Month: November 2005

The ethical christmas gift: A Blackspot Shoe brought to you by Adbusters. It’s no joke, Adbusters is not just criticising blind consumerism and big corporations anymore, but takes the next step and offers an alternative. Why did this take so long to happen? 😉 The Blackspot shoes are made from recycled and biodegradable materials, without leather and crafted by workers oranised in labour unions (in Portugal). With every shoe you buy a share of The Blackspot Anticorporation, which entitles you to vote on future decisions of the company. You, the consumer, get empowered. Besides that the shoes look nice and edgy. Maybe Santy reads this here and goes to the Back to Source “shop” in Hamburg and gets me a pair of the Blackspot sneaker (that’s the low shoe, size 45 please).

Three days ago I arrived to Schwerin. Here some details about the frosty trip:

On Friday the 18th I got woken up by my host in Sighisoara, knocking on the door, phone in her hand: Miruna was telling me over the phone that the truck that I will take to get back to Germany is already just outside town and I have about 15 minutes to catch it on the main road. I was expecting the truck one or two days later, so I rushed, packed my stuff and got a lift to the main road. Three trucks from Germany were waiting there. They carried weird, big shiny machines with lots of pipes – cleaning devices for fluids for gas pumping sites. The convoy drove to a town near Bucharest. Unfortunately the customs office there had just closed for the weekend and so the trucks had to wait until Monday. I jumped off, got a chemical toilet cleaning car to Bucharest and spend the weekend with Miruna and her friends in the capital.

Monday the 21st, afternoon: I was struggling with problems on my server when I got another call. The convoy, with one truck less, is on it’s way to the unload place for the machines somewhere in the middle of nowhere between Bucharest and Hungary. I can catch them on the motorway about 100 km from Bucharest in two hours. Get stuff from flat, cross Bucharest by metro to exit towards west, get on car in the dark, explain you have no money, kiss Miruna goodbye, leave for an unknown time – 1h. Drive to kilometre 73 – 45min. After 20 minutes waiting in cold darkness at a crossing near the motorway I see shiny machines go by in the distance. They stop, switch on their revolving lights, I start running. The same night we made it to the village where those monsters need to go. I have Tino’s computer on my lap, following the satellite signal and giving directions. We pass through tiny curvy roads that barely fit the trucks, going by many little bridges infront of houses with small benches on both sides of the bridge, facing each other. There does not seem to be a single bridge in this part of the country without two benches on it – odd. We park the trucks, have some beers and go to sleep. Every truck has two little beds on top of each other in the back of the cabin. My favourite quote this day from driver Tino while on the road: “I sit here in front of the bed all day, watch out of the window and think about what to eat. And I just can’t come up with anything good.” 🙂

The next morning at 6am someone on his way to work at the gas pumping site knocks on the truck door until Tino looks out. “The site is just there”, he is pointing out, “see you later!” We sleep another hour until someone else knocks. A little later we drive to the site, where an old crane and a dozen people work with what looks like improvised equipment on the new fossil fuel conveyour. We put the hundred thousand Euro device next to wooden barrows and axes and drive off towards the border to Hungary. It is dark when we arrive to the enormous truck queue of a few kilometres. Someone lurking around the foreign trucks offers a special service of skipping the queue for a hefty fee. We cross the border a little later, turn and go back into the no man’s land. We need to wait for a truck coming from Hungary the next morning. The coming truck will load its track vehicle bulldozer onto Tino’s truck and Tino will go back to Bucharest. I will get onto the other truck and go to Germany. This was the plan at least.

Sleeping on the Hungarian customs truck parking we get woken up by border guards knocking on the truck door very early. They insist on us leaving the parking towards Romania, they get quite angry. We park in the strip between the borders. Tino goes back to Hungary to help the other driver with customs papers, I stay in the truck for a few hours and observe poor Romanians stuffing dozens of duty free cigarette boxes into their socks, under their jumpers, skirts, into every possible enclosure of their Dacias. In broad daylight, 50 meters from the custom officers they do this all day long, going back and forth. We go for lunch in a sleezy hotel restaurant near the truck parking. This border at the edge of the European Union makes me feel sick somehow. The absense of moral thinking, everything is done through money. If you want to get something over the border it is just a matter of how much money you are willing to spend. You want a girl, how much? The unfriendly waiters overcharge, pocket the difference as if it is the most normal thing in the world. Drivers are frustrated from being delayed, guards are frustrated from seeing frustrated people. Border guards here can easily earn a few thousand Euros “on the side”. They usually drive the biggest cars, have the biggest houses in town. Everything is so obvious! I find out that my trucks probably won’t move for another 20 hours or so because of some missing papers.

This is when my actual trip home starts. At about 5pm on Wednesday I walk over the border to start hitchhiking to Germany at temperatures below zero. Let’s see how it works out. 🙂 After half an hour a Romanian truck driver took me towards Budapest. He is actually on his way to Austria, but needs to stay for the night at the Slovak/Czech border. During the last part of the trip we overtake another Romanian truck. My driver guides him through Bratislava over the radio. They call each other by the cities on their registration plate. Krk. Suceava can you still hear me? Krk. Yes, I’m right behind you, Pitesti. Krk. They will spend the night with their trucks parked next to each other on the big truck parking just before the Czech border because Suceava’s truck does not start well in the mornings. It’s 1am and minus 5 degrees. Pitesti offered me to stay in his truck, telling me it would really be no problem, but I decide to go on. For half an hour I stand on the motorway behind the customs where the car and the truck lanes meet again. Mummed border guards with torches come out of the forrest, check my passport once again, babble something about “stopnica” (little car stopper? I simply love Czech language) into their walkie talkie and walk off into the forrest on the other side of the motorway. A crazy old man in a old, well-decorated, small truck picks me up. Some hours later he drops me off in Prague near the metro. He nearly fell asleep a couple of times on the road, so I tried to keep myself awake and observed him, asking him useless things when the truck came a bit to close to the ditch on the right. I was so tired that I was hallucinating. The repetitive markings on the motorway can turn into all sorts of things I tell you. %) Sitting forward, backward again, drinking water, any move helps. The metro station was deserted, a few people gathered, the gates to the underground were openend, the fans started whirling. I took the first metro at 4:30am to the north of Prague. It got bright while I was waiting for 2 hours for a lift. Ah, the wrong exit, that’s why. The young metal rock lover dropped me off in his hometown Teplice, a few kilometres from the German border towards Dresden. I just had myself wrapped up in clothes again when a small white car with three young Czech gipsies (?) and a tiny open trailer stopped and took me to the centre of Dresden. I took the tram and bus towards the Autobahn to Berlin. I stood at a small drive-up for almost two hours. No cars for Berlin. I asked some road contruction people for directions and walked over a field to a motorway crossing. Wasn’t this supposed to be a drive-up? Hum, I watched the cars on the single lane road connecting the two motorways speeding by me. No one will ever stop. Ah well, sign up, the very first car stops and brings me 300 kilometres in 2 hours almost home. Hitch-hiking, I love thou. The young attactive woman driving is doing stock car races in her spare time, does not like trains and driving at less than 130 km/h. At the service area, again I was just finished closing my jacket, a young hanseatic business man walks towards me, asking where I want to go. He drops me off at a petrol station on the road towards Schwerin. The third person I ask, a man running a small gardening company in his van carrying a plough, takes me right into the centre of Schwerin. His company was just working on behalf of a mobile phone company, which is obliged to plant a certain amount of trees and bushes in compension for every sending mast they build along the fast train tracks. He tells me the secrets of good landscape gardening and drops me off at my favourite web design company in Schwerin: Mandarin Medien, where I will spend most of this winter I think. Summary: 26 hours from Romania to Schwerin, dispite ice and frost, well worth doing. 🙂

Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day. Make sure to avoid shopping or at least feel “encouraged to reflect on the role money plays in your live and in society as a whole” (Japan Times).

My server is up and running again. All websites were down from Monday to Friday – I am very very sorry for this. One reason for the long outage was that I was on the road during the week. Pretty bad timing..

It is definite. This weekend I will leave Romania and go to my hometown in Germany to start working as a part-time teacher in English and computers. I have no clue yet what exactly I will be teaching, but I like surprises. 🙂 Apart from the teaching currently there are smaller and bigger freelance jobs coming in as well. A winter full of work – my wallet (that I don’t have) will be very happy. Sighisoara is rainy, so it will be easy to leave.

A little update on the bicycle protest in Bucharest: It took place last Sunday and about 200 people attended. I couldn’t make it unfortunately, but have a look at these pictures (pictures 2, pictures 3) and this Indymedia article (Romanian only). The protest was about a new fantastic law that forbids bicycle travel on main roads in the capital. However, plans about the protest made their rounds in the local media and in the morning before the protest it was announced that the law is being withdrawn from the agenda. Good stuff, eh?

Great news: As of today my eco activist friends of EYFA (European Youth for Action) run their website on my server! It is a very special moment for me, because through EYFA my life got a quite different direction about three years ago. In 2002 I first attended their annual Ecotopia camp in Ireand. There I met active, idealistic and positive thinking people that have a good understanding of what is going wrong in our western-style lifes, and for the best of it that have real-world solutions, as well as the strong beliefs to put them in action or to campaign for them. They do not expect anything in return but to see the world becoming a little better. I was long looking for people like these “Ecotopians”. When at the camp I saw that also I can give a contribution and spontanously decided to give a small workshop about Open Source software. Since then every year I attended Ecotopia and gave similar workshops, until this year Arthur stepped in and gave his own workshop about the same topic. In 2004 I started hosting the EYFA wiki and discussion forum and I helped with the winter meeting in Pula/Croatia. In the beginning of 2005 EYFA sponsored the development of my Informal software, which they use to simplify the registration progress for their meetings. So now things finally come together on my server. 🙂

What am I working on at the moment? A web form manager called Informal – wow, how exciting I hear you say. Well, I think it is going to be a very useful thing for many people. My friends at EYFA are using it since a while for their meetings and it saves them a lot of work. I just put up a first project page, so if you like have a look to see what it’s all about: Informal. If you have some ideas or comments, please let me know.

The bicycle protest was cancelled because of bad weather. I have no news yet about when it will happen.