So this post is about a pretty terrifying moment of my summer which occurred just this week: my first hospital stay. To sum up a long story before you begin to panic, I got an infection on my leg, it spread very quickly, they drugged me on serious antibiotics and now I’m going to be just fine.

Last Monday (9 August), I got a boil on my leg. I’ve had these before but this one hurt a lot. It was so painful that I took aspirin in the middle of the night just to sleep. I also administered the usual home remedy to a boil, however while doing that I noticed it smelled quite funny. Tuesday I skyped with my lovely doctor friend, who asked me to show it to her. I then noticed the red area surrounding it which was also warmer than the rest of my skin.

So I went (at my friend’s advice) to the nearest GP to my house. The practice was shared with his wife, who had proudly hung a certificate of her completion of a course in Traditional Chinese Medicine alongside alongside her medical qualification. I was not at a world class office. This doctor said “ooohh, that’s big”, and then told me to start taking antibiotics.

Thursday it got bigger and started to leak (sorry), and so I finally went to the gigantic general hospital and waited 2.5 hours. The team of doctor and nurses all simultaneously uttered surprised interjections like “wooaah” and (in german) “handsome!”. This was when I heard the word “severe”. They drained it and wrapped it something to catch the rest of the nasties. I can’t say I completely rested my leg as I should have, but I remained home the whole day.

Friday I went in for my morning-after checkup, again waiting 2.5 hours despite having something of an appointment. Upon examination and cutting open and draining, these doctor and nurses said “my lord,” and “insanity!”, finally cumulating in “actually, you need to be hospitalized.”

I had never thought I would hear those words, and I can’t say I wasn’t a bit panicked. When he called around the hospital for a bed for me, the second call was successful, but he had to repeatedly apologize for the request, and to that I asked him “They’re not too happy about it, are they?” He replied, “No one here is.” Given that the bed had to be readied, I had time to get home and come back.

Having a visitor, and a trip to the US which would be delayed (the flight was sunday), the situation could not be more chaotic. I ran around trying to tie up loose ends and let everyone know what was going on but the internet was down and I didn’t know who all I should tell. I brought some clothes, but didn’t know if it just meant I would be hospitalized for the afternoon or a day or two, or whatever. I brought bunches of books, exclaiming to my visitor, “I hate being bored!” I unfortunately neglected soap, which is surprisingly necessary, shaving equipment and tooth care products.

Day 1   It was a 3 bed room. I didn’t know what to do at all. I usually like speaking German to people but doing it out of force when sick and panicked is not fun. The room had an unbeatable view of the city of vienna, and my neighbor had taken the window bed. He was an older Viennese man, with an ugly, but groomed, goatee, grey hair, hearing aids and a thick, repulsive viennese accent. He only spoke german to me, and only spoke viennese german, the variety I have the most trouble with, and the least joy in, interpreting. He told some crappy stories of his own life, something about going to Africa (which is hard to believe, given that he speaks neither English nor standard German) and in general he liked to comment on completely uninteresting things revolving around himself. I don’t necessarily attribute his 4x-louder-than-normal-indoor voice only to his hearing aids; I have heard this before.

To avoid talking to him, and also out of complete exhaustion, I slept almost the whole day, having very strange dreams.

Day 2  I’ll describe the routine, which had already begun on day 1. At around 8am, I wake up to people either giving me breakfast or changing my bed, eat my semmel and await your first antibiotic injection. This comes through an IV drip, and the effect is quite comforting. I get a bit of a dry mouth with a strange taste, which assured me that my bloodstream is being overwhelmed with poison to bacteria. I could watch the 100ml bottle drip down slowly feeling as a supercharged bacterial repulsion machine in the end. Sometime between breakfast and lunch the doctors came around with their rounds, one of them always being a professor, who graced us with his words of omniscient wisdom. The “normal” doctors and nurses spent the rest of the day carrying out his orders according to various protocols, making me wonder about how great it could be to be a doctor at the AKH in vienna. Felt like they were glorified nurses.

Normally, you get to choose what you eat, but I came too late in the week to get a choice, and lunches for the first 3 days consisted of non-breaded gravy soaked schnitzels of various sorts. At 4 you receive your second wonderful shot of antibiotics, and get a smaller dinner (I guess they’re following the more-food-earlier-is-better principle, but completely ignoring the high-fat-meats-cause-artery-clogging-and-eventually-heart-problems principle). Evenings were thus relaxing, well, everything was relaxing. There wasn’t a damn thing to do but read and talk on the phone. I intentionally did not try to find out about internet access there, as I was sure it would impede my recovery.

That day, we got a 3rd roommate. He was early 20s, heavily pierced, in apparent severe pain and generally morose. When he stood up, it was revealed that his genital area was bandaged, which he later explained (from what I understood) that he was burned because of burning his jeans. He wasn’t drunk a the time, which was believable, because he also revealed that he was an ex-heroin addict, and so doing anything in that direction would lead to much worse things. He also had some sort of birth defect, causing his legs to be diminutive and his feet too look alien in a movie-like way. he had a very large big toe and strangely arranged other toes (I’m not even sure if there were all 5 there), and they were blue and pale.

I really never felt sorry for myself there at all.

Day 3 Our new neighbor had been heavily drugged, and was forced not to eat, and was increasingly hostile. I did not blame him. It didn’t seem like he had much to hope for, except for a probably further-abnormal but healthy genitalia. Either due to drugs or lack of concern, he shat in his bed. I didn’t want to comment to the nurses, probably to spare him any more embarrassment, but that was a bit of a silly notion given his condition. They discovered it a few hours later, and I decided to take a stroll outside instead of overhearing the whole scene.

By the previous night it had become apparent that the antibiotics were working, and this was quite monumental for me. Since Monday, everything had become worse, and fears of the various dangers of severe infections (I mean, this is how people used to die!) troubled me quite a bit. I enjoyed the luxury of being allowed to enjoy the front entrance of the monster hospital, doing some people watching and some phoning. I cannot imagine how it would be to stare all day at the door and the window only for weeks at a time, but I know that will happen some day in the distant future. When I was sicker, though, I think the thought bothered me less.

The other sucky thing was that I came right at the weekend, and then you get on call doctors to take care of you. The professor that weekend was a young son of a bitch (couldn’t be 10 years older) who seemed to ignore my chart and just take a look and say, “take more antibiotics!” Then he looked Sunday to tell me, “looks better, but we’ve got a ways to go.” Such elastic prognoses are what you generally get.

Day 4  Now monday, the standard week professor was really credible sounding, and furthermore, there were about 5 doctors in the room doing the rounds. He gave me the exhilarating news that I would be getting out the next day.

That day, our pierced, troubled young’n was moved and a new patient was moved in. The hospital is so full that people end up in departments they shouldn’t be. This was dermatology. He came in, asking the nurse if he had to stay in the hospital, and they said yes, and his worried face told her he wasn’t prepared. He then received chemotherapy immediately, and was interviewed. He must have been late 60s, and he spoke to his wife in an eastern language I couldn’t place (seemingly more in the Russian than Balkan direction), was generally sad and seemingly shocked, for I guess he just found out that he had cancer, yet seemed to bear it with strength and bravery. No emotional fits, no negotiating with the nurses.

Again, I could not feel sorry for myself here.

Day 5  The day of my departure was great, I received only 1 injection and then was quickly released. The doctors seemed happy to answer my questions and give me what I needed to go. I wished everyone a good recovery, and leaving, I knew I would actually miss it a bit. In health, the oblivion of being in the hospital makes you a bit more relaxed, free from anything you might be able to do to stress yourself out. There was only a bed to sleep in, nowhere to sit or gather or anything. Of course, it’s much better to be out, in any case.

So that’s not my most stellar piece of writing, but I hope you enjoyed it. I couldn’t get great pictures out of the window, since I only have a crappy cell phone camera, but the view was really a once in a vienna experience. Not many high buildings overlooking so much of the city exist.

At the beginning of last winter, seemingly in accordance with a perhaps legally mandated souring of the general atmosphere of the city, the transit authority started a new campaign to “clean up” a bit.  The target?  Those nasty newspapers sitting on seats when people are not reading them.

Really.  The signs announcing the arrival times, when not announcing arrival times, printed a message that means “Your newspaper doesn’t need its own seat”.  I mean really.  They have nothing like the CTA’s “If you see something, say something” ever, because there’s nothing to see.  Except those filthy, shared newspapers.  (They’re free anyway, so it seems like a good system, if you are done reading the fish wrap called “Heute”, you might as well leave it for someone else than pollute a landfill with it.  Anyway, I find it a bit insulting to people’s ability to communicate with each other: can’t we just politely ask if we can move a newspaper and sit?)

And apparently that sign campaign alone was not enough, so they started printing ads in these newspapers, with pictures of signs that say “Your newspaper doesn’t need its own seat”.  I found this ad, in fact, while sitting in a bank of seats littered with at least 4 copies.  After seeing the ad, I laughed, and kept it open to that page until the end of my journey, at which point I left the newspaper on my seat with the ad face up, so that people could read that the newspaper itself was confessing that it didn’t need its own seat, as though in an existential crisis over its own seat-hoarding practices.

The point of this post:  my landlord is fucking crazy.  I want to publish her name in some fucking newspaper and expose her for the evil beam of negative energy that she is, but I really don’t think I can do that.  She’s the man, and I’m being brought down by the man.

So I moved into this wonderful apartment, knowing it was more than usual, being central and lovely, under the pretense that  the rent would be ridiculously low while construction went on for a year or so.  To be exact, I would pay about 250 €/mo. for a spacious, awesomely located apartment.  Great, right?

So I come back to Vienna after Christmas in January 2009, and realizing that it was still sparsely furnished, I decided to just go into a bit of debt to finish off the place.  What I didn’t count on was this: a law in Vienna changed the restrictions on building codes, and my landlord’s planned construction was thus illegal.  So they had to abandon it.  But instead of warning me well in advance, apologizing, or offering any concession, they simply told me a couple weeks in advance that the rent was going up to the normal rate, about 420 €.  That’s relatively high, but also bad for someone who spent himself into the ground.

It took months and months in poverty working my way back up to zero.  Meanwhile, I joined the renter’s union, a nice non-profit (or something) that represents the interests of renters by explaining their legal rights.  They are not lawyers, but do have more authority than most.  It took a while to get an appointment, but I finally discovered that the raising of the rent was against the contract, since the contract stated that it should be lowered until the construction was done.  Being that it was abandoned, it was not done.

I then offered the landlord (who, by the way, has a company minding the building, a company which strives to look professional, but their suits and pomade only thinly veil their utter ineptitude) the opportunity to make a compromise with me, since if I were right about the contract, she would have to take much less rent for the rest of the contract.  I think that’s unfair, and I thought we could fix it.

BUT then she brought in the lawyer, who sent me a letter saying, basically, “fuck off and pay up”.  So I go back to the renter’s union, and they tell me that while I probably don’t have a good shot in court, I could go through a process to make a legal assessment of the actual value of the apartment, which is lower than what I am charged.  So I did that.

So an official guy comes by to appraise the apartment, and the lawyer, the landlord, and the company taking care of the apartment all came to my apartment (so it’s 4 stiff Viennese professional, me, and a very nice long haired liberal type living at the apartment with me at the time–great scene).  So paralyzed at the thought of losing something like 3000 € over the course of 3 years, they were on a emotionally charged quest to insure that would NEVER HAPPEN.

And the official was totally on my side.  It was a normal apartment, not worthy of any extra value, and the rent should be lowered.  In the process, they discovered the mold that had been growing in my bathroom while I was here.  The landlord actually had to go into another room to sit down, catch her breath and fight off tears.  I mean, who knows, if they were to fix it, perhaps it would cost them 500 €!!!  Holy fuck!  The world is coming to an end!  They further attempted to pretend like there was a bike garage, which totally does not exist.  They asked if it was there the whole time, and started to lie, and on and on.

As a parting comment, the landlord expressed that since there was residual oil and stuffs in the oven, there would be a lowering of my deposit.  “Expressing” is nice.  It was like a lecture you get during an ugly break up, just piling on some random insult to have the last word.  She would not look at me or shake my hand after this.

So to sum up: they could have agreed to give me about 1000 € when I offered them to compromise in the beginning, and now they were really getting scared at the prospect of losing something like 3000 €, to the point of tears and yelling and irrational lying.  Importantly, during the course of living here, they will have received about 30,000 €.  All the while, defending this 10% of the contract (and the piddly 3% I offered them), they are paying a lawyer a bunch of fees.

Then, in December, I get a Räumungsklage, a nice word for “lawsuit to evict”.  Why?  Because there’s mold in the bathroom.  Why is there mold in the bathroom?  Well, of course, because I’m doing my night experiments on the effects of fungi on the walls of Austrian apartments that are owned by pigfucker landlords.

So I get a real lawyer this time, and he’s real classy.  He must be over 65, if not more, still smokes in his office, grins a toothy grin that tells you “I know this shit, it ain’t shocking me.”  For the trial, yet another official guy with a title, let’s call him a legal expert, or just expert, has to appraise my apartment to tell whether my “massive abuse” (the translation of the charge against me) is causing the mold to spread.

And this happens today.  He comes in, totally professional and impartial, looking, passing no judgment, honestly weighing the possibilities that it could be the construction, the layout, the winters, or  that I don’t open the window enough.  I tell him yes, I open the window.  He starts recording his observations into his tape recorder.

And then it begins to really go batshit.  The lawyer on the opposing side (who is just about as capable as the property management) asks me to show him how i open the window.  Then I tell him, (mind you I had to use my bad german), “what?  I go on the toilet, reach over and open it.” (It is a bit inaccessible.)  He clarifies that he wants to see me do it.  So I stand on the toilet and open the window, as the official records in his tape recorder “at the request of the prosecution, we are watching Herr Zimmermann open the window.  He stands on the crapper (best translation for the slang word he used) and reaches over the toilet paper, and opens the window.”  I hope that the sarcasm I was detecting was really there….

And now here’s a bit of aside (and a bit about Austrian officials): you see, with all these people, there is this dripping, dishonest friendly way of carrying themselves about. The guy from the property management acts toward me like people using the official forms of “you” (”Sie” instead of “du”, “Usted” instead of “tú”, “vous” instead of “tu”), saying shit eating lines like “oh, it is so nice to see you,” “your beard is really nice”, “I hope you are having a great day”, “I hope we see each other again soon”, in a very smarmy tone.  Just smarmy all over.  But he hates me, and he’s pissed, and he wants me to suffer.  This sort of obligatory smarmy-ness is just damn creepy, and could possibly represent their own fear of confronting their true feelings, which sometimes are so strong that they will inevitably come out in a completely ugly way.
Case in point: in the middle, here, where we discuss the sequence of events (I move in, there’s mold, it took so long for it to appear, there’s so much of it here and there) and then that there was a construction site above me, and implicitly that it might be his fault, he gets nervous.  He reveals is true feelings toward me when expresses, vehemently and fervently, that before I moved in, there was nothing there.  NOTHING.  it gets to the point of nearly yelling.  “NICHTS!”  The expert stands there and says, “OK, got it.”  Over the course of the whole event, he’ll continue to reiterate: “I want to say, that there was nothing here before he came.  NOTHING!!!”  Satisfyingly, the expert subsequently responds with something like, “yeah, I got it,” and “yeah, i heard you the first time,” and so on.

So finally we go up to the floor above me, where I had never been, the site of the construction, the beginning of the whole conflict.  And it’s fucking disgusting.  Like a bad attic that people tell you not to step in certain places, because you’ll fall through or get bitten by rats or swallowed by a monster.  We walk above my bathroom, and lo and behold, there’s a big trough thats made to channel water from one side of the building out the other, and it takes a 90˚ turn directly above my bathroom.  And it’s made of wood!  I’m talking like prospector mine sort of shit….like you should be sifting gold out of the water that comes through. This is primitive as hell.

And the shining moment.  The once-objective expert says in an utterly chiding tone, “This is dumb.”  He saw why it was there, and he knew that they needed to channel the water somewhere but, in his words, “this is no solution to the problem.”  And he briefly records into his tape recorder that the problem is clearly here: water is leaking from this ghetto-ass gutter out of the building, through the building and into my bathroom.  Furthermore he says that it’s detrimental to the heating in the building, and that it will damage the building.

So there it is.  Perhaps I’ll be in court someday, with several paid professionals all doting over my landlord’s whacked-out mind-fuck whim to insist that I should get the short end of the stick.  If it really comes to this, it will probably be one of the funniest days of my life.
In the meantime, my landlord appraised the inflation rates over the last year and discovered that the rent should increase by 10 €/month.  That’s class.  Do you really spend time and money on this sort of shit?  And what if there had been deflation?

Well, I hope this was informative.

Jean came to Austria and became my only American visitor outside of my parents.  I never befriended folks who were readily jaunting to Europe in the latter years.  We did the compact run-around-the-area-and-see-all-you-can-see thing that I’ve done before, too: it’s the sense that you’ll NEVER be in this place again, like part of your life will die after you leave.  It was nifty.

We first went to Prague, nearly immediately, and drank a bunch of Czech beer at night, and attempted to balance ourselves on the sidewalks rendered unnavigable by snow and no one to maintain them.  We saw a lot of cool sights, you know, castle type shit, but we really had to stop walking in order to look up.  It was cold, but we made it worth it.  I liked the Astrological clock, and would have bought one from the gift shop, if it wasn’t just a clock that looks like an Astrological clock.

I took the opportunity of having an artist visitor to make our much ado’ed second Whiskey Painting Night.  We managed a bit of a clever idea that was perhaps more clever on paper than in our execution: painting telephone.  Take a sufficiently small canvas that you can hold in your hand and hide from others, paint on it, then take a picture before handing it to the next person, who will “add” to it (or completely destroy it).  The results are shown here, but I think the concept deserves revisiting.  We also made a fantastic painting, only partially shown here.

The next day saw my second Vienna ball, Ball der Pharmacie, and also my second ball using my second-hand $20 suit.  I mean, the people that go to these things usually have a tux and a really nice watch.  I, on the other hand, wore a jean jacket.  It was largely similar to the other ball I’d been to, with an opening for the “special” guests, you know, that debutant shit that you read about in period piece novels.  A small orchestral band played Viennese fair, and in the downstairs there was a Latin bar, sporting South American music.  At around midnight they had (for some mindfuck reason) a Michael Jackson impersonator (perhaps it was because they had planned an MJ tribute in Vienna that was later cancelled).  The attendees really didn’t know what the hell to do with this, and we eventually made our way to the front, dancing like one should at a rock show.  I don’t know if they were admiring or displaying that they were apalled.  Maybe a mix of the two.

I finally saw the Zentralfriedhof (the central cemetary) with Jean, which is big.  That’s about all I can say for it.  It’s a collection of graves, and some of them are of famous really old people, but most are wealthy don’t-cares.  The noteworthy thing was Falco’s grave, pictured here.  I have never seen anything more inappropriate.  Is it just me or does that also look a little to much like a Jesus Christ pose to you?

There was also the cursory re-admiration of the really funny things about Vienna: the snooty fuckface waiters at coffee shops, the lack of any turnstyles preventing you from “jumping the turnstyles” and the availability of newspapers dispensed from plastic bags with a nice little money box strapped above (pictured.)

We finally wound up in Hungary, where we had the delight of getting a tour with Nagy Zoltan through budapest backpacker.  I’m not getting paid to say this.  If you’re in Budapest, do this.  They’re a group of enthused Hungarians with a wealth of knowledge and personality, and also a reasonable proposal: if you liked the tour, pay what it was worth.  In the middle of the tour, after getting a bit cold, we were treated to some Hungarian liquor.

So that’s half the reason I’m broke now.  The next part is in the next post. (Many photos courtesy Jean.)

To put it in dork terms, this guy has a really great angle on it.  Pink Eyes, as he calls himself, has channeled an incredible amount of energy into a harsh sound that is paradoxically warm and uplifting.  It’s perhaps his lyrics that do it, or maybe having seen the guy’s antics in a way that makes it clear that he has a good heart.

Learn the lyrics before you go, because you will be undoubtedly confronted with the opportunity to scream them along with Mr. Eyes, and really regret it if you don’t.  He brings the music and his spirit to your face, inches away.  He is fearless in making contact with the audience, and if someone smiles enough, he’ll push them even further, perhaps by picking them up and swinging them around, unbuttoning their shirt and sticking his head in your belly, screaming forehead to forehead, even tying you up in the microphone cable.

I had few interactions with him, the first, he looked at me and grabbed my chin, shaking it back and forth, as if to mockingly complement me on my cuteness.  Later he put his arm around me and I felt the hairiest back I have ever felt in my life when I reciprocated.  Finally, I got to scream “LET’S GO!” as they played the only song whose words I was sure of, the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”.

A lot of people could pull off these antics, but what makes this band special is the musical element.  While unrelentingly loud, with three guitars, a melodic component juxtaposes well with his voice, and in general keeps it interesting.  The singer’s act detracts a bit from appreciating this, you can go home and listen by yourself if you feel like scratching your chin over something.  This show is no place for that sort of shit.

A legal battle with my landlord over being dicked out of a lot of money has only escalated.  It is extraordinarily complicated, but I think I did the right thing.  The funny observation here is that it seems that legal battles are the pettiest.  Perhaps if we were actually having some childish fight in person, one of us, or both of us, could point out the extremes to which it had gone and stop it, but somehow these legal things grow like cancer when you have two parties not willing to give in.  The nice thing is that on my side, I have to pay nothing.  For some reason, my landlord finds it absolutely imperitive that she wins, even if she pays twice as much money as she will lose to her lawyer to make things complicated.

My papers are slowly going through.  “My” as in the ones I’m on, and oh how I must check my verbage.  I love it.

The band went into crisis before we even got more money back than we spent on it.  Now who knows what will happen with that.

Who knows what will happen with anything?   Great!

Next I was off to Barcelona.  I fortunately had picked a time when the Fiestas de Gracia were happening.  This is a celebration, we believe the celebration originates from the harvest time, out in Gracia, what used to be a village outside of Barcelona, but is now just a few metro stops away.  The cool thing about it is that there’s a marked difference in the street patterns because the main city and the village were later joined by modern, square-like neighborhoods.

What it amounts to now is a competition among the plazas (squares where the street is quite a bit wider and there’s some clear space) for the best decorations.  This year, and apparently preceding years, everything was made out of re-used stuff.  One plaza was heavily decorated with used Nescafe caps, another, my favorite, with Petri dishes.  There was no form it was supposed to resemble, they simply took advantage of the luminescent effect of pastel colors on clear objects.  It was mystifying.

Then there was partying, eating (very nicely), sight seeing (all what Gaudi is!), drinking, beaching and reading, and so on.  I feel a bit redundant to mention that it’s really worth it to see all the Gaudi stuff in Barcelona, because they tell you that on your way out of the train, while you’re walking on the street, in the bathrooms….but I do recommend the Park Güell, because you really get to enjoy a bigger piece of his, and you don’t need to wait in line, and there are nice people playing music outside.

Unexpectedly, the most blog-worthy events came during my layover in Zürich.  The stories will come out of order, since I guess the clincher is in the first one.  I decided to spend the few Euros it takes to get to the city and try and get something out of my 3 hours I had to spend there.  On my way back to the airport from the city, I went through another way to the train through the train station, and it was packed with people playing chess games.  It turned out that somehow they got some chess grandmasters to come to Zürich to play normal earthlings.  Each grandmaster was surrounded by 20 chess boards, and each seemed to be managing all of these games quite well.  I went to the front to see if there was anyone there I would know, and indeed, there was GARY FUCKING KASPAROV.  It was quite amazing to see the guy work so nonchalantly, kicking asses like he was picking up groceries from the story.  I took a video you can see by clicking here.   He’s breezing through 5 boards inside of a minute, folks.

When I first arrived to the city, I picked the first suitable coffee shop I saw, and was suddenly in the middle of a wedding, which was attended by people of African descent, speaking a language I did not understand.  The event was one that radiated glee in a way that couldn’t be denied, in a way that would also portend the scowl of grumpier central Europeans.  In fact, though, there were several local onlookers who soaked in the joy.  (The drivers of the post trucks that tried to pass through as they loaded the limousine were quite irritated, however.)  After Spain, a lovely integrated community, this helped me realize that Austria is one of the least damned integrated countries of western Europe, and maybe also one of the grumpiest.

I still love it, and look forward to more living in Vienna.

This first one illustrates quite a bit about Austrian language and culture.  It’s an ad for Ottakringer Beer.  The word “Krise” is the only German word in the sign.  The sign is intended to read “Mein Bier hat keine Krise”, meaning “My beer doesn’t have a crisis”.  As harsh as the Austrian dialect can seem at first, it has become endearing to me.  To me, many Germans speaking (very) high German really don’t have much in the way of feeling in their voices.  Instead they seem to be attempting to speak with a proper accent and voice.  Many Austrians reclaim the words by adhering to their regional dialect, and furthermore express themselves furtively, in contrast.  Mind you, there is a high degree of variation in Germany among affected German dialects, and I cannot claim to have made a good survey of this.

I don’t think the second sign needs any further description.

Official German is really different from the way people speak it, and reading these signs usually requires me to look something up.  This was awful to learn. The sign already looked menacing, but its meaning was worse: my water was indefinitely shut off.  I then realized why there had been a crew of people in a gigantic hole 50 meters from my building.
We saw another one recently that was quite a good example of “Sign German” (but I didn’t get a picture).  I was in an old-fashioned elevator with my drummer loading some equipment for the show to a Taxi.  It had no door guard, and it suddenly stopped and made a very annoying nasal alarm sound.  My drummer read the sign, which said something like “Beim Lauten des akustischen Signals und Fahrtunterbrechen des Aufzugs, steigen Sie bitte zurueck und erneuen Sie ihre Etageauswahl!”  I think it was longer, but I can’t think of much more to say (they really manage to fill space).  This basically means, “if the elevator stops, step back and hit the button again.”  Standing in a stuck elevator with an annoying alarm constantly ringing does not make me want to read a loquacious sign in any language.

The thing about it is that we’re pretty good, in the sense that it is a band that I actually feel like spending time on, despite the fact that I’m Too Old for This Shit (see also: Murtaugh List), and believe is doing something that wouldn’t otherwise be done.  Well, at least we have the potential to.  The other crazy thing about it is that we don’t really have a leader or “deciding” member of the band.  This has never happened for me.

There’s not a lot of stories to relate here.  I’ll direct you to our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/thechansmusic.  We had two shows so far, the first of which went very well albeit shaky.  It was a second-string type of venue in a first-string area, and we later determined that the owner probably is doing some other things with his business besides providing a bar.  Nevertheless it included a backstage, a cheering crowd, an encore and a general ascent in the interest level of the crowd as we went along (this is usually the opposite).

In the second show, we were supposed to play acoustic.  The owner had met with the other members of the band when they booked it (I wasn’t there), and apparently the guy was really likable and normal-seeming.  We explained clearly what we planned for the show, and he agreed to it.  I didn’t see the owner the night of the show until the police came, who were answering a noise complaint lodged against the bar, which did not have a noise license.  The owner was not so rational at this point.  He was wearing a shirt that said “Trinkteufel” (Drink Devil), which was entirely redundant.  It is very rare for me to see someone at his age (50’s) who is NOT homeless as drunk as he was.  The police gave absolutely no slack, and we were completely shut down.  (This can be seen on the last song on youtube, linked off of the above myspace page.)

There are a lot of reasons to account for the failure of this show, many of them not coming from us.  Nevertheless, the crowd had fun and stuck around (they were mostly our friends), and we played a couple (really) acoustic songs later in the night, after many, many more beers.  The 6 songs we did pull off were well done, and so I am happy with that.

The most striking things were the comparisons between the everydays in the US and Austria brought into the context of lab mates I have only ever known in Austria.  In short, beer is cheaper (and often better) in Austria, but pitchers can be a helluva deal, burgers are better and Walgreen’s is evil but useful.

There is the oft-mentioned but never to be overstated lapse in service style at the restaurant table.  Where you would expect to get some wait-staff attention in 20 minutes or so in a relatively fancy restaurant in Austria, you can’t get the waiters off your back in America.  I fail to see any way in which you could categorically prefer the former to the latter, but maybe that’s just me.

Some things that I thought to be universally great are apparently not, or, central Europeans have no taste.  Indeed, Dr. Pepper (not easily available here) was not much of a hit, Root Beer was a disastrous flop, and I had a real hard time extolling the virtues of the Twizzler straw principle.  Nevertheless, I think I managed to convey a lot of the joys of my country that I sometimes miss.

We also did a bit of the touristy things that I never do in Chicago, since I usually go there to visit, not to tour.  This is evidenced by some of the pictures.  Full stop.

I’ll leave you with one story from the actual meeting.  There’s no need to get science-y here.  After one day, many of us (around three) had put down a few, or quite a few, and found ourselves in the elevator with a senior scientist hunched over his Blackberry, who, to our surprise, had put back just as many, or more, as we did.  An operation mistake on our part caused the (faulty) elevator to become stuck.  In our state, we were not really sure what to do, or whether this was actually an emergency.  We finally resolved to hit that ever-so-special fireman button on the elevator and wait for it to ring.  Indeed, we reached 911, but they did not give us the impression that this was an emergency.

The police came and knocked on the elevator, demanding we come out, supporting our running theory that this was not an emergency.  According to them, the elevator could be opened by the maintenance, but the weekend had rolled around, and the maintenance had happily put its feet up on the sofa and cracked open a beer whilst watching some quality television.  During the about 20 minutes of being stuck, the senior scientist tried to convince us to read Nature articles on his Blackberry while we actively ignored him and attempted to convey our disinterest in his Blackberry clear by having our own damn conversation.  This was not working, so I upped the ante by doing some yoga in the elevator, i.e. standing on my shoulders and sticking my legs in the air.  Mr. Blackberry did not like that, and I don’t remember anything else about his Blackberry.

When the firemen arrived, who were necessary only because they were the only ones beside the maintenance having the key to the elevator, they briskly fulfilled their task.  I thought I would carry on the light mood that the police officers had set, as a bit of a thank-you additional to the exorbitant sales tax I was paying to the state of Wisconsin that week.  I paused at the door, looked up, and told the fireman, “Oh, wait, I was getting of on the fourth floor.”

He wasn’t amused.