ohhhh markus ….

while checking out all the different car rates (AVIS, Hertz, shame on you! you are by far the most expensive. winner was thrifty.com) for my trip, I discovered something strange. If I book my car on dollar.at instead of dollar.com its much cheaper, but I wasn’t quite sure if thats legally possible (there might be something in the footprint), so I thought, hey, lets write them an email and ask them about it. but since I had so many browser windows open I accidently refered to thrifty.at instead of dollar.at and sent it to the customer support of dollar.com. so that was my “no-brain part”.

but now guess what the reply was …

My eMail (to dollar.com):

hello!
I have an austrian driving license and a secondary residance in austria (although my primary residance is in New York, living here with a working visa).
can I rent a car from the austrian site thrifty.at (its cheaper for me) or do I need to go to thrifty.com?

tia,
markus

and here is the answer (notice the last two lines):

Thank you for your e-mail. If you are a resident of NY, then
you will need to use the thrifty.com site.

Thank you for choosing Dollar.

Krystle
Dollar.com Help Desk

Update: as I just found out, dollar and thrifty are the same company. so shame on me (instead of dollar).

I am planing for weeks (ok, days) my vacation like crazy just to find out that I might be screwed when I was trying to book my car and reading the smallprint. Unfortunately I need an international driving license to rent a car. and guess what. I don’t have it. oh what a laugh. Now I need to find out if I can get it somehow at the consulate. so tomorrow will be …. interesting. (these are the moments when you realize, oh yes, I am really not in Austria anymore and things are … different). oh well.

update: regarding to a phone call with an employee of trifty.com I am fine as long as she can identify it as my driving license. but I guess I will get a translation from the embassy, just to be on the safe side. and make a mental note to get a local driving license.

unfortunately my phone rang this morning, waking me up. fortunately on the other end of the line was Funichi Fukuda, inviting me over to the dance school where he teaches for a performance presentation. I was quite overwhelmed by the performances (but could only tape two, because my battery died. hate you, battery!).

enjoy!

I just finished the latest and last Harry Potter book, after reading almost 16 hours nonstop, removing the outside world with ear plugs abd just equipped with a big bar of Milka and some sushi. and what can I say, it was splendid day and one of the best reading experiences I had for at least two years Highly recommended.

as for the past 3 months since my last entry (omg, is it really that long ago?), there happened a lot, and it is no coincidence that blogging stopped when I finally moved over to Mac OS, unable to find a good offline blogging software (still haven’t found anything that comes close to Windows Live Writer, to my big surprise), and life has been, well, kept me busy kind of. There have been very happy moments in the meantime and a very very sad one, and by looking back everyhting seems to blur and fade.

Its just, there are so many things going on I want to write about, that in the end nothing gets written down; finding myself very often unable to answer the simple question what I did last weekend simply because my shortterm memory refuses to cooperate while being constantly overwritten by all the colors and sensations you get constantly flooded by here.