You know you’re an English teaching assistant in Austria when…

1) You work 15 hours a week and get paid a full time wage.

2) Your students call you ‘Frau Professor’ even though you have no teaching qualifications.

3) Your weekend starts on Thursday and most work days are over by 1pm, yet you complain when you have three lessons in a row. 

4) You find yourself accepting every imaginable social invitation and getting drunk purely to fill all your free time.

5) You get genuinely upset when people criticise baked beans in the classroom.

6) You are asked your opinion on the monarchy on a daily basis.

7) You are fully aware of the value of self-deprecation as a teaching tool and use it daily.  Anything to make the students laugh (or even half-listen)!

8) Your students are often 2-4 years younger than you and even though you refer to them as ‘kids’, you think ‘Georg’, ‘Patrick’ or ‘Wolfi’ from 8^th grade are pretty hot.

9) You find time to make up puns involving the man from Amstetten who kept his daughter in a basement for 24 years, despite the fact this makes you a truly terrible person.

10) After 6 months you can no longer distinguish between good and bad English.  You adopt all of the terrible expressions like, ‘the students are writing a test’, ‘we drove there with the train’ and ‘we see us later, yes?’ without realising until it’s far far too late.

Wasp

The Wasp.

 

Once, when I still lived Claygate and slept with my door open because I was scared of the dark, a strange thing happened.  The smoke alarm was going off in the loft and it woke me and my family up.  We all stood on the landing looking puzzled.  I have a crippling fear of house fires, so at this moment I reminded my family of the emergency exits.  My mum, who isn’t scared of anything, took the Polish axe from beside my bed and nudged open the loft hatch.  It’s not strange to have an axe by the bed, it’s a Polish walking stick with an axe head for ‘frightening bears’ and supporting you when you hike.  It’s called a Tupaga.  The dark chasm indicated that there was no fire burning its way through our house.  However, a few wasps buzzed out through the gap and whizzed around our heads.  It appeared we had a wasp nest.

 

Considering it was the middle of the night and there wasn’t a great deal we could do, my mum closed the hatch, mutilated the wasps with a rolled up newspaper and scraped their carcasses into the bin.  We all went back to bed.  Within seconds I had tucked up in bed and let the darkness lull me back to sleep.  It was then that I heard my brother screaming like a banshee in the other room.  Scared stiff, I cling tightly to my covers and waited until my parents ran into his room.  I slid out of the bed and padded quietly behind them.  My brother was leaping around his room, throwing his duvet on the ground and swearing maniacally.  We stood there perplexed, a shaft of light illuminating his crazy dance.  When he calmed down, we translated his ramblings into a story.  It transpired that a wasp had found its way into his bed, so when we all returned to our rooms after the false fire alarm, he had climbed into his bed, pulled his covers around him and made himself comfortable…completely unaware that he had trapped an angry wasp between his cover and his naked skin. 

 

I think we know how this story ends.

 

Thinking about wasps in the dark still makes me shudder, even though I’m thousands of miles and 10 years away from that day. 

 

And I’m still scared of the dark.

Alt Wien

Alt Wien

 

 

 

It is customary for traditional Austrians to have what is called a ‘Stammtisch’.  This means a table in a bar or restaurant that is reserved for the same group of people at the same time every week or month.  When I first came to Graz I thought it would be a great idea to have a Stammtisch for the English language teaching assistants so that we could drink, exchange lesson ideas, plan trips together and get to know each other better.  During the first week here I was hoping that someone else would organise it because I was dreading having to speak German to anyone at the point, especially a drunken Austrian pub proprietor.  However, no one did it so I decided to bite the bullet and ask in the dingy restaurant across from my building if we could have it there.  I understood approximately 20% of the conversation, but it seemed we had the table reserved for every Thursday for the rest of the year.  And, so that was it, Alt Wien was to be our Thursday night home from then on.

 

Alt Wien looks from the outside like it has gone out of business.  Net curtains hang limply in the window, turned yellow from cigarette smoke.  The sign, written in old German script, looks out across a busy urban crossroads, but is so faded it seems unlikely to draw in any passers by.  Upon opening the door the first thing you become aware of is the smoke.  Your eyes water and your lungs close up as you look around and see battered old Austrian men in faded jackets clutching their thousandth cigarette in work-worn hands.  The smell that lingers in the air is a combination of old cigarettes, burned schnitzel fat and stale beer.  It is a uniquely Austrian smell. 

 

The two people responsible for running the joint are Joanna and Herr Karl or ‘Herr Charlie’ as he liked us to call him.  Joanna is approximately fifty years old and a life-long waitress.  Portly and broad faced, she is virtually impossible to understand, but always smiled and welcomed us and told me on more than one occasion that my face ‘shines’, which is a compliment.  I think.    Herr Charlie turned seventy during that year.  He is short with white hair framing a smooth, smiling face.  He always told us stories about horses stolen by the circus and about the war, stories he would tell with completely disregard for whether we could follow them or not.  I was always quite fond of Charlie and made a point to ask him how he was.  When I missed Stammtisch on a few occasions, he’d ask if I was ok and would feign jealousy if someone said I was out with a male.  I thought this was grandfatherly affection.  At Christmas Charlie gave us schnapps, at Easter he gave us eggs, on Abi’s birthday he got his drunken musician friend to sing a song and play harmonica for her.  Actually it wasn’t her birthday, but we just said it was when it seemed likely she would get an embarrassing song, but I digress.  We thought he was a nice, slightly eccentric, old man. 

 

At one of the last Stammtischs we noticed Charlie sitting perplexed at a table with an iphone.  We asked him what the problem was and he explained that he was totally frustrated programming all the old stuff from his old phone onto it.  We sympathised, returned to our beers and thought nothing more of it.  Some minutes later Charlie came up to my friend Josh and nudged him on the shoulder.  He gestured that Josh should watch something on his phone.  Josh watched the video with a bizarre expression on his face, Charlie burst into laughter, slapped Josh on his back and then walked off.  Josh lowered his forehead to the table, his shoulders visibly shaking with rising hysteria.  Eventually he lifted his head and explained that the video had been hardcore, full frontal, no holds barred pornography.  In some way it was funny because he chose Josh, the most ‘inappropriate’ one of us to show the video to, which demonstrated a real understanding of our characters, but at the same time it completely changed our perception of Charlie from a kindly old man to an ageing porn addict.  From then on whenever he smiled it looked like a seedy ‘what are you wearing under that jacket’ smile rather than a ‘welcome to my humble establishment’ smile.

 

Those Thursdays at the Stammtisch were an interesting time in my life.  The mix of characters; high brow American intellectuals, vulgar English comedians, harmonica-playing regulars and the odd Austrian who came along with us for the ride, meant it was rarely dull. The dowdy interior, including a broken disco light suspended in one corner, doilies on all the tables and bizarre temporary art exhibitions like the one of nuns and another about the Middle East, gave it a certain charm.  The terrible service, the bonding over 0,5 glasses of Puntigamer, the telling of off-colour jokes, the awkward silences that would fall over the table when it became apparent that some characters are not supposed to mix, even though anything was possible in the fantasy world behind the doors of Alt Wien…That is the stuff I remember when I cycle across the crossroads and see the net curtains hanging limply in the window, turned yellow from cigarette smoke.  Thursdays will never be quite the same again.

A new blog is born

Ok, so.  I am the new official lord of the Sweetshop Blog.  Therefore I annouce that is now Graz’s Best Prancer blog.  That is my new zine.  I am going to post some of the stuff on here for your enjoyment.  Enjoy it.

My Bike.

 

In my first year here I didn’t have a bike.  This was firstly because I lived about as centrally as one can possibly live and secondly because I had a deep-seated fear of cycling on the ‘wrong’ side of the road.  In my second year, when I moved to what I affectionately call the ‘vegan punk dump’, I required a bike to stay in contact with civilisation.  This is my bike story.

 

Graz is a city ruled by cyclists.  The bike paths cross the city, along the river, through the parks and against the flow of traffic in the dreaded one-way system.  Like many mainland European cities, the paths of Graz are populated with the usual cross-section of society; cliché Euro-grannies with a loaf of bread propped in the basket of their 1950s city bike with still-functioning dynamo light; the fashion conscience racing biker with luminous skin-tight lycra covering the body like a blinding second skin; crust punks and hippies with black painted bikes or flowers gaffa-taped to the handlebars; and…people like me.  I needed a bike and I needed one cheap.  The options included buying a stolen bike from one of the Turkish shops, spending hundreds of Euros on an uber-trendy lowrider from the cool independent bike shop, paying through the nose for a proper bike from the sports shop or simply stealing someone else’s bike.  My flatmate has had seven bikes in seven years, six of which he had stolen.  He has a policy that if he sees a bike unlocked it deserves to be stolen.  Unfortunately¸ even after having seen my dream bike unlocked the very day I was out looking for one, I realised this policy wouldn’t fly with me.  The good news was that I got a tip from a friend about buying second hand bikes from a charity called Caritas, which I decided to follow up.

 

Upon arriving at Caritas a slightly nutty guy with long hair and a full leather suit came out and offered to help.  He informed me most of the bikes from the latest batch were sold, but there was one left that I could take.  I rode around for a bit and it seemed ok.  It was a rusty post-war granny bike with a basket coated with peeling paint, but it was mine for 50 euros.  The guy, Tscho, convinced me to go on a bike adventure with him to the cash machine, which I thought was a good idea.  He seemed nice, although he kept saying he had been on tour with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the last decade and had ‘dozens’ of cats.  On a side note, he said he needed my email for his records and the following day this appeared in my inbox –

 

Tscho Findeis to me

show details 07/10/2008 Reply

 

cheap poetry by someone who

´s got reminded by you -

due to ya appearence

and laughter

20 years after

her humour

died due a brain tumor

 

zero – one

digital

life

has gone

unnatural

in chinese signs

i´am a dog

and i like your habits

analog

 

(one of the eight cats i´m taking care of

might ask you for some translation on my gmail

account)

 

ever mind

–

tschau tscho

the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe (´)

 

Uhhhhh.  Yeah.  The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe?!

 

That day, riding home with the autumn air and splatters of rain hitting my face, I felt positive.  Graz is a great city to ride in, largely because you don’t feel like you’re in the way of motorists or in any danger, which is how I felt cycling around Leeds.  The only problem with cycling there is that there is always the danger of getting a tyre stuck in the tramlines which transverse the city.  Experienced city riders know that because of the width of a wheel generally being thinner than that of the tramline, you always have to cross it at an angle.  I know this now.  I learned the hard way.  I had left my friend’s house on the very day I bought the bike and was heading home when the accident happened.   I remember crossing the tramline because I was at a point where it was too close to the pavement to cycle between them.  I remember seeing metal bike racks flying towards my face, except they are bolted down, which means I had to be flying towards them.  I knew my face and the metal were going to come into contact so I threw myself to the side so that my shoulder smashed down on it instead.  The bike came down hard on one thigh, the handbag went flying from the basket and I felt concrete against my cheek.  For a moment I wasn’t sure what was happening because the girl waiting at the tram stop barely looked at me.  It was like in a strange film where I kept thinking to myself “If I don’t try to move then I won’t know what I’ve injured and then it’s simply not real.”  Every time I fall when skiing I do the same dazed thought process while lying face down in the snow.  But then all of a sudden a couple were standing there with my handbag saying “Alles OK?” again and again and again while I got gingerly to my feet.  An Australian woman picked up my bike, which was bent and had one break handle hanging limply on its cable, and told me to walk home.  So I did just that.  I limped home with tears running down my face, pushing the crippled bike along the darkened streets.  With every turn it said “clackedly-clack, clackedly-clack” angrily.  It had survived 50 years without this kind of carnage.  So it was that as day one as a cyclist in Graz drew to a close I was preparing myself for my first excruciating Austrian hospital visit and the bike stood broken and dejected in our garage.  Not a great start, I have to say.

 

Luckily my friend John hooked me up with a mountain bike shortly after. Once my shoulder and my fear had healed we went on some great rides up and down the river and now I can successfully face down pedestrians and trams on the streets of Graz.  We are preparing for a bike trip to Slovenia in a couple of days, which is flat run of around 50kms down the River Mur, a path dotted with forests and bars.  I can tell that my bike and I are going to have plenty more adventures together before I leave.  On the downside my flatmate may not be joining us because his bike got stolen… How’s that for karma?

Amateur

So i made a total of 7 copies to take with me to the London Zine Symposium (which was really rather good and a complete killer on my wallet)… they went pretty quickly HOWEVER there are more on there way that will be with me by friday. Smashing stuff.

Rich.

P.S. There were extremely legitimate and sensible reasons for only making 7 copies at the time but i’m fucked if I can remember them now…

We’re Back!

Issue 3 is on it’s way… It’s a monster.

More info when i’m not supposed to be packing for a holiday

x