In which Emily gives the people what they want!

Vienna, Austria--8:42 am

That means you, ye friends and relatives, logging on to your internet connections round the globe to happen by this little blog, who have risen up with one voice to say, "Another blog Emily! It's time!"

Or really, it's mostly my parents who rely on this blog, I think, for a weekly assurance that I am, in fact, still living.

The lamentable thing is that I am sick (again!) with nothing but a measly sore threat, but it's the kind of thing that is just bad enough to prohibit me from doing anything else (like eating solid food and sleeping), and it just keeps getting worse. I'm not happy about it.

Yesterday I went to the store for the express purpose of buying two things: grapes and ice cream. I had traded my pajamas for me jeans expressly for this venture (you should be proud, Mom!) and put my coat on over my ratty sweater, grabbed keys and a few euros, and went to Billa, the store down the street. I found the cheapest ice cream and a nice bag of grapes and went to stand in the checkout line.

A word about checkout lines in Austria. The checkout line people are not your friend. They don't look at you, or speak unless absolutely necessary, and they certainly do not bag your groceries. In fact, they don't even provide bags for your groceries. You must come to your local shopping center prepared both with a bag and with the acuity and speed necessary to quickly pile your food up in your arms after you pay, or the next person's can of goulash will come tumbling down the little food slide and crash into your, for instance, grapes (which are quite delicate). Then you head to a counter (these they have provided), hopefully without dropping anything, where you can sort your food and place it in whatever contraption you've brought to get it from the store to your home.

I hadn't been able to speak since Thursday, and what little voice I had by Saturday was no more. Anyway, so I've got my on-sale ice cream and my bag of grapes, and I'm standing in line. A woman comes in with sardines she wanted to return, and made a little bit of a fuss about how much she paid for the sardines and now they were on sale and yada yada, while the poor unhappy looking cashier went to go find her new sardines and re-ring her up. Those of us in line were all thinking something like, "Jeez, lady, it's a can of sardines! You're holding up the whole operation!" I should have known I was about to get major kick in the pants by the patience gods (with whom I've never been on good terms).

Finally, it's my turn, though for some reason (I really don't know why) Sardine Lady is still standing there. The cashier scans my ice cream, gets to my grapes and says:

"Sie muessen die Trauben abwaegen!" You must weigh the grapes!

Now, in any other state, I would have recognized the verb abwaegen, but...oh, well, it doesn't matter. I just didn't, this time. And I'd never had to weigh my grapes before. So I opened my mouth in an attempt to say:

"Es tut mir leid, ich verstehe nicht. Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch." I'm sorry, I don't understand. I only speak a little German.

But because I hadn't used my voice since Thursday, the whole thing came out sounding rather like a sick dragon who was, at any moment, going to spit fire on you, and I realized as I was coming to ich verstehe nicht that the people in line behind me were slowly backing away in horror, and so I aborted the mission entirely at Ich speche nur ein bisschen, which was a good plan because it collapsed, at that point, into painful coughing.

The cashier, quite certain, I'm sure, that the Sardine Lady and I were somehow in cahoots, or that, at any rate, I was about to infect every person in the supermarket with my dragon disease, grabbed the grapes and hurried back to (presumably) weigh them, leaving me bright purple and sorry-looking and trying not to feel the daggers being thrown my direction by the eyes of the people in line. And who was still there? Yep, Sardine Lady, who smiled at me.

Anyway, that's my life for now: sitting at the kitchen table, studying for midterms, trying not breathe on anything and munching on grapes.