Berlin-Friedrichshain seems a like nice place for a little work break. I’m settling in here for a week. Thank you, wonderful 7! The last two days of Read_Me in Arhus were pretty exciting: Apart from a lot of visual and conceptional stuff there was an Oriental Slackers Salon serving tea and various sweets done by Lisa and Patrice, a live gig with a reprogrammed dot matrix printer functioning as a synthesizer playing along various intruments made out of old hardware by Lauren and Paul, a radio station playing randomly created music, a movie mincer, a concert with automated window blinds, another one with Lego Mindstorms robots and VJ sets on self-made software. The first time I saw thrilling live-coding music sessions, meaning people writing and modifying several little programs that generate melodies, hammering beats and flashy visuals while the music is playing. You can watch them coding on a projector. Mostly two or more programmers’ screens are overlayed, so that looks pretty funky already. Here is a very good article by one of the live coders on Perl Music. — Also I talked to Trevor, a rather interesting intellectual with his very own, brusk attitude.
On Saturday Yew-Sun from China/Australia/UK and me started to go back to Germany pretty late in the afternoon. After only a few minutes standing on a road going out of the centre we were picked up by a very friendly and relaxed young doctor that used to hitchhike a lot as well. He brought us to Kolding. Getting out of Kolding was harder than we thought. At the spot that we walked to people were only going to the west coast but not down to Germany. So we walked back into town. Yew-Sun did not enjoy living on the roads as much as me, so she decided to check into a hostel and take the train the next morning. I said goodbye, had a look at a citymap and walked out of the centre towards the motorway. It was getting dark and I found a nice meadow to tent. I thought of the big East Germany party near my hometown that I would miss that night, watched the moon and went to bed.
The next morning I picked some apples from a tree on the way and walked towards the motorway. The bridge over the motorway that I saw on the map the night before turned out to be a small road going through a valley under a huge bridge. No chance of getting up there. So there I was wandering the forests of Kolding, walking through rivers, cow meadows and up hills, looking up at the trees, thinking about how I could get rid of the heavy laptop in my bag through virtual desktop computing. 😉 There seemed to be a lot of horse riding in this forrest, so the paths were pretty good to walk. Finally I could see some signs of the busy service area I was aiming for. Of course the folks in their safe cars, feeling generally unsafe in this unknown, unfriendly, loud environment they have just been dropped in, gave me strange looks when I came out of the bushes with muddy feet, my walking stick and a happy face. I asked two or three drivers for lifts until shortly after an IT technician from southern Germany gave me a lift to Hamburg. He was on his way back from a fishing holiday with his friends in Denmark, and he was telling a lot of stories from his time at the German army. Shooting wooden huts to flames with big machine guns and giving out to younger soldiers obviously is good fun, I must try that some time. It was very sunny when I crossed Hamburg from west to east by public transport and on foot. I stood at the infamous Hamburg hitchhiking spot “Horner Kreisel” for only 20 minutes when a shiny Mercedes with wide tires stopped. Very, very fast we drove to Berlin. There was a big traffic jam some kilometres before Berlin, but the clever navigational system with its soft, yet a little dull and robotic woman’s voice safely directed us around it. As we talked, the driver – a young IT business man – showed interest in my technical skills and as it looks I might do a small job for him soon. Hitchhiking is like a box of chocolates!