Carinthia goes spruce
Our field researchers have returned from their Easter sojourn in picturesque rural Austria. Not surprisingly, their reports testify to exactly that mixture of the bizarre, the outlandish and the barely believable that seems as archetypical of the Austrian countryside as of exotic lands like India, Malaysia, or Oberbayern.
Our favourite report in the latest batch comes from Catchy Carinthia, southernmost province of Austria, and, like most other provinces, a tourist region. Apparently, people there got worried that increasing numbers of mobile phone antennas would spoil travellers’ enjoyment of Carinthian hills come alive from the sound of those Grenzland-choirs. So someone had the glorious idea to mask mobile phone antennas as spruce. According to our informants, some Carinthian villages are now literally plastered with fake spruce. Studies about the effects of fake trees on dogs’ digestive tracts must surely be in the making. Some tourist managers were overheard discussing the development of “mobile shrub kits” that enable Carinthians to turn their ugly cars into bushes. There’s potential here for Camouflage Carinthia.