A more family-friendly Easter blog

Easter Sunday was a lot of fun.

I went to mass first thing in the morning, mainly to hear Robert and Waltraud sing in the choir.  It was much nicer than the singing in English churches – where it’s usually droning and mournful – you could actually believe people here when they sang “Hosanna”.

After the mass was over, I played with Heidi and Michael’s kids, which is new.  I tend to get exasperated by kids quickly.  I think it’s because I went to high school with so many little brats that I’m predisposed to think they’re all like that, but Heidi’s two are adorable and seem to bring out the Uncle Smashing gene in me.  So I played with them and took photographs to bring home to show my parents.  I also got to see Katharin and her husband and kids.  They came round for lunch and introduced me to the Austrian tradition of godparents giving their godchildren presents at Easter.

After lunch we went to Paul’s house and spent the afternoon in his garden.  He lives on the Kitzbühelerhorn, so his garden get’s the sun in the afternoon and there was a lot of sun to be had; there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

There was an Easter Egg hunt organised, which I initally thought was just fo the kids, but no, the whole family had an Easter basket to find, including – I was surprised to discover – me!  I was at down watching everyone look when Paul mentioned that he had already seen mine, I was touched to be included as part of the family.  Even moreso when I discovered they had supplanted a chocolate egg in favour of beer.

My Easter Sunday in a nutshell

Sitting there, I felt totally relaxed.  I still didn’t understand half of what was being said, but I was content to sit and drink and let it all wash over me.  I managed to get some more pictures, including a big family portrait.  I even got one of Heidi’s children on the balcony I used to play on as a kid when we got back to Robert and Waltraud’s; I’d brought the kids a big chocolate rabbit each and Heidi was good enough to help me use them as bribes.

I’m probably going to Hell for this

I went to mass for the first time in years today.  I didn’t understand a lot of the German language service and I already knew about the plot twist at the end, anyway, so instead I admired the interior of the church, which is quite a contrast to the mountain town outside.

Kitzbühel’s church is as baroque inside as any church I’ve seen in Vienna so far.  Lots of light is let in to play off the gold fixtures (of which there are a lot).  There’s also a lot of statues and pictures of people suffering, because whilst the love of God is all well and good, Catholic architecture does tend to focus on people’s pain.

I also spent a little while critiquing the altar servers, I was an altar boy for about five years when I was younger and I like to think I stil know my stuff.  I gave them a B+, overall; good bell work but the procession could have been neater.

Then my mind began to wander – moreso than simply judging altar servers – and I considered my religious beliefs, wondered on the nature of God and such.  I tend to avoid religion, but it seemed appropriate on Easter Sunday.

I thought about all that was going on in the world today as a result of religion and even started thinking about parts of scripture.  Suddenly I runaway train of thought went through my mind and I started thinking about whether Jesus’ new commandment “love one another as I [God] have loved you” might supplant the 10 Commandments of the Old Testament by basically saying “God’s never done this to you, you shouldn’t do it to others”.  The thought continued like this:

“God’s never killed anyone, therefore you shouldn’t kill others.”  (It’s an entirely dubious statement in hindsight, but I genuinely thought it whilst I was in church.)

“God’s never stolen from anyone, therefore you shouldn’t steal”

“God’s never slept with someone’s wife… now there’s an episode of Jeremy Kyle I’d like to see!”

I imagined the whole scenario.  Joseph sat in the studio, slumped in the robes identical to the ones use in every school Nativity in the world, shifting uncomfortably every once in a while.  Kyle approaches.

Jeremy Kyle:  Now, Joseph’s with us today because he’s worried his wife may have cheated on himand their child may not, in fact, be his.  Tell us about yourself, Joseph, what do you do?

Joseph:  I’m a carpenter.

Kyle:  Good job?  Steady business?

Joseph:  I’m a bit worried about the Ikea they’re building in Galillee, but other than that, I do alright.

Kyle:  So what makes you think your wife cheated on you?

Joseph:  Well, I’ve not slept with her for one thing and she always told me she were a virgin.  But she came home pregnant one day.  Thing was, though, she were still a virgin.

Kyle:  Well we’ll come bck to you in a moment.  For now, let’s welcome Mary to the stage.

And Mary enters, again in the same blue Nativity robes, all the while swearing at the Joseph and the booing Audience.  She’s starts shouting at Joseph as she sits down.

Mary:  You’ve got no right to go around saying that about me!

Kyle:  What have you got to say for yourself?  You owe this man an explanation.

Mary:  How dare he say that about our son, what proof has he got?!

Joseph:  He doesn’t look like me.  He gets this halo-y thing around his head whenever we get pictures tak-

Mary:  In case you don’t notice, I get the halo thing around my head as well.

Joseph:  Yeah, but not every picture!  And I never slept with you and you’re still a virgin!

Kyle:  Which is why we think that Mary’s been having an illicit affair with our next guest.  Please welcome God, ladies and gentlemen.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, God walks onto the stage wearing a tracksuit and a baseball cap, despite being the bearded man he’s usually depicted as.  He sits down in the chair and slumps looking sullen.

Kyle:  You’ve got quite a reputation, it’s a Testament, in fact to the type of person you are.  Vandalism at the Walls of Jericho, arson in the Egyptian desert, you even tried to get the first man to kill his son.

God:  Yeah, but I stopped him in the end.

Kyle:  Still, it’s quite an achievement, even for someone who’s 6000 years old, if that is your real age, we’ve found a lot of people who are pretty sure you’re several billion years old, assuming you actually exist.  And what do you actually do, when you’re not reigning down vengeance?

God:  I’m the omnipotent, omniscient creator of all reality.

Kyle:  And what does that actually involve?  What have you created recently?

God:  Well, nothin really…

Kyle:  I thought so, you’re a loafer, lazy scum who sits off because he’s done a weeks work and can’t be bothered to do any more, he just wants to sit on his cloud and watch everything happen and blame other people for his mistakes.

God:  Oh, come on!  I told them not to eat the apple, don’t start giving me that about “why was it there in the first place”!

Kyle:  I don’t want to hear it.  Mary, do you want to admit that you carried this man’s child?

Mary:  Yes.

Kyle:  And you, God, do you admit that, as the omniscient creator of all things, you must have known that you were impregnating a married woman?

God:  Yes.

Kyle:  And after she became pregnant, did you offer her any help?

Mary:  He didn’t even come see me himself, he sent one of his angels.

Kyle:  Well, I’ve got very little sympathy for you.  I don’t care if you are the virgin mother of the light of the world, saviour of all creation.  I think you’re scum.  But it’s not up to me, Joseph, what’s your take on all this?

Joseph:  Well, I’m just relieved that it’s out in the open, like.  I still love her and I want to raise the kid to be a carpenter.

Kyle:  And Mary, what are you going to do?

Mary:  I want to stay with him, there’s only so long it can last with an immortal deity.

Joseph:  The Three Magi suggested we take a holiday in Egypt for a bit, so I think we’ll try and work it out there.

Kyle:  I wish you both the best of luck.

And with that Kyle turns to the camera and says “Has your significant other cheated on you with a  deity, call our show,” as the number flashes on screen.

That is nearly exactly what went through my head during that mass, right down to the bad puns and pseudo-references.

I wonder if there was something in the incense they were using.

The first rule…

In the past month I have both watched the film and read the book Fight Club for the first time.  I am now way too into that world.  Now, I’ve not started an underground fighting ring, nor do I intend to.  I won’t be going to support groups for diseases I don’t have either.  I may sleep with a dark haired girl from the other side of the Atlantic, but that’s as close as I’ll get.

Really, I mean that I find myself interested in the ideas that the book brings up and making reference to the material during the day.  I’ve had insomnia since arriving in Vienna, so I sympathise with the main character, though I still make jokes about becoming Tyler Durden.

This evening I decided to mock up the poster of Brad Pitt holding a bar of soap, using some eagle shit I bought this afternoon.  I’m quite proud of the result.

Now if only I could photoshop someone into the space behind my shoulder

We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo

I almost missed my second entry because I was doing what boiled down to nothing on the internet.  Grazing,  my friend Chris calls it; the act of surfing the web as mindlessly as a cow chews cud.  I wonder how I – and most others – would deal in a world without technology.  Robert and Waltraud’s house in Kitzbühel is probably the closest I will get and even here I can’t resist the lure of a glowing screen and a keyboard.

Today I spent the day with Heidi, Robert and Waltraud’s daughter-in-law, and her two kids, who are lovely, but somewhat bewildering.  I’m convinced that I could have lived in Austria my whole life, be fluent in German and I would still only understand about half of what they were saying to me.  Fighting through childish mumble, Tirolerdialekt and a language I’m barely competent in generally results in a pretty one sided conversation – I tend to throw in a noncommital “oh”, an understanding “ah” or maybe, if I’m feeling cocky a “ja”.  Still, they are kind enough not to get too exasperated with the confused-looking grown-up (reluctant though I am to admit that that must be how they see me), so I can’t complain.

I went to a sort of zoo today.  I initially thought it was a reserve of sorts for the local animals of the Tirol, though I may have misunderstood what Waltraud was telling me about the place as I was under the impression that Japanese Macaque were native to Japan…

I was actually surprised by how much similarity to humans the Macaque had.  Maybe I’ve not been to a zoo in a few years, but I don’t remember other monkey’s having faces which showed such expression as the Macaque, who was expressing a sort of resigned annoyance at tourists taking photos of of it whilst it was eating.

The macaque shows exactly what it thinks of us tourists

I only saw one Macaque in there, I hope there was another.  Captivity can’t be fun at the best of times, but it would be worse to be there alone.

Most of the animals I saw were local to the Tirol.  Deer, donkeys and the smallest goats I have ever seen roamed free around us.  We arrived at feeding time and all the free-roaming animals were eating from troughs in the same place, th goats were so small that they were standing in the troughs and almost buried amongst the massive heads eating around them.  The were incredibly cute.  I also saw a couple of young bucks lock horns, nothing major, just a quick discussion about who was eating where which lasted exactly as long as it took for me to turn on my camera, so I am sadly lacking photos of that.

Tiny goats!

We also saw a flock of geese which got pretty damned loud as we approached their coop.  I observed, in German, that they must have eggs to the complete apathy of the two young children.

Afterwards we went to a park just outside the zoo, where the kids tried to see how many times they could pull the “one more time” game on the slide when mum said it was time to leave.  Credit to her, Heidi is a very patient woman, and her kids are muh better behaved than some I’ve met.  Besides the zoo was half-way up a mountain (as most things here are) so it gave me a bit more time to look at the view.

Had I grown up here, I wonder if I would appreciate this view less?  Would familiarity with these mountains mean that I wouldn’t understand how beautiful they are?  Has growing up in Runcorn, an industrial town on a dirty river, lowered my standards so this place is even more beautiful than it seems?  If so, I guess there are some reasons to be glad I was raised there.

This is the house that Ben built

That’s it!  I’ve written I title; I have stared a blog.  I’ve thought about started one several times, but it is a personal failing of mine that I will always allocated some future date for some alleged or arbitrary significance:

” I’ll start going to the gym on the first day of next month.”

“I’ll give up chocolate during lent”

These days are all fine days for starting something, but there always exists a time between the starting date and me, during which I can always forget about my pledge.  As the songs says, tomorrow is always a day away.  So away with needless preparation time or waiting time or whatever it may be.  I’ve already had this account for nearly six months; today is as good a day as any other.

However, in spite of that rant on the importance of days, today is Good Friday.  And it was a good Friday, I helped build a house.

The word “helped” is probably a bit strong, it would be more truthful to say that my presence was tolerated, as I don’t think the work was completed any quicker because of me (and I can only hope it wasn’t completed any slower).

I’m currently in Kitzbühel, the town in which I was born, staying with Robert and Waltraud, and old couple who lodged my parents for three years after I was born and who have allowed me to stay several times since.  They are incredibly hospitible and make sure that I want for nothing.  Unless, of course, I want to help.

Waltraud is determined that I enjoy my time here, so I can barely carry plates to the tabel because “you should not do that on holiday”.  I am somewhat resigned to it by now, but I can’t help but feel guilty when they’re doing so much for me and won’t take any help or payment in return.  So it was that when Robert asked if I wanted to help with the construction of his son, Paul’s, house, I lept.  I threw on some clothes to get dirty in and (being an eternal tourist) grabbed my camera.

Within minutes of getting there I realised that the camera was unneccessary.  Paul’s house is an ongoing project which father and son have been working on – between Paul’s job as a chef – for about 10 years, and Paul has been living there most of that time.  That’s not to say his living quarters are unpleasant; many of the rooms are alrady finished.  But the top floor is still under semei-constant construction.  Paul saves his money, then buys all the necessary materials to fit out another part of the house, after which he needs to save up again before moving on.  He was working for some of those savings that evening, so we had to work fast.

That afternoon we had to fix some skirting boards in a loft space and it was during this time that I saw a different side to Robert and Paul.  The process involved a lot of shouting orders, both at each other and at me, broken occasionally when Robert would disagree with something Paul was suggesting, after which there would be a brief, loud argument, with Paul usually winning.

An expertly fitted skirting board

... a less expertly fitted skirting board

After finishing the skirting boards, covered with saw dust and me suitably proficient with a circular saw, we moved on to attatch some plant trestles to the balcony.  This let me see a fantastic view of Kitzbühel.  True, most parts of Kitzbühel have a fantastic view, such is the appeal of the town, but as I held the trestles in place while Paul screwed them into place, I looked at the town and reflected on why I like it so much.

Paul's house, now with room for window boxes

True, I was born here, but I left for England when I was three and have only been back a handfull of times in the intervening 18 years.  But it’s a beautiful place, in stark contract to the town I grew up in and I feel a spiritual connection to it.  I feel more refreshed and energised for having been here.

I think right now, though, Kitzbühel is special to me because it has a timeless quality.  Nothing seems to change here, Paul was building his house when I was last here, he may still be building it even if I don’t come back for another six years.  People will come here to ski in the winter and golf in the summer.  Those mountains aren’t going anywhere and neither is the town nestled between them.

In the past year, I’ve had a lot of major changes in my life suddenly forced upon me, both at home and as a result of my year abroad.  Somewhere in there, I need a rock.  I need something that will always be there and always be beautiful.  That’s what Kitzbühel is to me and even if I don’t visit it often, knowing that it’s there is a comfort.