benn:org

I am in Mangalia on the Romanian Black Sea coast since a few days now. We are visiting Miruna’s mum and enjoy a life without worries, but with nice traditional food, good literature and fabulous weather. About a month ago we travelled from Schwerin to Berlin, from there separately to Iasi in Romania, to Ecotopia in the Republic Moldavia, back to Romania for a week, just over the border to Bulgaria for a few days and then to Mangalia. I hope I will soon find the time to post a detailed account of this trip, a journey often like travelling in time, between so many cicles of friends, families, cultures, between west and east, high tech glass and steel cities and peaceful villages without roads.

Last night Miruna and me arrived to my home in Pinnow near Schwerin. From Dijon Carol and me got a lift to Germany by the Saxonian hackers “20H” and “Tiger”. Carol got off at Metz. From Frankfurt to Hagen I went with a doctor of Afghanian origin, and the last 20 km to Wuppertal I got a free train ride on someone else’s ticket. Miruna and me stayed a few days in a small town near Wuppertal and started our trip to Schwerin very early in the morning. The friend of Miruna’s family that we were staying with gave us a lift to a petrol station towards Bremen. After two hours of white-bread people driving by us a friendly couple on their way with a trailer to north-east Germany brought us to Bremen. The two had travelled off the beaten path since decades and quite some stories to tell about Romania, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in the 80s. In Bremen we spent the afternoon with Antje, an old friend of mine from my village that I didn’t see in years. Back on the road we waited 5 minutes until a salesman for luxury watches picked us up. Quote: “You know, diamonds easily make a watch cost more than a million.” He dropped us in Hamburg at the exit towards Berlin. There were two other hitchhikers, which did not look too lucky. After 20 minutes a nomadic tattoo artist and painter brought us to somewhere near Wismar, 20 km from Schwerin. At a crossing in the middle of nowhere a young guy cruising around the villages picked us up in his really big old car, and drove us to Schwerin very slowly (to save petrol). We had a beer at a pond in the centre where my mum and my stepfather picked us up and brought us to Pinnow. They had prepared the guest appartment very nicely for us and we were happy to arrive. Good weather, nice lifts, nice people.. 🙂

I uploaded my LTSP presentation to the brand new Files section. The presentation went great and will be repeated tomorrow. Photos and a report will follow.

I arrived to Dijon last night. Leaving from Brussels I got delayed by the rain a lot, so I had to stay in a field somewhere between Luxemburg and Metz. It started to rain heavily as I was starting to put up my tent. In the hurry I must have bent the longer tent pole too much, so it broke with a loud crack – no, noooooo! Why now, why here, arghhh. Rain soaked everything and completed my misery. I covered my bag with the tarp, searching for the pegs in the dark. Then I found this small piece of pipe in the peg bag, which I never knew what it was for. Heureka! It exactly fits over the pole and fixes broken poles. 🙂 In the morning rain forced me to sleep late, ah, there could be worse things. I arrived to Dijon late in the afternoon, a small film crew on their way to Barcelona gave me a lift from Nancy. I walked the last kilometres to the local squat, home of the pRINT! hacklab, which will be homing the nocturnes, the night events of the RMLL free/libre software meeting next week. OK, enough links.. The first vegan food has been cooked, the first organisers’ meeting attended, going to bed now. The squat is huge! A childhood dream has come true, I am staying in a medium-size empty factory, inhabited by friendly people, with many rooms and a warehouse as the living room, full of all sorts of creative junk that has been moved around, worked with, abandoned, just to be picked up by another person walking through. First class graffiti everywhere and space, space, space.

Just to remind you of this year’s Ecotopia, 1st to 14th of August.. It is the annual European summer camp of eco activists, taking place in a different country every year. The setting of the camp is comparable with a rainbow gathering, much smaller though and with the difference that Ecotopians have some more down-to-earth solutions for “another world”. This year’s topic is “Alternative Technologies” and the camp will take place in Moldova in the Saharna nature reserve. Find more information about Ecotopia on the official website. If you want to get travel and visa costs reimbursed, you should register within the next days, so the folks in Amsterdam have enough time to deal with it (application form). So, see you there? Miruna and me will arrive there only within the second week unfortunately..

It’s Miruna’s birthday! You can now visit her at Miruna.net. 🙂

I am in Brussels since almost three weeks now. I know, that is not quite around the corner from Bucharest. I had a nice trip via Sighisoara, Budapest, Prague and Leipzig to attend a wedding of a friend near my hometown Schwerin. From there I went straight to Belgium into Miruna’s arms and it looks like I will stay a little longer than expected. 🙂 The city is buzzing, life is easy, we have a lightening fast Internet cable right into our room and I need to work on some little things. So, why move around? In the beginning of July I will go to the Free Software event RMLL2005/Nocturnes in Dijon to help with the set up a little. I might post a little report about my trip from Pula to here in a few days.

At least for a few days until I reach Bucharest. For today the weather forecast is sunny, then some showers. Let’s see how it goes.

Last night the US American anarchist philosopher and author John Zerzan gave a talk about Primitivism in the Monteparadiso Hacklab. The concept is pretty radical, actually it is difficult to be more radical. Primitivists advocate a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of technology. There you go.. Apart from that it was interesting to share the room with a friend of the Unabomber for a night. 🙂

There were several wild parties around the building and some rain and sun on the weekend. I had some leisure to tinker a little and the outcome is my brand new location indicator device (to the right, not to miss). 🙂 For the techie in you: To use it I just type a little text for the bubble and click a point on the map. The wonderful ImageMagick cuts the big map, draws the circle, texts, my face and other things on the small map and writes the image files. The image editing has been done in Gimp, which I start to like more and more.