Mad Friday.

A trip or rather deja-vu.

We needed to return the hired cement mixer to Obi and with that in mind, Bob strapped it on top of the trailer and we drove to Oberwart this morning. A slow drive with an orange beacon behind us. Yes, the obligatory Obi orange clad the cement mixer.

Even at ten town was hectic and busy. First stop was Obi and thankfully that went well but now we had a trailer in tow. As we combined the trip with a visit to supermarkets, Bob had to sit it out in the car, guarding our trailer ( yes, still a bit of South African nostalgia left over ) while I whizzed the trolley around the overflowing aisles with dexterity. Bob did take a book to while the time away and he was as patient as can be.

One would think that no shop would be open from today on in. The tills had queues of up to ten deep, the aisles were at times rendered impassable by lone trolleys and of course the ubiquitous shelf packers kept on wheeling their outsized trolley all over. Honestly, I've never seen so many people shopping at the same time. There were daughters taking their elderly mothers for an Easter shop, and it was rather comical seeing the obviously urbanites ( who don't bat an eyelid at spending five euros on a cup of Joe ) having to compare the merits and price of a bar of soap for ten minutes. Yes, it's the little things...

At the corner of the spice aisle, I saw a woman stop and look at me. She looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't place her until she started grinning...it was one of my walking gals, alas her hair had been adversely affected by humidity and I by stupidity. Gosh, I felt like such a fool and one can't very well say that the hair had made her unrecognizable, can one? Anyway, we chatted for a good while until I remembered Bob sitting outside in the car, cooling his heels.

Driving about town with a trailer in tow is not much fun although it came in handy transporting bags of soil for the upcoming vegetable planting. This time I sat in the car while Bob entered the crowed nursery, guarding our chariot. It took a while until he returned with several bags of topsoil, while casually mentioning that he'd stood behind my ' boyfriend ' at the check out....a man who once, years ago asked me to dance at the local community center and whom I'd be hard pressed to pick out of a line up.

Biggi