Schnee, Scheisse and Salami

Wrote a whole pile of blogs and emails the other day on my laptop, and oy now found a place where I can send them from! So there's a few...

Ah, a mixture of my own and a LOT of other people’s incompetence made it one of those journeys where I could have just cried half the time if I weren’t so excited about travelling. No matter how pissed off I am, the second we start picking up speed on the runway and lift off I just get all giggly and happy and don’t care anymore that I spent 9 hours flying to Bangkok subsisting on cheese and fruit, because YET AGAIN my vegetarian meal had not been ordered. Blank looks, ‘did you book a veggie meal?’ ‘umm, YES, like a MONTH AGO when I booked the flights’. Grrr. Then check in for flight to Vienna- ‘am I listed for vegetarian meals?’, ‘no, but I will call them now’, ‘danke’. Mealtime comes around, no veggie meal for Zoo, more blank looks. Still, they managed to rustle me up some rice and pasta and veggies, which was better than yet another cheese platter (as much as I love cheese, there is only so much one can consume in that period of time), and the only hot meal I had in over 20 hours of flying. No soy joy either, and with that much dairy consumed my sinuses were freaking out by the time I am half-way to Austria. Of course, before this my brand new moisturiser had been confiscated at Sydney airport for being 25mls over the 100ml liquid limit. This was my fault though. As another bonus, I bought some vodka and bourbon duty-free at Sydney airport, at a cost of $40. Collect it when I get through security, in its plastic duty free shopping bag. Get to Bangkok, go through security and it gets confiscated. ‘But I bought it duty free! Here is the receipt! It’s still stapled up in the bag!” No, being over 100mls it needed to be properly sealed up in some special sealed clear plastic contraption, which was obviously too much effort for the morons at the Sydney duty free place to bother with so I just get shafted. Byebye to Zoo’s alcohol. $50 worth of skincare and booze lost in one trip. Get to Vienna, rested and jumping up and down because it is SNOWING! EXCITED ZOO! Ticket to Salzburg is 43E, which is much more than anticipated. Go to coffee shop, ask for ‘kleiner mocca’ like it says on the sign, assistant nods at me, asks ‘strong?’, ‘ja’, and then hands me a long black coffee. I am too over it all to care about arguing, and its hot and I stand in the snow on the train station. Decide to get a snack from the machine, put in money, think I am hitting number for some yummy chocolate coated biscuits but in a fit of vagueness manage to ask for a salami roll creation instead- most probably the only meat product in the whole cabinet. But heck, I don’t really care, the snow is on my face and so I stand on the platform stuffing myself with black coffee and a vending machine salami roll and alles gut, ja? And the moments of sheer bliss, sipping reasonably decent whisky whilst reading Chemical Palace and listening to Rammstein on the audio channel (awful, but funnily appropriate) are well worth most of the aggravation and stuffing about. I even feel like I could write a conference paper…

So now I am on a train heading to Salzburg, through tunnels and past white fields and houses with deer skulls and antlers hanging by the door, and the sun bright behind the clouds and a trolley coming round selling Pringles and hot chocolate. I get to panicking that my laptop battery is running low and I want to keep working and suddenly- MAGIC! I realise there is a laptop powerpoint right next to me, so I find my adaptor and keep on writing! No idea where I downloaded my Honours thesis though, which is a bit of a problem as I wanted to use some of it for the paper. Hmm.