As Irish pubs get more and more popular in Austria, so does Guinness. Here is a piece of advice for you: don’t drink Guinness in Austria. In fact, don’t drink Guinness outside of Ireland. Why? Well, there are 3 Guinness breweries in west Europe. One in Dublin, one in London and strangely enough, one in Germany. They all claim to brew the beer using strictly the same receipt, and maybe they do, but it tastes completely different. If you ask me, only the once coming from Dublin tastes like it should. And what do you think are the chances that the one served in Austria is coming from Dublin? Exactly.

After all that, I must confess that I personally don’t drink Guinness at all. There are a lot of little local breweries who are much better. My favourites are Murphy’s and Franciscan brew.

At my last trip to the Off Licence shop, I’ve seen a shelve with beers of the world and Austria’s representative was Zipfer for 5 euros the bottle. Zipfer? For crying out loud, from all the beers of Austria, why Zipfer? Austria offers so many great beers, Stiegl, Hirter, Schlägler, Freistädter, Trumer to name just a few. Of course, I do know the reason why non of them will ever be found outside of Austria. Heineken has bought the Brauunion, which owned most of Austria’s major beer labels. But the major labels are most often the cheap ones, Kaiser, Gösser and Zipfer proof the point. Considering the better brands Brauunion has to offer, like Wieselburger, why do they export Zipfer? Do marketing people actually drink beer?

Renting a car is hopeless. You quite simply can’t select a specific car, only one of a certain group. That said, of course you can choose a certain decent car - once you are over 30 years old. You could for example pop by at Prestige Car Hire in London and rent an Aston Martin for 750 pounds a day. Which would be exactly the same amount of money you would have to spent for a helicopter to bring you from here to there, at least in New Zealand. Yes, most helicopters will struggle to do 300 kph, but so will an Aston once it’s caught in traffic. I’m not able to effort either, so lets stick to reality again. You rent a car from one of the two lower classes and usually end up with some nasty cheap Japanese pocket rocket. Unless you are in the States, where you might end up with an all American small car, which, by all means, is even worse. That said, even Japanese cars are worse in the States, as they are fitted with U.S.-style comedy suspension and are usually underpowered with automatic.

I don’t mind the fact that the cars are relatively inexpensive ones. I don’t need fancy toys, leather seats or a wooden dash, plastic is fine. My problem with all this cars is that they seem to save money in the wrong places. Most of this little cars are loaded with fancy toys and big screens. Big two colour LCD screens of course. It took me a day to adjust the air condition in the Nissan Almeira. At one point I suspected they made the multifunction keyboard deliberately as complicated as possible. Naturally all new cars these days (except our own) come with electronic windows, electronic and heated mirrors, air condition, CD player and board computer. Which is all very nice, but at the same time they are horrible to drive. The clutch in all of this cars is feeling absolutely wobbly, the steering is mostly vague, and the engine is always running out of power at 80 kph. It is not that I expect sports car performance or anything close to it.

I once suspected that the Nissan was indeed powered by an electronic engine and saved the fuel in an extra tank, how else could you explain that the car set of quite fast and run out of power just afterward. Low gearing, to little torque? Nah! And it wasn’t just the Nissan. Pretty much the same story with the Renault Modus, fancy centre mounted dash, lost of buttons (at least each was serving a specific function!) But the clutch was a feel free construction and overtaking was an adventure. Still, the Renault was by far the better car, compared to something like the Mitsubishi Lancer, where - uphill at 55mph - the automatic couldn’t decide which gear to choose.

So are all cheap cars doomed to be crap? I don’t think so. Look at roadsters for example. Most of them are relatively inexpensive sport cars, but they are far from being crap. The Mazda MX5 for example, maybe not everyone’s taste, but all in all a brilliant car. And how is that possible? Because it is focused on the essentials. No expensive fancy toys or mechanics, like folding hardtops. Which, besides of making the car cheaper to produce, also reduces it’s weight, so it doesn’t need a very powerful engine, which makes it even more of a bargain.

I see no reason why it shouldn’t be possible to use the same recipe for little hatchbacks. The Rover 45, which I recently got as a replacement car as the Land Rover spent some time in the Garage, proved my point. Even if the car was fairly new 2002, the interior looked like it wasn’t modified since the 80’s, after all, there must have been a reason why the company went bust, but it was nicely trimmed and functional. Most importantly, the car was actually quite nice to drive. The clutch felt almost like in a BMW of 10 years ago, and the engine delivered torque quite nicely through its rev range. I still wouldn’t want to buy it, not even as a daily commute vehicle. For one, I have a feeling it is rather unreliable, but more importantly the driving position is absolutely and by all means crap. I didn’t have enough headroom, so I lowered the seat as much as possible, by doing so, it folded backwards and I ended up so far back that I could barley reach the gear leaver, at least in 1st, 3rd and 5th.

See what I mean?

I am sure there must be an inexpensive, cheap to run car out there that follows the roadster principle while offering enough space. I might give the Logan a test run.

For the last three months we didn’t really had the space to put up our TV. Now, after we finally moved into the flat we waited for - yes we really did, and yes I will post some pictures and blog about it later - we have the room, but the TV died. After 2000 km in the back of a Land Rover and being carried around for a few times, it simply died. For a number of reasons I decided to have it repaired. One is the fact, that the TV’s over here have different audio tuners which means that it would be only of limited use back in Austria.

What surprised me is how little I missed it. I missed the surround system and the fact that we still don’t have Internet access at home drives me half crazy. But the TV? Not at all. We went to the cinema more often and borrowed a DVD every now and then, but not that often, as I refused to watch action movies without the surround system.

Even when we will get it back, we won’t be able to watch TV, you know, because if an Irish tuner can’t decode continental audio signals, neither can an Austrian decode the Imperial one. And I couldn’t care less. I once argued with friends that for me TV, as it currently exists, is a dead technology. I am aware that a lot of people love to lie in front of a TV and spend hours zapping through channels, but that doesn’t mean that I am one of them. Personally I hate the concept of zapping, and when I look at the rising sales of digital receivers with build in harddiscs, I get the impression that I am not the only one. But recording the shows you want to see so you can watch them when you have time is not fixing the cause, it is working around the root problem. I don’t have time to spend hours in front of a gleaming box in the hope to find something entertaining. I want to see what I want when I want it! An alarming number of people downloads TV series through the Internet, and the Industry is calling them pirates and criminals. But how many of them just want to see the latest Episode of LOST or Battlestar they missed because they had better things to do then sitting in front of a glowing box. A lot I would guess. Still, the legally offered programs are a joke, Apples iTunes for example, who does offer a few good shows, streams them in so bad quality that you could impossibly watch them on a big TV. Things will have to change.

So even if I am not going to use it as a TV, it will be nice to have the big screen back, makes it more comfortable to watch DVD’s and sooner or later we will end up with Sky. Rather sooner I would guess, but that’s up to my better half.