Recently in Planet Earth Category

Czech may be the language of most of my ancestors, but unfortunately my grandmother decided to not teach a single word of it to my father, so I am isolated from this potential facet of my cultural heritage. A recent visit to Prague has revealed that most of the language is a total mystery to me. Even after acquiring a few of the quintessential words necessary for survival (e.g. vepřové pečeně), the pronunciation is still something of a challenge. It's not so much the numerous diacritics on the consonants, it's more that the language seems to rely much less on vowels and that the consonants appear in perfectly tongue-splitting combinations, such as in Plch zdrhl skrz drn, prv zhltl hrst zrn or in the sentence that serves as the title for this blog entry and which seems to be famous enough to even have its own wikipedia entry.

They all speak English too. I'm not surprised, considering how many tourists they have to cater for. It would have been fun to hear more of these tourists twisting their tongues while trying to utter something in Czech, but none of them (except myself) did. Cowards. Not that anybody understood much of what I was trying to say, and I also gave up soon enough. I did get the vepřové pečeně and the pivo though.

The newspapers tell me that the current heat wave in Vienna is caused by hot air from North Africa that is swept into Austria via the Mediterranean. I'm fully inclined to believe this, not only because it's incredibly hot and humid, but also because the air has quite an unusual scent. At the moment it smells of sea water and pine trees in front of my house, just the way it smells in Crete, despite the fact the the sea and the nearest pine trees are several hundred kilometres away.

I've lived in this particular part of Vienna for a little over ten years now. It's an urban area, close to the city center, in a district with a Green Party majority, but virtually no green, no parks, and no ponds or other bodies of water.

A strange regulation exists in the American state of California, called Proposition 65, which requires apartment complexes, schools, etc., to post warning signs if any chemicals used on the property (e.g. detergents and suchlike) can cause cancer. Some of these, such as the one pictured left, do not sound very reassuring. You'd think that people should stop using such substances rather than warn others that they are being exposed to them. It's a strange world.

I was made aware of this through an interesting comment that Aardvark reader Jann posted here today.

Gelegentlich wundert man sich schon ein wenig, was alles verkauft wird bzw. verkauft werden darf. Zum Beispiel fand ich vor kurzem folgendes auf einer Packung: