Doors

I don't know why every time I fry eggs for breakfast our frying-pan looks like a carton of paint exploded in it afterwards. All in all though, kitchen-wise we are doing fine. It's much tidier than it used to be (and I am not saying this to deliberately annoy our former flatmates who are reading this from Bucharest) and the fridge seems more spacious than before (it's been declared hoard-free - nothing more than short-term shoppings allowed!). Okay, so I recently threw away a lump of bread that had gone green and grown a beard, but I'll admit that one was on me.

Romanian honey. Be prepared for scary side effects.
Today, I went to sit in the garden with my book. I got some good ideas for pictures to make from there - one can see three of our windows from there. Before that, I had tried to get some practising done but with the sun shining outside and temperatures reaching 20 degrees this seemed like a crime. Jorge and I went to sun-bathe on the Schlossberg and afterwards I decided to venture into Graz's Westside on the other side of the Mur and get some train tickets from the station. It was dark when I came back and, as usual, I got to dodge the drug-dealers in the Stadtpark.

Explanation: the tomatoes in Spar were on sale.
When I told my flatmates where I was going I was swamped with money and culinary wishlists - the Hauptbahnhof Spar is the only place open on Sundays. It's a horribly crowded and unpleasant place but I plunged in to find milk for Maria, raspberry yoghurt for me and toast for Thomas, who has a fever and is walking around the house frightening everyone with his ghost-like appearance. I considered locking him in today after he threatened to go for a run.

French bacteria are not the only thing spreading here - Petra had the flu earlier but now it has been passed on to her roommate Anna. The light-switch of our bathroom is stuck and we can't turn the light off. We should probably call a technician before our landlady accuses us of damaging the flat and refuses to pay us back our 400€ deposits. She's looking for an excuse for that anyway. Our ground-floor neighbours may be invisible, but their notices to the rest of the house are getting more aggressive. Every time I stop to read them I am seriously afraid of the door opening and an ugly hand reaching for my neck and pulling me in. Their door must be sound-proof and probably nobody would hear me scream.*

However, light-switches are not the only things going crazy in this building. Petra and I got the shock of our lives yesterday when we were going out the front door on our way to the opera. She grabbed the handle of the very heavy door to pull it open (okay I should have opened the door for her but that's beside the point) when it came off, was flinged out of her hand and crashed onto the staircase, creating a minor earthquake on our street. It took us about five minutes to regain speech. Maybe this is a new attempt by the friendly owners of this building to lock the whole house in - it's nearly impossible to open the front door without the handle.

After the opera, I spent some time with the Spaniards watching boring football and eating the last hamburgers at the Jakominiplatz McDonald's, one of the most horrible places on earth. After that, it was Pastis with a very tired Finnish pseudo-mafia (do five people, two of who are American and one is Austrian, count?), after which I stopped by the cellar at KJH for the birthday party of Richard, who refused to let me go home and kept pouring strong drinks in my plastic cup.

*see how I contradict myself here - in the previous post I said one can occasionally hear voices from behind the door.