Austria - No Kangaroos

´elloo. Tis I, in Austria, which keeps informing me "no kangaroos in Austria" - but only in English, so I think it`s meant to be appealing only to Aussie tourists (like me - it was funny the first time, but after about 200 times...) and to bitter Austrians sick of being mistaken for the tanned, bogan, beer drinking piss-heads who make it here from Down Under. Or something. Am I missing the point? I don`t know.

As I was wandering the streets of Salzburg today, alternately composing a blog and trying to get the song "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" out of my head (they played it at the hostel last night and I think it even featured in the soundtrack to my dreams in which I was organising trains and booking hostels!), I thought I would mention a mental note to myself which I had been trying to put into practise. Which is: Lay Off the Gummi Bears. Since my week of crepes (last week), I have left the land of crepes behind (the land extending from London, via Paris, to Basel where I made some crepes with my sis), and have since taken up to eating gummi bears left, right and centre. Oh the joy that is the gummi. I blame Marnie! Anyway, so in the spirit of advice such as Lay Off the Adverbs, I thought, Lay of the Gummi Bears. And then I walked past a gummi bear devoted shop, which could have been all well and good, except they had posters out the front of gummi bears in so-called amusing situations, one - or maybe even more than one - of gummi bears, ah, "getting it on". Doing "the sex". As much as gummi bears can - the picture, thankfully, didn`t go into that much detail. Or else that was on the back - I don`t know, I didn`t look. It`s one thing to reenact an abridge version of David Lynch`s Lost Highway using gummi bears (red one for Patricia Arquette`s brunette, white one for Patricia Arquette`s white-hot, hypersexual-ganster-mole blonde, orange I think for Bill Pullman and and yellow for Balthazar Getty, green for The Mystery Man. Then red one with a green head for when Patricia Arquette appears to Bill Pullman in bed with the Mystery Man`s freaky face instead of her own.... you get the picture. And if you don`t, ask Marnie about it, as it was all for her benefit!) That`s all well and good and part of the normal course of events should one be in Berlin in August drinking beer and eating gummi bears on a sunny day. But POSTERS of gummi bears having sex! That`s too far - it`s not on. It´s just not cricket. As they say...

So I think that rant in itself has cured me of my gummi bear obsession. And/or put people off reading the ravings of a gummi-overdosed mind. So I will endeavor to be more coherent and even informative next time. I am off to Prague tomorrow - very excited about that. I anticipate, whether rightly or wrongly, cats! And maybe less gummi bears, but I should really eat the packet in my bag otherwise it would be a waste...