ON STANDBY…

The woman from Tabak gives me credit. I went there once to pay 1 € I owed; she wasn´t there so I gave it to a nice old woman who was in her stead. I went back next day and there was my ordinary Tabakfrau (she´s kind, one day I was wearing a suit she told me I was a dazzling vision), whom I kindly said that I had paid off already. She told me not to worry, she had already erased me from her list. She does not know my name, so I asked, out of curiosity, what she had written. “O, der Holländer, natürlich” she said. The Dutch guy. She asked me whether I am from Holland… She´s not the only one, I´ve been asked if I´m Dutch more than 30 times this year, so I surmise I speak German with a Dutch accent… curious, is it! Well, at least that means that I´ve got none of the Spanish typical tics, nor a Spanish accent but… Dutch? I´ve been asked two times if I was Swiss, I do not know if that is a cause for happiness or not, I´ve got a friend who speaks Swiss German and it is impossible to understand

O well, whatever, nevermind. Austrian German is no Standard German; to twist it further, there are a myriad of dialects and accents within so small a country as Austria, so everyone speaks differently: Austrian German. Who gives a toss if I speak with this or that accent? Viennese is worse, doubtless: wös höst du gemöcht ist echt schiach!

My little household problem was sorted out yesterday. Hausverwaltung did not give a damn. Wien Energie told me I would be charged 200 € should they come in vain. At the 4th try, the owner picked up and said he was sending an electrician. The guy came and within minutes found out that, inside a closet out my flat (to which only the Hausverwaltung, Wien Energie and electricians have the key), a piece was missing. He went home then came back with the missing thing, plugged it and Lo! Light and electricity came back. Where was the piece? The electrician said that SOME BASTARD who found himself without light for whatever the reason MUST HAVE STOLEN IT. The key to that closet is nothing special and anyone can buy one in any electrician store.

I´ve got light and electricity again. Marvellous. How did people manage in the Middle Ages? What would we do without electricians? Plumbers, electricians, peasants, waiters… people who wait our tables, keep our cities clean, solve our problems… Heroes, tenfold as necessary as CEOs and bigwigs who pull the strings.

Though the plan was to go to Carinthia for nature and lakes, in the end it was Graz, the second-largest city in Austria and the capital of the federal state of Styria. I loved it, it is 1000 times nicer than the more renowned Salzburg, which I founded rather average. The red of the roofs, the green of the hills and the blue of the river Mur make Graz beautiful. It´s got six universities with over 40,000 students. Graz’s "Old Town" was great, no wonder it was recently included in the UNESCO list of World Cultural Heritage Sites. In 2003 Graz was named sole Cultural Capital of Europe. I´m not one for moder architechture (normally) but in Graz the blend shows a lot of taste. Special mention to the Kunstahaus and the Murinsel.

The Murinsel (Mur island) is actually no island at all, but an artificial floating platform in the Mur river. This landmark of Graz has the form of a giant sea shell. Two footbridges connect it with both banks of the Mur. The center of the platform forms an amphitheatre and below a twisted round dome there is a café and a playground. The Murinsel is built for a maximum number of 350 visitors. I don´t know why, but it is nice there where it is.

The idea of reading (in German) more dynamic books than Joseph Roth´s “Radetzkymarsch” (that provides us with a great picture of what my beloved Austria-Hungary was in Imperial times, but each paragraph is like a paving slab in Austrian…) and the likes of it is working out fine. I´ve devoured the first 5 Harry Potter books in German in less than a month, without getting stuck with the “Feuerkelch” or the “Orden des Phönix” either (those two seemed to me a pain in the arse the first time I read them), and now I´m completely enthralled with the “Halbblutprinz”. Yet O woe fell onto me… yesterday I came home and there was no light. Nor electricity. So I found myself reading the adventures of Harry in candlelight, just like in darker and more medieval times. Like in Hogwarts (sigh). Given the situation, when my eyes began to hurt I took a stroll to the beat of the darker and most medieval Led Zeppelin and Blue Oyster Cult. What else can one do? Everything is hobbled by lack of electricity. The refrigerator does not work (not a big loss anyway, there´s nothing inside), I cannot shave my face (then again, I do not do that very often when I´ve got light), neither read nor watch films (my laptop´s battery lasts no more than 90 minutes, the poor thing is terminal) and today´s Nescafé, made with hot tapwater, tasted heavenly, yes indeed.

The worst thing is that I do not know what it is: I already toyed with the plumb-box, and it cannot possibly be Wien Energie, for I´ve paid everything and I suppose they send out at least two warnings before cutting it off. I´m phoning the Hausverwaltung this evening, in the hopes of having it sort out fast. Well, it could be worse. Leastways I have water. And a clean boy is a happy boy, even in the dark.

In this year of spiritual retirement in Vienna, I have thought too much and experienced the full gamut of human emotions. I feel more intensely than ever how time flashes by and we grow up. Things change very quickly. A friend of mine who found himself in a similar situation in London harbours very similar thoughts. This morning on the subway I was listening to Nena´s “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann” and I became melancholic, as I always do when listening to that song. It reminds me of my Erasmus in Bielefeld. Everything was so wonderful there, so childish and naïve. I do not want to grow up. Where are the summer loves now? The Sommerlager? American hard rock from the 80s? The partys with dated pop in German discos? Beers at 12.00 in the morning?

People evolve somehow, grow up. And I do not know whether I do that in a logical way. It seems I do not, as the majority seem to follow the “way towards anticipated retirement”. The news that this or that guy has settled down reaches me more frequently now than ever before. Someone writes a mail and says “here in Spain the people are so stuck… no wonder, I suppose that´s what there is if you stay… all my friends buy a house, get married or have children”. Meanwhile I keep on thinking about going to Brussels, burning money to pay the flat rent in Vienna and in 1000 journeys. People you´ve known for years tell you that those who´ve got a decent economy have bought a house… It seems sensible, does it not? Mortgage for ever, children, marriage. Security, peace, in other words. But by doing that one also leaves other things: different stories and scenarios, new friends, errors to learn from, and so forth.

Settlind down? I´d rather take advantage of the opportunities of rambling round now that I´m young, I´m a curious baby en tour of discovery. Setlling down terrifies me, it would mark the end of childhood. I´ve got dead serious Peter Pan complex, I´m the naughty boy who did not want to grow up. Marriage? I cannot, I´m a boy. A mortgage? Bitte, I haven’t got the slightest idea as to where I will be 7 months from now. Maybe I should go home, look for a job there, mortgage up my life and settle down. Is that the prudent and logical thing to do? I do not think the people who do that ever though about the opportunity cost. Then again, they might have…

Yet I suppose it is normal to reflect on those things when you can see everything change around you. And when a friend informs you that the love of your days of youth got married, so beautiful a girl that that I very seldom gathered the courage to talk to her… and she got married! Well, in addition to that, my friend came to know it because the “marvellous news” appeared, with pics and all, in the social section of certain tacky newspaper, alongside three or four sentences that… for the love of God! So kitschy they could make a man puke. My friend sent the mentioned “thing” to me. Devastating. She looked beautiful. Ye Gods, I feel like Die Ärtzte, it is too late for me, and I knew it from a friend. And like Die Ärtzte, someday I will avenge it and she´ll regret it, yet it will be too late.

Alas, it will never happen for me. I should have thought about the opportunity cost back then, when I should have tried: what is the alternative to doing nothing? Exactly what it happened: NOTHING. And now she´s on the “way towards anticipated retirement”. Why that urge to settle down? I cannot grasp it. I told my friend in London about my Liebeskummer and he developed some raving on the application of opportunity cost to relationships. I link it here. As you see, opportunity cost must always be borne in mind. 

Opportunity cost is a term used in economics to mean the cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone (and the benefits that could be received from that opportunity), or the most valuable forgone alternative. For example, if a city decides to build a hospital on vacant land that it owns, the opportunity cost is some other thing that might have been done with the land and construction funds instead. In building the hospital, the city has forgone the opportunity to build a sporting centre on that land, or a parking lot, or the ability to sell the land to reduce the city’s debt, and so forth… Opportunity cost need not be assessed in monetary terms, but rather can be assessed in terms of anything that is of value to the person or persons doing the assessing. Assessing opportunity costs is fundamental to assessing the true cost of any course of action. Note that opportunity cost is not the sum of the available alternatives, but rather of benefit of the best alternative of them.

I´ve gone through opportunity cost in this blog already, in Arbeit macht krank & Le Stage. Here I assessed the opportunity cost of going to Brussels, and not the other way round. Error. Opportunity cost must be assessed both ways. In Le Stage, the opportunity cost of going to Brussels is staying here; the only benefits I lose: money and security. It seems high, does it not? Well then, let´s take a look at the opportunity cost of staying here: not going to Brussels to do the Stage, and consequently losing all this stuff:

• Having my piece of mind back (here I do shite that chips away at the frayed seams of my sanity day in day out)
• New city, new country
• Learning French
• Getting to know 600 stagiers from more than 30 different countries
• Be close to people I love
• The widening of opportunities the stage may provide me with
• Seeing how the EU is, from the inside.
• Being the guy who resurrected the Doha Round of Trade Talks, thus revving up global Trade (I exaggerate here).

I could go on for hours, yet, in a nutshell: NO CONTEST. I´m going to Brussels. I already told the bosses here and they understood. Well, nobody could expect that so nice a guy as I am would stay here doing rubbish. Two months to go and counting! I´ll keep on rumbling down the road and musing on Erasmus, summer loves and that I do not want to settle down yet. Falling through space and time, direction endlessness.

The bloody heat wave that stormed Vienna has worn off, now it cannot be higher than 20´ and there is a refreshing wind that blows from the North. I´m wearing a pullover, I can think clearly again. I´m clean, I can move without sweating, I do not need three or four showers a day, the tube smells of tube and not of sweaty cattle. After the hell we endured throughout the last two weeks, this is paradise on earth. Then, how is it possible that I am the only one who seems to be downright happy with this refreshing wave? Everyone complains now. I cannot grasp it, but people love extreme heat. I, on the other hand, hate it, you can do nothing but sunbathe and activities that do not involve movement or the use of your brain. My favourite seasons are undoubtedly spring and, above all, autumn, when everything is golden and fresh and a bit melancholic and decadent. Nicest months of the year: September, October and May, with no possible contest. And between 0´ and 30´, I´d rather have the former.

But people apparently love to sweat and stink. And, according to scientists, it is getting ever worse, since global warming seems unstoppable, mainly because people do not give a damn. I wonder whether the people would be so carelessly happy-go-lucky about the weather if it were “global freezing” instead. Surely not. Were we about to face an ice-age, heads would roll, measures would be taken and everyone would be dead scared. But the perspective of a few degrees higher average temperature in the foreseeable future has got some appeal for the people, who, again, love to sweat and stink and do nothing but lie in the sun. More sun is more fun, to hell with the generations still to come and live in a planet that will closely resemble hell! Humankind is a selfish beast. But there are selfish arguments against global warming as well; more sun is not necessarily more fun for everyone: skiing, for example, will suffer.

Scientists are warning that global warming is melting Alpine glaciers at an unprecedented rate. They claim that in 15 years time, many low level ski resorts could have no snow at all. Temperatures have already risen about one degree in the last 10 years. This has caused the snow line to recede up the side of most mountains by an average of 150 metres. In the Austrian Alps, it could move from 1200 metres to 1800 metres within 15 years. Global warming will reduce the snow pack area and glaciers will experience accelerated melting. It is estimated that 50 to 90 percent of current Alpine glaciers will have disappeared by the end of the 21st Century. Low level skiing resorts have the most to lose as they could end up with no snow at all. Many are investing heavily in snow-making machines but their spending could be in vain, as snow cannons only work if the air temperature is below freezing in the first place.

In some resorts, skiing could disappear all together.

Many people say global warming is not happening. Well it bloody is, and some of the low level ski resorts will simply be wiped out. Within some years we will no longer dream of going to a resort below 1800 metres. If current climate changes continue and the scientists are right, then winter skiing at low level resorts could become a thing of the past.