benn:org

I was in Hamburg for the weekend to get an intense Hospitality Club treatment. We were working on the redesign of the website, coordinating tasks, defining goals, making drafts for all sub pages, and I was hacking some HTML and CSS. Have a look at the redesign page to get an idea of where we are going. Lupochens drafts are the ones that we base the new design on. Also there were two HC related partys, just to remind us what we are doing all this for. 😉 Thanks to Wiebke, Micha, Simon, Veit, Matthias and all the others – it is great working with you and I see you soon. I’m off to Barcelona now. Sun is shining, roads are clear – go!

“A man needs to travel. By his own means, not by stories, images, books or TV. By his own, with his eyes and feet, to understand what is his. To some day plant his own trees and give them some value. To know the cold to enjoy the heat. To feel the distance and lack of shelter to be well under his own ceiling. A man needs to travel to places he doesn’t know to break this arrogance that makes us see the world as we imagine it, and not simply as it is or may be. That makes us teachers and doctors of what we have never seen, when we should just be learners, and simply go see it.” Amyr Klink – Sabina, thanks for sending this to me. 🙂

Bucharest! Busy with Internet work.. That’s the thing about it, it follows you whereever you go. Is this good or bad? Anyway, I am in this nice block. See the funky patterns in the park? Bucharest is full of geometrical city planning. It’s more than 30 degrees, so I actually prefer to sit inside. Click, click..

I left Schwerin a week ago to visit a friend’s birthday party in Leipzig. The day after I went to Berlin to attend the Hospitality Club beach camp. I was only going to stay for a day and then go to Romania with a carsharing lift, but for various reasons I decided to stay with the 600 lost travellers until yesterday and joined a small nomadic tribe (Hello Sabina, hello Dante! 🙂 on a mission through Berlin. It’s not really clear yet when I will leave – I’m floating.. Thanks to Alex for hosting us all.

I’m about to leave Schwerin – another week or so? On my Sunday morning flight over the world with great grandfather Google I accidently zoomed into the Saudi Arabian desert and found this giant funky shit. Try to find Pacman and his big friends! 🙂 Wikipedia tells me it’s Center pivot irrigation, typical for Saudi Arabian agriculture. Aha!

On my way back from Amsterdam on a beautiful spring morning two weeks ago I first encountered the total control over the motorways around the city by the police. I didn’t even finish drawing my sign when already a police motorbike stopped right in front of me and sent me back a few kilometres towards the city. There I tried a petrol station with little luck, walked on a few hundred metres and found one of the shrouded in legends “Liftplaats” – a stopping area for hitchhikers created by Dutch city planners at the roads leading out of the cities. It has a big traffic sign with a thumb on it, a place to lock your bike, a bin and enough room for the cars to stop and accelerate (Google maps liftplats Amsterdam). Great! Ten minutes an I was on my way towards Germany with a cigar smoking bronze sculpture artist and art trader. At a petrol station I asked someone heading further towards to Germany. He told me his wife and him adopted three kids from Columbia whose parents had been killed in a fight over drugs. Like on my way into Holland I got a lift by an African person in a delivery van over the border. He was delivering goods for the afro shop in Osnabrück. It was afternoon already when I first walked to the wrong exit of town, and dusk when I got to the right one. I got a short lift by an (ex?) junkie couple towards the motorway. While she left the car to buy something he told me that his military service in the Kosovo war, with seeing how brutally people slaughtered each other left him no escape but drugs. They said they will come back in two hours and take me to Bremen. I decided to turn down their offer and after almost 2 hours waiting for lifts in the dark I jumped over a fence into a small forest and pitched my tent. The road was roaring all night and I could not resist to unpack my laptop to watch an episode of Futurama. Silly, I know..

The next morning it lasted about 10 minutes until a young driver on business travels took me to a petrol station outside Bremen, two hours further north. There I asked a young couple if they could give me a lift to Hamburg. They dropped me in the centre, I got the bus to the exit towards Berlin. Hamburg city planners decided to erase the favourite hitchhiking spot “Horner Kreisel” (a roundabout before the motorway to the East) from the map by building another car lane and high curbs in its place. Great! But fuck you (excuse me), city un-planners, after 15 minutes my female co-hitchhiker and me got a lift by a nice big caravan with a friendly driver at the bus stop just before the roundabout. She got off at a petrol station on the way and I went on with the caravan driver, a motor pilot and catamaran owner, right to the heart of Schwerin. Juicy smells of fresh green parfumed me on my walk through the castle’s garden to the Mandarin office, my current shared office. A nice trip. :o)

I’m in Amsterdam since more than a week now. Slowly I am getting used to my beloved bicycles being the hero on the roads. Still I have a big smile in my face when I see a father cycling through traffic with his two kids in a huge box in the front and the mother sitting sidewards on the carrier in the back. I visited several squats or ex-squats, mainly with the EYFA crew for dinner or a night out. The ASCII hacklab and tech collective was one of the more interesting for me. Activist people, healthy food, organic beer, free wireless Internet all around. Yes, I think I stay a little longer, but I need to go to Germany soon to sort out some things before leaving for the summer.

What happened since Breakpoint? First see some pictures of the decoration team and the Inca statue that I helped building. On Tuesday morning after easter I started hitchhiking from the road to the motorway just outside the Breakpoint hall. After half an hour I started walking on a bit towards the motorway, because it was nice and sunny. After a few kilometer a courier driver in his private car stopped and took me to Frankfurt airport, doing his deliveries on the way. I went by metro to the main train station to pick up my tent which Miruna was so kind to send it to me from Romania by bus. Thanks, Miruna! 🙂 Around the Atlassib office it felt like being back in Bucharest – Romanian language and customs amongst the people loading there many bags into the bus, the interior of the office, the dry and warm (polluted) air. I went out to a petrol station right before the motorway crossing towards south, after a while a friendly young man stopped and took me one hour south to Mannheim. His girlfriend had just quit with him after six years of relationship. Right before he got on the car! He was very calm, saying that it had not sunk in yet.. A while ago he started this cocktail bar – make sure to check it out, when you are around. 🙂 In Mannheim I stood beside the main road towards Heidelberg when a Malaysian woman with her parents visiting stopped. I felt the urge to visit south-east Asia again when chatting to the parents. Such an exciting part of the world. In Heidelberg they were so kind to give me a lift right to the address that I was heading for. I met Cristina, a good friend from Bucharest that is studying in Heidelberg for a while. She was an excellent host, accomodated, fed and showed me around town.

Two mornings later I went to the drive-up of the motorway, where after one hour another hitchhiker joined me while waiting. Another hour or so later an Iraqi man who already had a carsharing passenger on board took me a few hours up to some motorway service area near Collogne. Phew, he had quite some style of driving, not keeping lanes, breaking way too late and so on. From the service area I got picked up after almost two hours by two young Arab people in a brand new fast car. There was something fishy about those two, the driver, a very smart guy, constantly talking into his headset, speeding like there’s no tomorrow, and his co-driver something like an assistent. Probably there is no real tomorrow for them, they told me they were driving up and down Germany non-stop since four days without sleep, living of energy drinks and a few hundred Euros for petrol. The co-driver told me that the driver is being searched for by the police. I asked no further questions and was happy to get off at some petrol station an hour further north. Phew. After two hours (it really wasn’t my day, I didn’t care anymore which way people were going) a friendly man stopped, went a bit the wrong direction and dropped me off again at some road towards the motorway to Holland. At a bus stop I watched the sun going lower and lower, thinking about what my options were and how good chances to get to Amsterdam the same day are. Suddenly a black convertible of the latest and biggest kind with a star on the hood stopped. I squeezed my bag somewhere where there was naturally no room for it and we flew off with Genesis’ “No son of mine” in repeat mode and a lot of fresh country air, some 400 horses pulling us down the empty motorway away from the sun. His mission was to pick up some cans of Dutch beer from a petrol station near the border and then to return to the Ruhr area to attend some football match “auf Schalke”. Although he wasn’t feeling well about it he took me right to the border. His feeling was right, there was a large scale police operation going on checking every car going in and out Holland. He forgot to pay a few fines in Holland some time ago, so he had to spend some extra time explaining things to the guards. I asked the driver of the car next to us if he is going towards Amsterdam, so he was and off I went. Bayo from Nigeria with his electronic gadgets took me to a town outside Amsterdam where I got the train to the station near the EYFA office. Dunja picked me up and we went to get food in a squat nearby, where I met some old and new friends. 🙂

Some quick news: I finished a two weeks course of teaching C++ at Schwerin’s chamber of commerce and I got myself a new laptop (iBook 12″), because my other 7 year old one finally passed away. 🙁 R.I.P., Weasel. Currently I am at the Breakpoint computer demo art gathering. Here I help with decorations – I spent all afternoon carving a golden mask for an Inca king out of polystyrene – and in the “info team”, where I will guide people around the gathering during the weekend.

Hehe, our server got slashdotted today. A Slashdot front page article about Google and Biopiracy linked to the Captain Hook awards campaign hosted on our server. So this caused a little down-time due to quite a bit of traffic coming to us at once. Cool! 🙂