6 monthly report

today i took the compost out & realised that it's the first time i've gone out of the apartment since last saturday. today is thursday. i came down with a cold on monday & have been lying low ever since. 5 days is not really that long (some people don't come out of their apartments for years) but the season is changing pretty fast right now - the sun has rolled much further to the south & the leaves are increasingly colouring the ground instead of the trees. soon all the buildings will be revealed in their nakedness once again.

anyway i took the compost down to the rubbish collecting place, remembering to take the key. it's unnerving when the metal grille door closes behind you, locking you in with all the rubbish. you have to unlock it again to get out. there are two large blue wheelibins for recycling paper, which are nearly always overflowing, but must have been emptied recently. whoever empties it doesn't pick up what spills out - i don't know who does that but it does get done eventually. there are about 8 large black wheelibins for household rubbish, also usually brim-full (this rubbish collecting place serves two apartment buildings with a total of 90 apartments). then, at the end, there is one little brown wheelibin for compost - at least, there used to be! today it's disappeared!!! i hope it's only a temporary absence - andy & i have just got our system sorted out, using compostable paper bags, because usually you take the rubbish out when you're going somewhere, so taking it out in a container isn't so convenient. anyway, i had to put the compost in with the household rubbish; it felt very wrong.

the apartments in this area are all nicely spaced out from each other, with large areas of grass & playgrounds for the kids. i don't know why they don't offer some of the grassy areas as allotments for the residents - then we could have a proper compost. it's a perfect location for a community garden - there could be a big garden & still heaps of room for the kids to play football & ride their bikes. but who am i to suggest something like this - a foreigner who's not even here half the time; a foreigner who gets fascinated by cultural differences in rubbish collection; a foreigner whose grasp of the local language has barely improved after 6 months of being here.

i have been "here", as in europe, for just over 6 months now, so i feel like i should do some kind of report. but i'm too busy with the UpStage festival, & still getting on top of this cold, plus trying to organise travel for my uk trip that starts next week ... let me just say that "here" has included munich, brussels, bozen, madrid, london, hamburg, odense, copenhagen, uddevalla, graz - plus day-trips to salzburg & innsbruck; next on the itinerary is exeter, edinburgh, belgrade, turin and frankfurt - and that's just this year. most of these trips have been work, but there have been a few holidays in there as well. you can read back in the archive of this blog if you want more detail than this - i've got a festival to organise!