GRAZIAN GREATNESS

My final stop in Austria, Graz is yet another beautiful river-side city, reasonably close to the Slovenian border, and it's here I find the funkiness I felt to be missing in Salzburg. This is much more of a student town, and acquired the much-deserved title of 'European Culture Capital' in 2003. Sure enough, it's buildings are beautifully preserved and there's more of the greenery that I love, either in small city parks scattered throughout town or up on 'Schlossberg', the Castle Hill area I walk upon one morning and gaze down over the myriad of rust-red rooftops below.

On my first day here, the busking is great. It's a Sunday afternoon, and I play on a quiet cafe lined street in the Franciscan quarter near Haupt Platz, the main square. The restaurants are filled mainly with music lovers and students, here from the States and other parts of Germany / Austria for the festival season. They come and speak to me and invite me to their shows, but alas, alack, whimsical traveller that I am, I plan on only staying for a night.

That all changes when I move down the street to a different perch and see ANNA, a German girl who lives near the Austrian border and who I met in Salzburg a few days ago. We both laugh to see each other, as it's something we'd joked about previously - she'd told me she was coming here to study dance, music and drama for three weeks of her holiday. It's really nice to see a familiar face and she invites me to stay at her student accomodation the following night, an offer I take up as we talk over pizza 'after the show', he he.

Austria seems to be kind of a small country... the next day, a man in a red shirt comes up to me and tells me he saw me at the airport in Brussels, that we caught the same flight to Salzburg together, that he saw me playing in the street in Salzburg AND that lo and behold, here we both are again! Uncanny... another woman tells me she saw me in Salzburg as well - what's happening here?!

As well as rediscovering how small the world seems to be, I feel like a children's entertainer all over again when I'm playing on the main street and three young mothers stop with their strollers all filled with under one year olds. All of a sudden I have a captive audience of three sets of wide blue eyes, all not sure what quite to make of this big mouthed singer in the middle of the tram lined street. When one of them starts doing a little dance in his seat it's a great moment. Yet another mother and child stop out of the blue to watch what must look like a children's show by now and I feel like I'm back doing pre-school storytime at the library (an old job of mine).

My last busking session is a great one - I play right opposite the main tram stand on Hauptplatz, it's busy and sunny and a great way to say goodbye to Austria, this country I've loved for a week. A man stops to sing 'Guten Abent Gut Nacht' with me (German lullaby I learnt in singing class ten years ago) and kisses my hand goodbye with a flourish. I take this as my cue to pack up, and leave in good spirits. At the train station I eat a typically Austrian lunch of Sauerkraut on pumperknickel bread and prepare to board my train into Slovenia, eyes open in search of the place where country merges into country and Western Europe becomes more Eastern, where perhaps I can enter the kind of places I've been longing to go for a while now...