Strangely, holidays that once meant a lot to me when I lived in the States – Thanksgiving, for instance – have lost their meaning as well for me: I forget about them completely, since there’s little here to remind me.

I wonder if the new holidays in my life will ever replace the old holidays, and if they do, how long will it take? Will I ever have a visceral heart-shaking response to just the thought of midsummer?

Solstice

The summer solstice is celebrated in Austria, as is the winter. It was a warm day here yesterday and we'd planned an outing of some kind, but after mowing, weeding and driving kids around there was no time to do anything else. My in-laws are away on a trip so we instead went to their house in the evening and watched television. They have two, so our youngest daughter watched cartoons downstairs (oldest daughter was away at friends) while my wife and I watched trash upstairs.

For dinner I drove to McDonald's and brought some stuff home. The attractive young woman at the window where you make your orders and pay flirted with me, I am fairly sure. Either that or I am losing my mind - after all, I am a man in his forties driving a family car with a childseat in the back.

When it got late, we went out onto the balcony (the in-laws live halfway up a big hill) and watched Midsummer bonfires blazing around the countryside. That's how its celebrated here, usually, bonfires up on a hill somewhere to which people hike, drinking. The kid wanted to go to one, but we were reluctant - she was already so tired she was nearly hysterical, and I personally was afraid of ending up at the wrong bonfire, one attended by thick-necked young men with SS tattoos and shaved heads, say, rather than normal people. And the local one had been rescheduled because yesterday was the local priest's birthday and he wanted to spend his birthday doing something else.

It's a pretty tradition - dark night, orange bonfires dotting the countryside. We counted the ones we saw on our way home, to distract the kid. Six or so. Maybe more. More orange glows, anyway, beyond the crests of hills. They've done this here, I think, since they discovered fire. They do it at midwinter too.

Julia's wayward child

Living here in the land of fine foodiness, you'd think all my gastronomic needs would be satisfied. Well, I suppose they are, and I adore all the rituals surrounding mealtimes in France. I love wandering through the market with my wicker basket, stealing olives and sneering at tourists.

Although I have to say I've yet to adopt the French's penchant for innards. I was once sent by a friend to buy lamb's brains for lunch. I stared and stared at eight little blobs on a plastic tray in the tripe shop, wondering whether I was meant to choose the ones that looked smartest.

(And the sight of canned tripe on supermarket shelves still makes me cringe... conjuring up images of lonely old men, naked light bulbs and hot plates.)

All this healthful fare is well and good, but I sometimes miss favourite old junk food. I miss greasy take-out and peanut butter cups, frozen lemonade, hot dog stands, a certain thick mayonnaise that would clog an elephant's arteries and respectable chocolate chips... Not junk food, but now that it's summer, more than anything I miss fresh corn on the cob, sweet and dripping with butter. Here in the home of Michelin stars, it's considered pig food.

Back home

My hometown is stranger to me now than where I live. Visiting my parents last week, the food and eating habits seemed foreign. The cars bigger. News on constantly, same five disturbing stories repeated all day as other unrelated items scrolled along the bottom of the screen as text, also repeating, as if only a dozen things happened all day in the entire world, all scary, all about America.

Newspapers full of advertisements for department store sales. My mom took me to the mall to get some school clothes for my daughter. I couldn't remember how to talk to the sales clerks. One told me all about her day, that she was getting off early that day and looked forward to returning home to read. I asked her what she liked to read, but she couldn't name any titles. "Family stuff" she finally said. I didn't understand what she meant.

The next clerk asked me, as I stood in front of the cash register, if she could help me. "Yes," I said. "I would like to purchase this pair of child's jeans." I remember exactly what I said because she gave me an odd look when I said it, as if wondering if I was one of those guys from another galaxy, so I realized it must sound a little unusual.

"Was anyone helping you?" she asked me.

I gestured towards an elderly lady going through one of the sales racks. "Yes, my mother over there."

Later, a young woman selling massage oil and hand lotion, when she heard I lived abroad, asked me if I speak with an accent.

Double Happiness

I'm getting married next month.

My Singaporean friends and colleagues have thus spent the past few months educating me on the customs involved in creating a sucessful, happy marital union.

Dear Kristen,

love,
Mei Ling

I don't think we will be adopting any of the multitude of local customs into our wedding, but it has been interesting to learn more about the different rituals followed by Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Muslims and so on.

If we were going to incorporate 'foreign' elements into our wedding, the following ones appeal:
1) Chilean custom of having little bells on the guests tables during the reception. When the guests ring the bell, the bride and groom have to kiss.
2) Swiss custom whereby all the cars in the bridal party and all the guests in their vehicles toot their horns as they travel to the reception venue. It makes for a happy and noisy procession that all passing traffic can participate in by beeping back.

What local customs would you/did you incorporate into your big day?