Backyard Fun

Living on the sixth/seventh floor of an apartment building near the middle of the city of Graz, technically I have no backyard. Instead, I have this.



A public soccer field. It used to be home to the city's team, SK Sturm, but they relocated to a larger stadium a little further from the city center a few years ago. This field is now home to amateur games for both kids and adults. Now that the weather is nice, on any given night we can go out on the balcony and watch a game.



Aside from the fact that I am not really that much of a soccer fan, there is a downside to this: cheering crowds. It can be quite loud. Add to that the PA system on which a playlist of about 3 songs is constantly blared, on repeat mode, and if you don't keep your sense of humor about you, it can be a bit trying.

Just beyond the field is the Grazer Messe, the city fairgrounds. Recently, a traveling performance, "Afrika, Afrika!" has moved in and set up a colorful tent city just visible beyond the trees at the far end of the soccer field.



The show is apparently an African version of Cirque du Soleil, replete with music, drumming, dancing and acrobatics. It is extremely popular, and its tour has therefore been extended so that it will be gracing the neighborhood until July 7. I intend to go at some point, but plan to memorize the songs and lineup before I go, so I can better appreciate seeing the visual accompaniment to the music that I can hear quite clearly from my balcony every night. It is a nice addition to the usual screaming soccer fans and the Scissor Sisters' "I don't feel like dancing."

Last night the neighborhood auditory ambience reached a new level of provocation as the beer garden adjoining the soccer field invited a live musical act, "Sunrise," a duo of middle-aged tone-deaf Austrian men who slaughtered their way through 5 sets of covers.




We were awed by their prowess with a synthesizer, which jauntily continued blaring their background music despite the keyboard stylings of the guy in black. Even more impressive was the karaoke-esque performance of the guy in white, who artlessly blundered through such favorite standards as "Proud Mary," cracking the high notes and missing modulations right and left, knocking aside microphone stands in his ever-increasing level of intoxication. Best of all was when the duo joined forces in gut-wrenching, ear-splitting duets, in which they both seemed content to pick their own key and stick with it to the bitter end.

The crowd cheered, danced and sang along, and consumed copious quantities of alcohol. Alas, I -- stupidly -- did not join in, stubbornly of the belief that no amount of alcohol could ever make it okay, much less enjoyable.

And yet there was something endearing about it all, when the guys cracked corny jokes in heavy dialect between their musical abortions. I suppose it is a case of tolerating something in a foreign culture that one would never tolerate in her own.

Christ's trip to heaven

It's yet another holiday in Austria: Christi HImmelfahrt, Ascension Day. It seems that every day important to the Catholic church is celebrated in this country as a legal, nationwide holiday. And the whole country shuts down -- all businesses except a handful of enterprising restaurants are closed. Since I had the day off, we planned to visit a pub-esque restaurant we've only been to once due to its rather inconvenient location at quite a distance from our apartment with no straightforward public transport linkages. We set out on our journey, and naturally, upon arrival half an hour later or so, found out the place was closed. Lesson learned: we were supposed to be in church, celebrating Christ's trip to heaven, rather than enjoying ourselves in a nice beer pub. We hit up a local pizza chain instead, which, as it caters to the student communtiy, is nearly always open during the uni semesters.

Then we had the bright idea of trying to acquire some alcoholic refreshement to take back home with us, our purpose being to hole up for the rest of the day as it was a particularly rainy and cold one. Considering the day's holiday status, this was easier said than done, as all grocery stores were closed, but we had hope that the branch of the local supermarket chain, Spar, located at the train station would be open. It is the only grocery store in the city that stays open until the ungodly hour of 9 p.m. and the only one that is open on Sundays (yep, all stores are closed on Sundays, too). So we bussed down to the train station and found that this Spar was indeed open, and also, of course, packed. Ridiculously so. It's not a large place to begin with, definitely not constructed to hold hundreds of people doing their desperate holiday shopping. It's also poorly laid out, with the cash registers off of a central aisle that accesses 5 aisles of merchandise, so tyring to wade through the crowds to first find one's purchases and then find a place in a line in the midst of people trying to find their purchases and find a line was nothing short of a disaster. A quick trip to pick up a couple drinks and some milk for next morning's coffee took at least 20 painful minutes of in-store time plus about 45 minutes of public transport travel.

I'm of two minds on this whole store closure business. After a year and a half of life in this country, I am more or less used to it -- you just learn to plan ahead and stock up on whatever you may find yourself needing on Sundays or holidays. Sometimes it is inconvenient, like when you have been too busy to get to the grocery store before a holiday, or somehow weren't aware a holiday was approaching (remarkably easy to do, trust me). What is more interesting to me are the opinions and reactions of the Austrians themselves. Whenever the issue comes up, they staunchly defend store closures on Sundays and holidays, because "everyone needs a day off," including cashiers and shop keepers. (incidentally, the restaurants that are open on Sundays and holidays make up for it by having their "Ruhetag" (day of rest) on some other normal weekday -- usually Monday or Tuesday). This is a political issue, because it is actually illegal for stores to be open on Sundays or holidays unless they somehow have special dispensation, like the train station Spar. Often there are governmental discussions about changing this law, or allowing stores to be open later -- most have to close by 7:30 at the latest -- but people always come back to their argument that it is important to have a day off. When I tell my students or colleagues about 24-hour stores in the U.S. they are often shocked, can't believe that anyone would want to shop late at night, much less work such hours. They express sympathies for such workers, victims of wanton American consumerism. And yet, when the opportunity is there, they are happy to take advantage of it, as evidenced by the crowd at the train station Spar yesterday. It's only a matter of time, really, before capitalism wins out and stores demand ot be able to stay open on Sundays and holidays to take advantage of the opportunity to earn more revenue. I'm sure that Spar did a week's worth of normal business, if not more, by being the only store in town open yesterday.

In a way, it's a shame -- I find the way things are now charming. There's something quaintly nice about the idea of everyone in the family having a holiday on the same random Thursday and being, in a way, forced to spend the day at a leisurely pace, together.

Time Travel: Greece, March 28-April 8

Psakoudia



The tiny beachside village is cloaked in an atmosphere of quiet desolation. Thatch sun umbrellas are bundled up disassembled along the promenade in front of their respective resorts, and the curving expanse of brown sand is deserted and dotted with heaps of browning seaweed. There’s a chill in the air, an itinerant wind, and the clouded sky remains unwelcoming.

Psakoudia seems to be slowly waking up after a long slumber, straggling lethargically out of a winter’s hibernation. Shops and cafes keep erratic hours and locals trickle into the Café Paradise at noon for their morning coffee, unfurling newspapers tucked under their arms and spreading them across the bar. Conversation between proprietor and customers is jovial but indecipherable, the rhythmic rise and fall of Greek, the accents falling on unexpected syllables.

The whiny hum of power tools sporadically fills the air as repairs are made and the trappings of summer are reassembled. Preparations are performed with the methodicalness of routine.



The rush of tourists will first come after Easter, and their Western European imperialism will transform this place. Their presence lingers even now, in Roman-alphabeted street signs, in the anglicized names of the resorts and cafes, and in the shopkeepers greeting suspected foreigners in streams of German and English.

There’s a strange sense of intimacy about off-season Psakoudia, in these unoccupied months free of its resort veneer. It’s like witnessing a normally perfectly-coiffed movie star with her hair down, in the comfort of her own home. And voyeuristically watching while she languidly costumes herself, paints her face and plasters on her public persona.

Fridays

A giggling trio of schoolgirls jounces along the sidewalk, chattering, gesticulating, jauntily toting their Schulransen -- boxy backpacks patterned in vivid calleidoscopes of neon and jumbles of prancing ponies, cuddly kittens and other fanciful designs, the pride and delight of school-going pre-adolescents.
Parting ways at the corner they pause to share last secrets and trickles of gossip and tauntingly announce their weekend plans.
A tinkling singsong rises above the others as one serves up the coup de grace: "I' fahr' zu meiner Oma!"*

It's Friday afternoon, when freedom and possibilities stretch tantalizingly over two days that loom limitless, a moment filled with the magic of anticipation, the innocent excitement and eagerness of childhood, and the warmth and comfort of a visit to Grandma.



*Translation: "I'm going to Grandma's!"

May Day

The first of May is a double-sided holiday in Austria. Its origins trace back to ancient pagan tradition, Walpurgisnacht and celebrations of the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Christianity drove off the pagan roots and made May first, rather than the evening of April 30, the important holiday, but the celebrations are still purely secular. The central piece of the celebration is the may pole, the Maibaum, which starts as an actual tree in a forest somewhere that is cut down, stripped of branches and bark except for a few branches left at the very top. The pole is then usually carved with elaborate designs and erected in the center of town, the Hauptplatz. The most important criterion for Maibäume is, apparently, the height. The taller the better.

Once the may pole is erected, tradition dictates that a group of young men from a neighboring and rival village must attempt to steal it. I have never witnessed this event, as the places where I have lived in Austria are larger cities that have lost a little bit of their old ways and that, apparently, don't really have rivals. But I have heard that the stealing is quite common in smaller villages.

On May Day, it is typical to see people decked out in national costume and demonstrating traditional folk dances, literally dancing around the may pole. There is usually a brass band, or at least someone playing accordian, and some food booths set up offering beer, sausages, and other regional favorites.






At least that's how it was where I lived last year in the small town of Bruck an der Mur. I was delighted by the festivities, the costumes, the friendly and joyous atmosphere as everyone enjoyed the holiday. And yes, of course, like all official holidays in Austria, May 1 is a day when everything shuts down, not jsut government offices and schools, but stores are closed, as well. It's one of the idiosyncracies of life you get used ot in Austria after awhile, and you learn to stock up on groceries whenever a holiday lurks around the corner.

But as aforementioned, May Day is a double-sided holiday. Thanks to the Soviets, it took on a new meaning, the Tag der Arbeit, or Labor Day. Of course, there were movements of workers before Soviet control of Eastern Europe, and many people trace the connection between May 1 and labor to these movements and demonstrations, but the Soviet Union made it an official holiday, and although Austria was never Soviet controlled, it adopted the Tag der Arbeit, too. So May 1 has become an important socialist holiday, a day for demonstrations and protest marches in priase of socialism and demanding more rights for workers. It seems to have degenerated into a day of general political protest, actually.

Here in Graz I eagerly headed down to the Hauptplatz on the morning of May 1, expecting to see the kinds of fun-loving folksy traditions I had enjoyed the year before in Bruck, but I was sadly mistaken. Graz, as the second-largest city in Austria, likes to think of itself as incredibly modern and is often chracterized as being a hot-bed of socialism, and that claim seemed believable at the Hauptplatz on May 1. Sure, there was a May pole, but the SPÖ, the Austrian Socialist Party, had taken over and was having a huge rally, complete with red balloons and streamers, party paraphanelia, political propaganda speeches and a band playing, of all things, Tina Turner covers. There was also a parade of demonstraters, pockets of people from literally all walks of life marching along with banners anouncing and denouncing various causes. There were the requisite Che Guevara T-shirted scruffy students waving communist flags and proclaiming solidarity with Cuba as well as the anti-EU set who take any opportunity to voice their grievances, but there were also elderly folks marching along with help of canes, stroller-pushing parents, disinterested young kids, and head-scarved foreigners. The only unifying factor among these disparate groups was their discontent, and, perhaps, their hope for a better world.