weekend celebrity update

Spent the weekend in vienna - shopping, climbing mountains around the city (Grinzing), catching up with friends. Met the complete Mainz Football Team at the airport including trainer Jürgen Klopp jumping the economy queue on Friday and the Canadian indoor hockey team (finished Nr. 9 at the World Cup in Vienna) on their way back from Vienna to Frankfurt this morning so I decided to have a celebrity theme today.


So let's start with Thursday - the Vienna Opera Ball (Opernball). This Ball is the biggest official ball in Austria - with most of the government present, together with all kinds of artists, intellectuals, showoffs, etc. If you are rich and / or famous, you should go. There is full coverage on TV also. Normally it does not get too much coverage outside Austria unless some trashy celebrity comes and visits - there is a guy called Richard Lugner, who owns a huge construction company in Austria and he invites "stars" to the ball to show off his fortune. He is also called "Mörtel", which means something that fills the gap between bricks when building a house. He is like 70 years old and has a wife of 40 or so called "Mausi".

Anyway - so Mörtel and Mausi have invited people of smaller or bigger calibers over the years. I remember Pamela Anderson, Sophia Loren (sometimes they actually manage to get a real celebrity with style totally embarrassing themselves when they figure out who booked them), Sarah (Fergie), Farrah Fawcett, Geri Haliwell (scary spice), Grace Jones (who totally trashed a Hotel room in Vienna that Mörtel had to pay for in the end) and this year it was the one and only Paris Hilton. Part of the invitation is normally an hour-long meet-the-fan session in the Lugner City, which is a big shopping mall in the not-so-elegant part of town. I don't think any of these celebs is aware of what awaits them there. This year Paris got lipsticks thrown at her (click here for the video on youtube). She looked better in the evening at the Ball though.

Also Britney shaved off her hair. It seems that in a moment of craze she went amok and just did it. I am not sure if I feel sorry for her or am starting to like her. There is something about this picture I like.

diversitysn't

I took the bus from Darmstadt after work to go to the airport to go to Vienna. Normally the bus needs about half an hour to get there. We go via the highway, everything under control, the usual Friday crowd to the airport - some business-people, some tourist-looking people, some others. We take the A5 normally and we notice that trucks passing by honking at us - strange. Then the bus takes an exit to a gas station, the driver stops and gets out. No message, nothing. He gets back in, takes his mobile phone and gets out again. No message, nothing. The clock is ticking. Then he talks on the phone for some minutes, people start getting nervous, gets back in and tells people that the bus cannot go on because some door is open and he cannot close it. So there will be another bus in 20 minutes.

Needless to say I am not very relaxed at this moment - and so is the guy behind me. So before I can think about it, he is already calling a taxi. So I ask him if I could join. Sure, he says. Another 2 people ask and we are leaving the bus. Some more people make some more calls. Here comes the funny part. The diversity of the people on the bus surfaces. Some people stay on the bus, some get off.

The 4 of us are waiting for the taxi to arrive. A blond girl with an Ipod and a shiny mobile phone gets picked up by a huge Mercedes first (papa-driven I assume). Two backpackers go around the gas station and begin to ask every single driver if they go to the airport. They eventually get lucky and board a small Peugeot. Finally also our taxi arrives and we get in. The ride to the airport is fast and it turns out to be sponsored by accenture as the guy who called the taxi works for accenture and is going to expense it of course.


It's funny how a mix of people gets dissolved in a crisis and people revert back to what they really are.

f***ing stefan raab!!!

I just watched The Truman Show - and thought that i actually managed to escape valentine's day - and now there are stupid couples kissing on the stage in TV-Total and Stefan Raab is singing one cheesy song after another - a kind of Knutsch-Song-Megamix.

I am going to bed now. And by the way, the blog color is back to normal.

aus.
schluss.
basta.
buonanotte.

I choo- choo- choose you :-)

I found pics of my all time favourite valentine cards from The Simpsons. I think they are great.




... other than posting these two cards and the nice pink background on my blog, I am looking forward to totally ignoring this wonderful event. Happy Valentines Day Everybody!!!

3 weird things

... happened today on my way home

1.) Ghost train: I went to the train station in Darmstadt - there were no delays shown, no trains at the station but all the platforms were full of people. Then my train got canceled only to arrive 10 minutes later without any warning. It was a bit weird boarding a train to nowhere just because it arrived at the same platform the original train was supposed to arrive...

2.) A Disturbed dog: I got off the train in Frankfurt and started walking towards the underground when I saw a woman walking with a dog - the dog stopping and peeing. Problem was, the dog was peeing on a young girl's leg!!! Needless to say, it took the girl quite some time to recover from the first shock but then a heated discussion started. People stopped to watch but they settled it so quickly that there was no mud fight unfortunately. What a disturbed dog ...

3.) Hooligans: Sitting in the underground a weird looking business guy got in at the European Central Bank. He had very strange round glasses. The next stop - Römer - some 5-6 guys got in - first I thought they were hooligans but my second thought was that they were actually going to check our tickets. The weird guy must also have had the same thoughts so he tried to get out of the train acting like he just forgot to get out - but he was pushed back with a loud "can I see you ticket please?". Basically the more disgusting and scary / strange a group of 5-6 people on the underground look like, the more likely it is, that they are actually there working for the train company checking tickets. This other time I was being checked by what I thought to be a group of 6 mentally challenged sweaty fat people. In the end I thought I could have saved the guy as it was after 19:00 and I had a monthly ticket, but not if he tries to jump out of the train right next to the controllers!!!

One more thing: there is another city in Germany without traffic signs ...

here i am ...

I have finally found that special something that I have been looking for for such a long time to pimp up my blog. The thing is called plazes and is a social networking service in connection with location tracking. I have signed up, set up my home location and started SMSing whenever I left my place. So from now on you can see where I am whenever you come to my blog - just look to the top right section. It is pretty cool - you simply send your location via SMS and you get a reply from the system so that you know if it knows the place or not. There are a couple of users in Frankfurt already, but not too many. You can discover new plazes and get points for doing so. It also calculates your average speed when going around. Let the race begin!!! (though I guess now I will need an SMS-flatrate, otherwise this will cost me a fortune :-)

DSDS on YouTube

I got an invitation to anti-diet paradise (casa Alba) tonight and so am staying a bit longer in the office so I am not there too early. Just enough time to update the blog with the recent highlights of the "Deutschland Sucht Den Superstar (DSDS)" candidates.

Here is a list of my favourite moments:
1. Tanja the gardener (just watch and cry :-)
2. Andreas (Dieter Bohlen is the most straightforward person in the world - but wait until the guy plays the piano - wow) -> they threw him out in the meantime because he has Zero "Ausstrahlung"
3. Mr. Love spielt ein bisschen was für euch :-)

Absolute highlight of the day: Nadine


BONUS

sometimes people make a war ...

I found this clip on the internet - it is a kind of anti-war rap song from Hungary. It is so funny - I guess you can only enjoy it if you speak a bit of hungarian or if you know how hungarians speak english when they cannot really but are trying anyway. Sorry if it is not funny to you - I enjoyed every second of it ...

ICELAND!!!!!

Years of peaking at the icelandair website are paying off finally (ok, I am a bit exaggerating here, but who cares?). They have a new promotion running as of tomorrow - you can fly back and forth for a measly 140 Alpendollars!!! both ways!!!

If anybody wants to join, let me know. I will be booking tomorrow first thing in the morning! Looking at my list of things to do from my last visit, this will be another great weekend!!! This time I will try not to forget to check out the mask :-)

more about the deal here: http://www.icelandair.de

UPDATE - this just in - I have kept my promise not to travel to this madman-country of the US of A for a long time now. Recently only have I began to think I was too stupid and felt a kind of an urge to visit NY - and now I am reading that they are going to have every visitor's fingerprints taken and put into the same database that the FBI keeps for the criminals. What a fantastic way of catching criminals. Bastards! (I know that my last word is not really an argument, but I don't think arguments help here any more)

Bottom line - I am back to where I started. There are plenty of other places to visit on mother earth...

the return of the blog :-)

I was planning to switch on the big marketing machinery to bring back the blog - but i am too lazy for this. So instead here are some rather shocking photos of harry potter - yes, it's him. They are actually from a play in London, that opens end of February. It is a rather strange story involving 'arry going naked, a white horse, a psychiatrist and more weirdness...

By the way, the rest of the cast is also pretty impressive. Among others there is Richard Griffiths, who played uncle Vernon in the HP movies ...

This just reminds me - it must be great to live in London ... Here is another photo of Harry with a horse ...