Words

In the Austrian dialect, there is a huge amount of words ending with an i. Aufi abi linksi rechtsi hubsi schwubsi schatzi babsi wischi waschi mitzi rutschi schlafi... As you can imagine, all essential words in any local conversation. I am also learning that "ich auch" translates into "i a" here and that the correct way of counting things begins with "oans zwa". But when you go into the details, it all gets so much more intriguing - my goal is not to leave Austria before I can differentiate between the different dialects and aurally separate a Steirer from an Oberösterreicher.

Moodiness is a strange thing. Often it just takes a few words to cheer you up or send your mood spiralling further into unfathomable abysses. Feeling a little glum today at choir rehearsal (maybe because my home-made lunch had been a real lowlight in the list of my most recent gastronomic creations) I sat munching on a mushy banana (see quote of the day on sidebar ->) when a soprano from the choir suddenly walked up to me and started chatting.

At first she seemed to just want to strike a conversation, but when I told her about my studies, she opened up her heart to me: "To tell you the truth, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't obligatory for the singers. I hate choirs. I can't STAND them. I used to sing in choirs a lot when I was small and now I just can't listen to them. It's horrible." Of course my first reaction was a certain degree of astonishment - I mean, if you had blue eyes, what would you reply to someone who came up to you and told you all blue-eyed people were disgusting?

But then suddenly I just felt like laughing out loud. This person (who, by the way, looked like a grasshopper with the head of a bee) just came out of nowhere and cheered me up just by telling me her simple opinion. But it got better - she started explaining that she could ONLY work in choirs where there were two times more men than women because women's voices were always so dominant in choirs (at this point I could still follow), and that she would prefer children to be added to the choirs to even out the heavy sound of adults (here I wasn't sure whether she was pulling my leg) and in general the worst thing for HER was that she of course was a coloratura soprano (I had a hard time keeping a straight face) and did those colleagues of hers really call themselves sopranos???

I really don't know how to explain why she cheered me up. I've been trying to, but I've erased lots of sentences until now. It's not that I thought she was a bag of laughs and made fun of her in my mind - quite on the contrary. Every once in a while (but quite rarely) people come from nowhere and surprise you with their words. I felt really refreshed. Nobody wants to hear the same routine sentences again and again.