benn:org

Today is the first time in 10 days that I got out of Ecotopia. The camp is great, got loads to tell. Wonderful landscape, people etc. Will post a summary here after the 6th of september. Until then: Dobrey djen!

We arrived to Kosiv/Ukraine! From here it is only 20min by bus to the camp of Ecotopia. Wow, that was a trip. The day before yesterday Alicia and me hitchhiked from Berlin to Teplice, the first town in the Czech Republic. We went directly – thanks to Michael that picked us up after only standing less than a minute at the Autobahn! From Teplice to Prague it was only EUR2.50 for the train and it took us 2 hours or so. We nearly slept through our stop in Prague.. In Prague we went to the main square and spent some time listening to a “Momo” reading and doing street theatre with 3 other Germans under _the_ clock. After some beers we went to an island on the river and slept under the open sky. In the morning we nearly missed our bus to the Ukraine and got ripped off by a friendly taxi driver (he shall rot in hell for his sins). Well, we could stop the bus in the nearby traffic jam. Hmm, we have to work on our timing I think. 🙂 20 hours, EUR45 and 2 border crossings later we arrived to Ivano-Frankivsk in the Ukraine. Things are very different and remind me of South East Asia a bit (squat toilets, mini buses, overloaded vehicles). With some bits of Russian and continous repeating of the places we want to go to we made our way to here, Kosiv. The Internet cafe is around 1.20 per hour, so I will keep you updated. Happy to be here! 🙂

Berlin again, praise my host Alex! 🙂 Yesterday I went with Markus and some friends of his to the new luxurious Kempinsky Hotel in Heiligendamm near Rostock. Not really my kind of places but what they have made out of some old derelict beach villas looks very impressive and attracts a lot of tourists, which are well needed to bring forward the region a bit more. Celeb spotting: We saw Wolfgang Joop standing around near the cafe – wow. Kempinski kicked the local design school off the ground before they started building. I robbed a pen, I feel like such an anarchist now! 😉

I left Schwerin and hitchhiked to Rostock in company of Alicia, an Irish girl that is on the way down to Ecotopia as well. I went to Markus’ birthday party in the evening and I will visit my dad tomorrow. Alicia went to the IGA Gardening Exhibition and on to Berlin.

Phew, my server is getting up and running again after my provider switched it off for security reasons (see below) and after I decided to let them wipe the hard disk for the same reasons. 😉 All this kept me busy the last days. I am not fully there yet, so a “Sorry for any inconvenience caused” flys out to the people that I host stuff for (Eimeir, mash, Paco, Sustainable Ireland). Apart from doing all this fun stuff I am enjoying a beautiful summer in my home town Schwerin – including beach parties, swimming in crystal clear lakes, endless silly-talk nights with Mischa in my favourite pub “Freischütz”, barbecues etc. – until next week.

I’m in Berlin since two days now (thanks for the hospitality, Ronald!). Always good to be here. I just realised that someone hacked my server this morning. Kudos to BloodBR. Probably wasn’t too hard, but why me?? I’m trying to fix this now. Man, I don’t have time for this just now..

Did some Urban Exploring today: The usual Spot a tall building, walk by the security with a straight face, get the lift to the top floor, take the nearest fire exit, walk up a bit, try some doors, find the roof access (is *always* unlocked) and have a phantastic view over the city (bring food and drink if you like) just worked fine again. Memories of the good old days in San Francisco.. 😉

Holidays are great! You have loads of time for things that you normally don’t get a chance to. For me now this is reading. Apart from my book I was just reading on the Internet about “Blogs” (weB logs, so something like this page here), which brought me to blogger.com, which brought me to Google’s jobs page. They eat organic at Google! When people asked me what’s so great about [the programming language] Python, I usually waffled a bit in tech talk and then mentioned that by the way Google uses it a lot. Talking about organic or bio food I now have great new card to play as well. 😉 OK, enough blogging for today and back into the sun.

Arrived to Madrid. Even hotter. Will stay 11 days until the 1st of August.

Went with Sylvain and Sebastien (two Frenchies that I used to work with in Dublin and that moved here a couple of weeks ago) to the beach this night to talk and drink. Hundreds of people from all over the world were doing the same. So much nicer than the pub. 🙂