Sleepwalking

On my fourth day in Salzburg I felt homesick for three minutes. Now that I survived the first week I feel at home here. You do find viennese people a lot in Salzburg these days though. The editor of the newspaper der Standard walks with his son by the shop Salzburg-Salz, where you can get whole brick stones of salt cut out of some mountain. The director of Vienna's People's Theatre sits at the Café Tomaselli where you can get sweet strudels that are just ... perfectly expensive so I only have one a week. Tomaselli is in the house where Mozart's wife raised the kids after his death. On the street between Tomaselli and the University's law faculty a little skeleton is dancing and singing "Tutti Frutti, oh Rudi!" The skeleton produced from carved wood is skillfully made to sing and dance by the puppet master who pulls the strings. The art dealer Ursula Krinzinger is enchanted by the show and throws a coin into the suitcase on the ground. She walks leisurely from the Churfürststraße into Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse and on the corner to Franziskanergasse she puts on her sunglasses just to take out her purse again and she hands some money to a beggar sitting on the ground. On the very corner I see the politician Peter Fichtenbauer, member of the extreme right party FPÖ. As people's attorney he lately surprised positively: he stepped in for an asylum seeker who had waited 18 years for having his asylum application answered. Now he asks a policeman where to find a cash machine. Ursula Krinzinger walks on into the Rupertinum. She visits the exhibition Art/Histories and takes a look at the photos that show the house where Leo Trotzki lived exiled on a turkish island from 1929 to 1933.

I meet the main suspect of the crime at Fotohof at the bar Denkmal. In order to study him I take him to an art opening and make him drunk on the way. At the bus station we meet a young lady, a fellow student from the Summer Academy who smells of booze. I share a bottle of red wine with the main suspect and he tells me about his art: photo shooting. On a bicycle trip he had met a homeless man who blabbered him full for an hour while the suspect made only three analogue photos. I think that is strange, I just made ... like a couple of hundred digital photos within the same time period. Is the probability not much higher that I have a cool photo? So we chat about such things and the suspect says that the photographer Paolo Woods who gives the course at the Summer Academy once was abducted by some Taliban which made him stop reporting from war zones. We walk along the pond at Leopoldskron and around 9.30pm we finally arrive at the gallery opening. A painter from Kraków is exhibiting, Bogumil Ksiazek. The gallery owner says she had to protect him from all the women around because Bogumil is admired for his physical appearance. I say the two sentences that I can say in polish to Bogumil: "Luckily I am not an artist. My life would be difficult if I was one." Bogumil tells us about the clochard Hermes who lives on the streets of Kraków. Bogumil befriended Hermes and painted him repeatedly in oil. We continue redwine. The gallery owner and her husband, a doctor in Hallein, want to take us to their appartment. Here there is even more art, she shows us the room of her son without asking him or knocking and the dog starts barking like mad. So we thank them and leave together with a chinese piano professor. It is late but I still don't know enough about the suspect so I take him to the Felsenkeller, a steamy club inside the mountain. I don't know very much about what happened there.