Elfriede Ott a'la Austrian (or Croatian) neighbours

When we were living in our very first flat in Graz, we once watched an Austrian movie called "Elfriede Ott" with my German-speaking friends. It was supposed to be a comedy in the style of "Siin me oleme". The activities took place in Graz and the movie had the best Austrian actors and actresses playing in it, who meant nothing to me. The language of the movie was Austrian German with deep influences from the local Styria dialect. Which at that time was almost impossible for me to understand. The movie itself was supposed to describe Austrian neighbourhood in a humorous way. I didn't get it. Until....

...we moved to our next flat in the part of the city called Eggenberg. Eggenberg is a very multi-cultural region, with a colourful mixture of inhabitants. Mostly from South-East Europe (like Croatia, Turkey etc). Our new neighbours were from Chechenija, probably Turkey, some other nationalities that we never found out and there was a couple from Croatia. A very old couple. They were the only people in the house, who owned their flat and didn't rent it.
This couple made me understand the humour of that Elfriede Ott movie. The movie about neighbours, who have to know everything about everyone.
So, while we were moving in, they introduced themselves to us straightaway as the house-keepers (you know, when there is a problem, we should go to them). When we moved our stuff into the flat, they occasionally peeked through our opened door to see what was going on and sometimes even invited themselves into our flat. Ok, we were new and interesting. Couple of weeks after we had moved in, Hannes had his birthday. We were not loud or anything, but at 11 pm. our neighbours came to our door to tell us, that they cannot sleep (they lived above us). We didn't play any music, sometimes we might have laughed a bit loud, but that was it. A while later, before I was gonna have my birthday party, I went to tell them that we're gonna get visitors and brought them a package of waffles as an apology. They kept going on about how loud we are, how loud the other neighbours are and just spoke in a mannes which in Austria is called "jammern", the Estonian equivalent is probably "kiunumine" or "vingumine".  I asked them whether they have thought about the fact that, when they hear us, we hear them too. And I asked them about the war going on upstairs that we sometimes hear (you know, when someone runs or plays a ball). I said that we get oftern that feeling, that we would like to say something to them as well, but we are just too nice. Well, from that day on, they never told us anything about us being too loud.
But that's not how the story ends. Oh no, this is just the beginning.
You see, we had a communal garden, for everybody to use. Or, for everybody to use, but for those neighbours to control. There was a corner for bicycle storage- which we actively used as our flat was on the ground floor. One day our doorbell rang (soon after we had moved in) and we were explained by our lovely pissed off neighbours, that each flat was allowed to put only one bike there, due to the lack of space. Alright, we would've put our bikes to the bike storage in the basement, but that was full of stuff from exactly those neighbours. Which we also mentioned. Couple of curses in their mother tongue, and some days later the room looked a lot cleaner. Hallelujah!
As the laundry drying room in our basement was locked and our flat had already massive humidity problems, we used the garden to dry our clothes. It was allowed, but our neighbours didn't really like it, because the laundry was either way too close to their tomatoes or on the way of their garden-furniture (the "communal garden" itself was probably 20 square meters or less). So, often, when we put our laundry outside, it was a "hurricane-like windy" day so it fell over (the drying rack) or someone had reorganized our laundry on the rack or relocated the whole rack in to some shadowed corner in the garden or we found nut peels on our drying clothes (our neighbours had the balcony on the first floor straight towards the garden). The cute old couple also had to clean their carpets from their balcony right after we had put our freshly washed stuff outside or water their plants in a very extravagant manner, so it splashed everywhere (the muddy water of course). Once I caught the bitch  in the act- she had told we should put our stuff under their balcony because then it's not in their way - 20 minutes after I had put it there, she was watering the flowerd on her balcony and guess where all the extra water went. Oh how she could shout, when I confronted her about it. I guess you could've heard it even from a kilometre away. I left her alone to yell as I was not really bothered (after all I had said what I needed to say) and went inside. The cries of the deeply insulted and hurt woman lasted for another 30 minutes.
Once, one of my other neighbours, was training in the basement corridor. Nothing that would bother us. But the female part of the couple from hell, well she rang our doorbell and asked Hannes to go and look with her, what was going on. They went, she yelled at the poor guy in the basement for a good amount of time and thought that Hannes will support her. Hannes said, that he doesn't mind the guy exercising there and left. A week later there was a notice on the corridor wall from flat-owners association, saying that "For fire-safety reasons, it is not allowed for anyone to exercise in the basement.".
Sometimes those neighbours brought our laundry back into our flat, when they didn't like it being in the garden or they rang our doorbell for some other reasons or just complained to us about our neighbours from Chechenija or someone else who had done something they didn't like. At some point they put a sign on a window in the corridor with pictures of Jesus Christ and some holy text (most of the people in the house were muslims), which we then removed in the darkness of the night. We saw the couple often lurking behind the corners of the corridor or the stairs, trying to listen what is going on in various flats or who is talking to whom in the corridor. We sometimes caught them in the act and they then pretended to be doing something really important. But they always knew exactly what was going on where.
The case with our neighbours reached it's high point, when someone broke into our electricity-box in the corridor and by mistake switched off the electricity in all the flats on the ground floor. Except for one- the one where the Checheny neighbours lived. Probably it was them - they had their electricity turned off, I guess. But the lovely Croatian neighbours came to us, thinking we did it. We explained them the situation  (which was a hard task taking into account that they were constantly whining) and hoped they had understood it. We also called the police who recorded the incident with the electricity box. Couple of days later our flat had - once again -  no electricity. We are pretty sure that the old damn couple switched it off to annoy us as much as they could. We couldn't prove it though.
After one year of hearing them complain about everything I told the old lady to piss off and she never spoke to us or disturbed us again. I also might have threatened her with the police.....
All I know, is that we were probably the worst neighbours one could have in their opinion. I'm sure the new renters of our old flat will have heard of it by now. Maybe they have even topped us. Who knows.
But by the time we moved out, I understood everything that I had seen in the movie "Elfriede Ott".

Our problems with the previous flat still continue but that is a whole new and even longer story than this one....

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The birthplace of Terminator

Once in my language course in Austria, we were discussing about all the famous people that come from Austria. A few names were named: Fritzl (yeah, people tend to have heard of him a lot); You-Know-Who (at least we should not say his name out loud- he was a very very bad person, worse than Fritzl) also originates from here; Franz Ferdinand; Arnold Schwarzenegger. For some weird reason, no one in our group named Mozart. But this post is not gonna be about him anyway. Everyone should know he comes from Austria, I mean seriously, people?

I'm gonna briefly talk about my visit to the birthplace of the currently most famous Austrian - or as the locals tend to call him - Arnie.
After having lived here for almost three years, I decided it was time to visit the only existing museum about Arnold Schwarzenegger, located in his birthplace. I guess there will be more museums created, once he will be dead. But let's not think about that. Arnie comes from a tiny village called Thal in Thal valley near Graz. The whole area of Thal is full of symbols and signs related to Arnie. The local lake has a boat standing next to it, where he supposedly proposed to his wife. There is also a hiking trail with his name around the local lake (called Thalersee).
The locals in Graz asked me, after I had mentioned I want to go see the place, why I would do such a thing? They don't seem to be proud of their own Mr. Universe. They also say that there is nothing to see. I was gonna check it out myself.

So on a nice and sunny day I took my bike and cycled up to his museum (it's about 30min cycle with average speed to his museum from where I live). Right in the end, I had to cycle up a small mountain (to an Estonian it was actually a mountain). I got up and to my surprise, I was there. His birthplace is a not a spectacular-looking house with big signs on it. It was actually just a house with his statue in front. Alright, the locals were right, it seemed indeed to be a small museum. Still, as I didn't have to pay the entrance of 6 Euros, because of the Steiermark Card I have, I went inside.
As soon as I opened the door, some Christmas song started to play. It turned out to be some sort of a movement sensor to tell about the visitors arriving. Merry Christmas then! Later on, every time someone walked past the sensor, it played the damn song. The workers must have good nerves there - already I heard that tune at least 10 times.  The person setting off the sensor, was mostly me, though, as I was almost the only visitor. And I almost went mad with that. Anyway, as soon as I got in (and the workers got notified of my presence with a lovely Christmas tune), I was greeted by a very happy  woman, in my opinion even by a too cheerful woman considering that she works in a museum. She spoke a lot, offered me a soda to freshen up and allowed me to start my tour of the museum.

There were about 5 rooms to see- it is still a house museum. There was a room full of photographs of Arnie, just every photograph they couldn't fit into any other room. The room also had couple of pieces of furniture, which had belonged to the Family Schwarzenegger. The next room was dedicated to Arnie's time as a governor. Some medals, American money with his picture on it, more photos etc. The most interesting thing for me in this room was the wax figure of the man himself. After taking couple of photos, I moved to the first floor, where I could see the toilet, which Arnold's family used (yeah, an old-fashioned toilet, but still different as you could sense that Arnold, like any other normal person, needs to use such facilities), the kitchen, the room full of body-building machines he used to train with. In that room was also a figure of half-naked Arnie showing off every muscle in his body (well almost every muscle). All the walls of that room were covered with similar-styled images. Pornography for body builders, I guess. The last room was dedicated to his acting career and had some original costumes from the sets (about 2 costumes altogether- he was such a generous guy after all) and also another wax figure of the Terminator-Arnie and the robot (that one was only made out of metal). I took some pictures, and, after having been in the museum for about 30 minutes, I was done with it. Glad I didn't pay for the ticket, there was really not so much to see. Maybe we should still wait another 20 years or so, and then visit again. You know, when it would be a memorial musem. I guess they might have more stuff to show then.

In the end I wanted to buy a postcard from the museum to send it to my mum (I mean, how cool would it be to receive an Arnold Schwarzenegger museum postcard?). On every postcard there were only pictures of the house. I wanted the man himself on the picture, of course. Turns out, that Arnie hasn't allowed anyone to use any photographs of him to be put onto a postcard. Not even his own museum is allowed to do that. This is just ridiculous- we all know how he looks like anyway, we can print a picture out ourselves- what is the problem? The lady in the museum was also not happy about that rule. I also got a fridge magnet from there (to my surprise, they were allowed to put a picture of Arnie as a Terminator on it) for my mum. The most amusing things they sold in that musem were: wait for it- condoms! With Arnie's face and the the museum logo on the packaging. I guess when someone uses them, they might be protected by Arnie's special power. I couldn't think of a friend, who would need such a special condom, so I decided not to buy it. If I still want to get one and frame it, I can always go back and get it.

I also spoke to the lady in the museum a bit before leaving. She loved to talk, you could see that she doesn't have exactly a lot of interaction with other people during her work (with maybe ten visitors she gets per day?).  I told her I might be helping the Estonian Special-Olympic delegation next year (because Arnie had come to the opening ceremony of the last games that were held in Austria and I hope he will come there next year) and she was so exited about it - telling me, that I will be visiting her again next year as all the delegations will visit the museum! It turns out I had made a new best friend in that museum for about 10 minutes. When I left the museum, she wished me all the best and told "See you soon!". Probably going for the second time into that museum would make me a regular customer.

After a strangely amusing trim to see the birthplace of Terminator himself, I cycled back home, feeling way too satisfied, taking into account what I had just seen. One thing for sure, the locals were right about the museum.

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