It has started to snow! Look out the window if you don’t believe me!
It was rain when I left home a hour ago – and someone flipped the switch finally.

Sometimes when I’m driving around town with my wife, I feel like I’m in some Old World video game, with tiny, evil Peugeots and VW Golfs darting out from impossibly narrow sidestreets and indominable grandmas on bicycles daring me to turn right.

My wife drives like Mario Andretti on amphetamines and Scotch, so it’s always interesting travelling with her. Throw in narrow curvy streets lined with tall buildings, hidden driveways, lack of signage, not to mention other drivers hellbent on getting home for the first showing of Quiz Taxi, and it’s positively breathtaking.

The Inner Stadt is a scary place for this American driver. One thing I have learned, though, is to let the guy on my right, no matter who gets to the intersection first, go through before me. He’s going to try anyway, ’cause he’s got this weird idea that I know what I’m doing. I don’t. Yet.

My Deutsch für Musiker classmate, Midori Sugiyama, is the featured performer in an Orchesterkonzert this Wednesday evening, January 24, at Grazer Congress. She will be the violin soloist in a Sibelius symphony and will be playing with the Kunstuniversität Graz orchestra. This past fall she travelled to play the piece in England and was received quite well. Her final exam in German is the next day, so give her an extra round of applause, just don’t ask her about Dative prepositions.

Living on the top floor means my thighs stay rather in shape, and I’m huffing and puffing by the end of the trek. It’s relatively cheap for me to live here. There’s no urgency for shopping (nor are the shops open at convenient times to do so), people do not tend to eat out so often. Rent is very reasonable. I just wish we had a terrace like our neighbors.

The General is for sale in a little shop on Burgergasse for 100E. He’s at a discount, though, because the owner is switching his art stock from traditional and landscapes to modern art. I thought the subject of the painting expressed the store owner’s quandry as well as the artist’s point of view of traditional versus modern (values, architecture, fill-in-the-blank). A cuple of store windows up, is a modern art gallery where the current artist on exhibit features spalshed-on stick-figure people with blank faces. I tried to talk my husband into adopting The General and taking him home with us, but we agreed that the shocked look in his face would be a little difficult to take every day – it makes me jump every time I walk by it.

Sorry for the grany photo (I took it at night, with reflections on the store window), the live version is much more colorful!

first meeting at the karl-franzens university

we are the future….

on the way…

to the “hauptplatz”

yesterday 2500 students went on the street to fight against the new goverment resolutions…

At 3PM today at the She Drup Ling Buddhist Center on Griesgasse, the Tibetan Kalachakrka for World Peace organization hosted the closing ceremony of their 10-day-long sand mandala ritual. For the last week or so three monks from the Dalai Lama’s monasterey in Dharmsala, India have been constructing a colorful sand mandala. This afternoon they dumped it in the river.
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(Engegasse)

the sun is shining, but nothing has a colour, because there should be snow all over….

so it´s really refreshing to see graz this colourful…

(murweg, under the “hauptbrücke”)

It was through watching Reg Park and others in the day’s action films (primarily sword-and-sandal epics) that Arnold came upon the idea of moving to America to become a bodybuilding and movie star. To him, America was a place of limitless possibilities, a place where he could spread the wings he felt were bound by the confines of Austria.

So, fly, fly, fly… but don’t forget your sandals.

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