Lost in the North

The "Green" Chewing Gum?

2011-05-04T13:31:00.005+02:00

I recently read an article on Slate about chewing gum. The author is concerned about the low biodegradability of the gum, and that city administrations such as London are spending huge money to remove gums from the streets, using things like steam or chemicals. Therefore, he seems to advocate recycling chewing gum, which would imply convincing people to dispose of the gum in a separate garbage bin. Or, even better, we could buy green (magic word) tropical chewing gum from friendly gum farmers in Yucatán.

It really sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? This would create jobs in areas where people would otherwise emigrate from and "invade" civilized countries (and, in the case of Europe, become parasites of the welfare state). It is a much used argument, invoked as a panacea for all problems of modern society, from global warming and garbage disposal, to poverty and immigration, and it is the core of the new green attitude and policies gaining ground in Western society. But in reality, this is only another of those delusions of modern society, according to the principle "change everything so that everything remains the same".

Luckily, the article also reminded the reader that chewing a gum is a totally useless activity. Thank Goodness. It is funny that we need someone to remind us that. So many everyday actions, or products we shop, have become so typical and so deeply embedded in our modern lifestyle that we dare not question them. But it is far worse than this, unfortunately. Chewing licorice twig is also mostly useless, or at least the reason why most people would chew it as I do sometimes would probably be just the fact that it tastes good. The difference is that while licorice is a real thing (natural and readily available, without factories needed for processing) and has interesting medicinal properties, chewing gum is exactly the opposite.

Chewing gum is a symbol of the dominant culture: a totally useless, pointless act, that involves massive destruction of the natural environment (through the construction of factory to process the raw materials, and dams and all sorts of power stations needed to power them). There is something far worse than failing to throw a chewed gum in the bin: it's the act of chewing it in the first place. Or, even worse, the act of buying it in the first place. Chewing gum is a non-food without any purpose at all - in fact, through the massive production of saliva it induces, it fools the digestive system into thinking that food is being ingested, so we are the whole time on "digestive mode" while in fact we are not taking any food whatsoever. Its flavours are fake, like eating a pizza made of plastic (who would do that? oh, it's coming, I'm sure of it, and then, we'll all buy it!), and if not directly dangerous or noticeable, they do have an effect on our metabolism, and they certainly do have an effect on the environment, because of the technology and the energy needed to manufacture them. Do we really need all this?

Oh, I almost forgot: we even spend money for this! And, given the amounts, a lot: "Worldwide, humans chew about 560,000 tons of gum each year", the article says. Do your maths, and please include the costs for cleaning up the streets. Chewing gum is a powerful symbol of modern society and its attitude towards money: we make money by 1) destroying the natural environment, 2) forcing animals and traditional peoples out of their traditional environments (yes, dams count too), and ultimately, 3) we rob these poor brown people of their own culture until they start desiring the white man's way of living, and eventually start participating in the wage economy, at conditions usually extremely unfavourable for them. And what do we do with this money? We throw it away buying fake food.

But it's not all. Now, we are green, remember? So it's time to do something about our environment! So after we have destroyed their habitat, impoverished and enslaved them (it's modern slavery, not old-style, mind you), we even force them to work for us to produce our green chewing gum, that of course will be organic-certified and fair-trade and sold with a nice surcharge, just so that you'll remember that you're actively helping the environment and the poor farmers (not like those commoners who buy cheap stuff). So they will be basically forced to cut down their own rainforest, that for millennia provided all they needed to sustain their traditional lifestyle, to grow (certified) chicle trees for our green chewing gums. Which we don't need, like we don't need to cut down tropical forests, exploit "third world people", and neither us or the environment will have to pay the toll for the factories, power plants, the processing, packaging and transport of the products. Great idea, indeed.

Christmas 2010 - An On The Road Story

2011-01-01T15:20:00.002+01:00

Summer 2010 is over, but the memory of it is still so vivid, that this Christmas, Denise and I could not resist, and decided to make a little experiment: hitching from Amsterdam to Italy, passing through her mum's place in Saxony, and Austria. And since it's on the way, we crammed in Czech Republic as well.

It already sounded like a very bad idea. Especially because we left with freezing temperatures, lots of snow, motorway queues, and except Vienna, we had not arranged any place to stay along the road. In fact, the first day (Sunday 19th) we didn't even have the guts to leave, and preferred to wait one more day and see what would happen. You never know how these Sundays are - there might be a lot of traffic towards your destination, but rather consisting of happy families with full cars that never saw a hitchhiker before. And that was the case, unfortunately, of not only Monday 20th, but of most of our trip.

Leaving Amsterdam was as hard as it was on that hot summer day I left it for Portugal. We walked at a decent time (around 9 a.m.) to the official Liftplaats Prins Bernhardplein, close to Amstel Station. In case you never tried it, you should know that nearly anywhere in A'dam is a better place than that one. I know, it looks so nice, with all that place to pull over with your car, and the sign with the thumb. But maybe next time the city administration should ask some real hitchhikers or check Hitchwiki for the right place... Anyway, this time there was a lot of snow, and since nobody knows that that is a place where people are supposed to pick up hitchhikers, they didn't clear the snow from the lane where cars can normally stop. We tried for an hour or so with a sign A1 - Duitsland, and then moved to the gas station further on the way. After freezing a little more and jogging around the gas station to warm up, we got a ride to a gas station in Amstelfort. From there, a Swiss guy saw our sign while we were having breakfast, and invited us into his car, bound for Hengelo. In the early afternoon, we were near the border. A long way to go, since we were not going straight to Berlin, but only until Magdeburg, because from there we had to reach Leipzig and Denise's mum place, Oschatz.

After too much time, I spotted a German car with a B plate, = Berlin. The driver was exactly my type: hippyish, long hair and beard, 30-something, probably a hitchhiker himself in the old days, and driving alone. He was in the back of the gas station, so thank Goodness I found him, cause I knew he was our ride. And he was, and we soon set off towards the Hauptstadt.

George was not German, although he had a German car: he was a Yugoslavian kid who came to Holland in his teens, and recently moved to Berlin to work on some "projects", i.e. he rented old buildings and turned them into multifunctional spaces where people made art during the day and danced and got wasted at night (or something like that). Cool. He really was our ride. He also almost bought us dinner, but I couldn't even look at that food, so we had some peanuts instead. Unlike him, we were happy even if there were monstrous queues on the motorway (A'dam-Berlin is the most trafficked motorway portion in Europe), some even 30km long, because at least we were warm in the car with him! He wasn't in a hurry, so he left us at Magdeburg train station at around 9 p.m., from where we continued with a local train, and arrived in Oschatz at 1:30 in the night (!).

After 3 days in Oschatz, we slowly had to move forward to Italy. We weren't sure which was the best way, whether via Munich or Czech, given that we had planned to visit some macrobiotic friends in Vienna anyway. So eventually at the last minute we decided to go through Czech, although we didn't know any Czech and the motorway Berlin-Munich is very easy (and fast). But first we had to go to Leipzig to finish some things, and ended up starting hitchhiking at 2 p.m. towards Prague. Still very much possible, if it weren't for that guy that wanted to bring us to a "better spot", and we ended up in the middle of nowhere at a gas station used only by people going shopping to the nearby mall. Shit. It got dark, and we were still there, freezing. I wanted to give up. We went to a bus stop, where we found out that we had to wait ages for the bus. Then suddenly, a young fellow that had seen our sign before, collected us from the bus stop and brought us to probably the nicest gas station I've seen for a long time: full of couches where people where relaxing without having to buy anything at the bistro or shop! Our driver had just come back after 6 months in the army in Afghanistan. Amazing stories told in just a few minutes. We had a break and drank tea out of our thermos flask. It was pitch dark outside, but good traffic. I am mostly very selective while asking people, and it happened again that a guy that we didn't ask invited us into his car, direction Dresden. The guy was indeed a bit weird and drove like in a videogame: 160 km/h with such a fog that you couldn't see half a metre from your nose. We didn't talk during all the time we sat in the car, over an hour. When I got off, I thought I had got white hair or even bold... but we were there, and in a few minutes, I asked in my broken hitchhikers' Czech that I had learned in the summer, for a ride to Prague. We very soon got one, and the guy (that played great music) drove us directly into Wenceslas Square, in the very middle of Prague (although he was not going into the city). It was 10 p.m., and we couldn't believe that we were there, when at around 4 p.m. we had almost frozen to death and wanted to give up! We had no idea what to do in Prague, only that we wanted to reach Vienna and our friends ASAP. But we had to celebrate. So we found a pub and had a great beer. Then we took the last metro to the outskirts (Chodov, to be precise), from where we were going to hitch to Brno in the morning. I felt something, that we would have found something there. Well, originally the idea was to find a pub that was open all night and stay inside there until the early hours, drinking or pretending to drink. But apparently there was nothing in the surroundings. We found some cardboard and tried to lie down somewhere, but the cold was very bitter. After some time in one spot close to the metro station, we decided to try something very daring: We went into the ATM room of a bank, one of those cabins where you need a card to get through the sliding doors. Of course there was a security camera inside, but let them come, we thought, if they come, then we move, but otherwise we stay here. And that was the winning strategy. The room was warm enough (it was heated!), and the floor was obviously neither wet nor cold. There was almost nobody around, and even those that walked past, didn't care too much about us.

So we survived in there until 6-7 in the morning, sleeping or something like that. And we set off to our hitching spot towards Brno. Hitching is great in Czech Republic, and also in the summer I never had problems with the language (people spoke excellent English or German). We indeed found a ride to Brno very soon, with a nice German-speakinh Slovak lady driving home for Christmas (it was the 24th). Because of a misunderstanding, she left us basically in the middle of the highway, but we soon found out that there was a big mall, TESCO and a gas station very close. We walked there, had food and a long break. We got there at 10:30 in the morning or so, so we were more than confident that we would have found a ride to Vienna before nightfall. But that didn't happen. It was very frustrating. Somehow the place didn't feel so right, although I checked later on Hitchwiki, and that was exactly the right spot, recommended by other users. Nobody helped us get further to the next gas station on the way, so after wasting the whole day trying the impossible, we took a train to Vienna, that was only 130km away. It was very expensive (600kr, 25€), at least for Czech standards and our budget, but we were very tired and cold from the day before.

Nevertheless, we spent a very nice Christmas in Vienna. The next day (25th), our friends drove us directly to a gas station on the way to Graz, where we got stuck for a while, until a nice lady drove us a bit further South, until the point the road splits into two, close to Wiener Neustadt. It soon became clear that Austria is not a good place for hitchhikers, that gas stations are too often on the wrong side of the road, and that for this reason most of the people are always going in the wrong direction. Or at least this is what they told us, since nobody wanted to give us a lift. Until we decided to go with the flow. Since everyone was going to Semmering, we decided to go there, just to get out of that place. I was really afraid that it was a bad idea, that we would get even more stuck than before. Luckily, the gas station was very good, although of course it was on the wrong side of the road (it was in the middle of a crossing, so cars could go in 4 different directions from there). The cold was really biting. And unique case of all gas stations I've ever seen, there was a heated smoking room inside (or at least something like that, since it was also used by the staff members as a garderobe)! The room was equipped with all things that someone who lives on the road can ever need: a table and bench to eat his lunch box, ashtrays, slot machines with naked ladies, and a TV showing several movies with Bud Spencer & co. Later in the day, it got less crowded, and we settled down in there, as we couldn't find any rides. Denise lay down on the bench and slept for something like 8 hours without pause. I have no idea how she did. I myself read a whole book till the end, wrote letters, and could not get any sleep in there.

This is how we spent the night, until the morning of December, 26th. I started to get very pissed at Austria. Everyone we talked to seemed to be bothered by us, and almost nobody showed any sympathy for us. I never ever had this feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the morning we tried a bit more, and then left that horrible place (that however had saved us from freezing) and walked to the train station. We had no idea about Austrian train tickets and passes, and there was little info around. So we got from the vending machine an Einfach Raus Ticket. Sounds good, let's get the hell out of here. At 3 p.m. we reached Villach, at the border with Italy. I didn't want to hitchhike anymore. I hadn't slept at all during the night, and I was pissed off at all those people. But I couldn't find any train going to Tarvisio or anywhere in that direction from Villach that day. Wtf? Even the bus to Udine/Venezia was not going that day. This was one of those signs, about whose existence I found out last summer (see my previous post)! It could only mean that we had to hitchhike to Italy, whether we wanted it or not. And we had to want it very badly, if we didn't want to get stuck again there.

There weren't even any buses or trams to the south of the city that afternoon, so we followed the signs and walked. We showed our sign Italia to everyone. But I saw many Italian cars carrying visibly uninterested people. I thought about how many people said that hitchhiking in Italy sucks. I hope they are wrong, at least up here, I thought. And an Austrian car with a visibly Southern guy inside pulled over, and gave us a great ride until Padua, from where we took a cheap train. And we reached my parents' house just in time for dinner.

And this was how we spent this Christmas...

The irony of fate

2010-08-31T09:23:00.005+02:00

Until some days ago, Tamara and I were vagabonding around Galicia, with no clear plans but to go somewhere East one day soon. After "rescuing" Robin in Oporto and leaving him with Valentina, direction South, we decided to follow Robin's steps backwards into Viana do Castelo and Galicia, and let us inspire by the wonderful people that took such good care of him in the previous days.

Viana was not as nice as we expected though, the festivity was loud and full of gross churrascos. A huge line of stands occupied the whole coastline at the docks, with people selling all sort of crap. A caravan bearing the header Pop Musik was playing loud, fake music while a surreal crowd of people of all ages and sexes stared stupefied in the blinding spotlights at two screens that showed scenes of drunk girls at some mass concert showing their breasts on camera. Tamara asked for leftovers and we dined on free rice, chicken and olives. That night, I left my phone in the car that brought us there from Oporto, but I didn't care. Exceptionally, it was legal to camp inside the city, so we found a nice park next to the river beach and crashed there. When we woke up he next morning, we were hungry. Suddenly, a huge bus with dozens of passengers all wearing the same t-shirt arrived, and they set up a huge camp kitchen, a beer tap, and started eating copiously. While I was staring at them, Tamara got up and introduced herself to them with a big smile. They looked at her with suspicion, but eventually she came back with a plate full of deep-fried crab claws and other things. We still had some bread we got for free the previous night, and olives. That was probably the best breakfast we'd had in a long time.

We hadn't really clicked with Viana and its people, and the beach was too windy, rocky and cold. Leftover fruit and greens at the market were not great. So the next day we set off shortly before sunset. We hadn't really agreed on a destination, but it was clear that eventually we would have had to cross the border somehow, so I just wrote Vigo on the sign and my loyal companion didn't complain. We walked up the hill into the setting sun, wondering if we'd have ever get anywhere that night. I caught up speed, reached the designated gas station, and put down my sailor sack to wait for Tamara to reach me. The sack was leaning against a street light pole, and the sign with it, so Vigo was basically almost completely hidden by the pole... I then started jumping like a monkey, with my t-shirt over my head, to cheer up my travel buddy, when suddenly a car pulls over, and stopped right next to my sack, without driving further into the gas station. A guy came out, smiling, saying, in Spanish with a French accent, something like I have to move some things to the trunk, you guys can sit in the back. I stared at him astonished, and Tamara, that was still many meters away, probably too. It was very unlikely that anyone would ever read the sign, since it was half hidden, but not only did they see it, they also stopped while we were not hitchhiking (and I was jumping like a drunk monkey)! We jumped in. His Galician girlfriend was driving, and they met while he was hitchhiking to a festival in Andalucia; I always pick up hitchhikers, she said proudly, and he said that that was the first time he picked up people rather than being picked up himself, and passed us a joint. I love this kind of rides, karma, connection. They knew exactly where we could spend the night in Vigo, and dropped us off at a huge park in the centre.

Still, we were hungry. So we walked into town looking for fresh dumpsters. We checked some, and a pizzeria for mistake pizzas and such, but we could find nothing. It was 11 p.m., cold and the city was desert. We sat around for a while around the entrance of an underground mall, until we heard some voices. A couple with dreadlocks and a dog were working on a dumpster just down the huge stairway, where we hadn't been. I went down and went like hola! hay algo de interesante aquí?, that was immediately counteracted by the girl with a stupefying sei italiano?, which sounded a lot more like a statement than a question. She told me she had a van and was going to drive to Italy soon. I started fantasizing about getting a 2000km ride from there to Milan, and parted from them with a bag full of packaged tuna sandwiches fresh from the day, perfect apples, and orange juice. We ate, made supplies, and crashed in a corner of the park that looked like a huge bed of fallen leaves, where we slept like babies.

The next day, we ate some more sandwiches and hitched to the beach with a guy that lived most of his life in Argentina, Calabria and India. He was a fisherman there, a boat mechanic here, and a drummer in India. One of those short encounters that can inspire you for weeks. The sea was as clear as spring water, the sand was white. A lady from a frutería gave us a big bag of ripen fruit. We ate some more tuna sandwiches, met the rasta couple again, I was not going to get a ride to Italy, alas. We crashed again in the park.

Some days later, after mixing with pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela, getting introduced to a whole village during a Queimada in the middle of nowhere, and meeting with Ana, my former flatmate in Reykjavík, and her Icelandic boyfriend Óttar, and receiving outstanding hospitality from her and her family, we ended up at a road restaurant outside Foz. Hitching was slow and boring, and it was already quite late in the day, after long time waiting in the morning to get out of the middle of nowhere where we were. We found a ride for one on a truck to Oviedo, Tamara went. I was alone, somewhere in Northern Spain, and little traffic. I walked to the highway and found another hitchhiker, a local, that was going to Basque Country to look for a job. He offered me to hitch with him, which would have been fun, but I decided to go back to the restaurant and ask more people. Almost immediately, I asked a couple for a ride to Oviedo. The lady threw me a friendly glance that I really liked - she then threw the same glance to her husband, who consented. She crawled in the back seat and fell asleep, while I was condemned to an endless conversation spacing from travelling, cold vs. hot countries, politics, health, psychedelic mushrooms, alternative agriculture and ethnobotany, all the way to Bilbao. I got off the car that I was completely exhausted, but also happy about the 400km ride. I tried to hitch a ride to Vitoria-Gasteiz, without success, then tried to find a place to sleep in a thorny orchard where there was no flat ground, and eventually fell asleep somewhere quiet, until the rain woke me up at maybe 5 am.

The plan was to find a ride to Barcelona, and either spend there one night or take the ferry to Italy, that was leaving that same day at midnight. The ferry was expensive though (50€), impossible to hitch, and I knew quite well that I would've never made it to be back on time in Amsterdam if I had gone via Italy. I tried from 7 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, from multiple spots, always with a sign and my thumb, to hitch a ride to Miranda de Ebro. I could find none. I grew very tired and demotivated. When I reached my last hitching spot, a gas station in Etxebarri, I realized I had to accept my fate, instead of fighting it, and give up my plans about Italy. After 20 min from this realization, I asked a car that was indeed going to Catalunya. It was 3 in the afternoon, I could have made it to the ferry. That was a big temptation, but I didn't betray what I had just realized, so I turned down the ride. The next people I asked were a nice old French couple and they gave me a stupendous 150km ride into France, until the perfect service area. It was there that, while I was looking around, my ride arrived and parked right in front of me. It was a Belgian van bearing the weird xerography L'origine du prénom du nom de familie. I walked to meet the driver. He was alone, the van was really full, but I saw there was some space in the front. I opened my arms wide, with my last forces I exhibited the best trustworthy smile I was able of, and said bonsoir monsieur! vous allez en diréction de Bordeaux?

We talked and drove for long hours, in my broken French, and then in English, until we stopped at a cold service area before Paris, and slept until 7:30 the next morning. I didn't want to cross France again, that's why I preferred going to Italy instead, but fate provided me with an amazing ride across all of it. The driver and I connected very well, and the next afternoon I was in Bruxelles. Two more rides, the last one with a crazy Indian driver that checked my passport and asked what was in my bag before taking me, and I was in Amsterdam. I still couldn't believe it. My crazy driver drove me to a coffieshop to celebrate with me my fortunate and unexpected comeback, and got me incredibly stoned. All this had to be.

Na República

2010-08-14T14:37:00.002+02:00

I am still in Portugal, so this blog's title is getting increasingly more inappropriate. Wondering if I should change it into something else, wondering who is really reading it.
The Hitchgathering was a complete success for me. I met stupendous drivers, took the right routes, met randomly with amazing people at random gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Crossing France was a success, hitching in Spain was not so bad after all, and Portugal is really beautiful. We managed to gather around 80 people in Sines, all with amazing stories to tell. The locals were great, we went to the market to dumpster dive and people started giving us boxes full of stuff. We fed everyone with nearly no money, and with very poor facilities, Amilyn, I and other volunteers cooked food for the masses in a big pot on a barbeque grill. But the best part was the post-gathering, when a group of 15-20 people got together and continued South along the Alentejo coast and reached a cave on a beach near Porto Covo. We stayed there 3 days, partying, swimming, exchanging stories, cooking on a bonfire. I didn't want to leave, but now I am in beautiful Coimbra, in a "república", i.e. a students' commune where people pay almost no rent, and being CouchSurfing in the summer so hard, here you can just knock on a door to experience the renowned Portuguese hospitality. Heading somewhere North tomorrow looking for Robin, who didn't make it to Sines, and then somewhere East across Spain, maybe to Italy. Valentina and I will probably have to drop the idea to go to Serbia for the Guca festival, due to lack of time.

Everything is ready

2010-07-30T12:56:00.003+02:00

It's not over yet: I am packing my stuff again, for this summer's last trip. From the extreme North this spring (Iceland) to the extreme South (Portugal). I have a schedule to go, info and phrasebooks written down from Hitchwiki, and a somewhat precise (but purely referential) plan:

Saturday 31/7: to Paris (meeting with Brillo)
Sunday 1/8: to Bordeaux
Monday 2/8: around the Basque Country
Tuesday 3/8: Pre-gathering in San Sebastián
Wednesday 4/8: Salamanca
Thursday 5/8: Lisbon
Friday 6/8: Sines

I have absolutely no plan for the way back, and finally, I can do without one. I know there is a big truck stop on the border between Portugal and Spain, I will go wherever I get a ride to. I cannot exclude a quick surprise stop in Italy, or even a visit to the Guca festival in Serbia, where Bregovic will be playing for free...

I will probably die of heat, a heat that I always try to flee, but this summer, when I will meet it face to face. So see you maybe end of August, when I'll be back in Amsterdam.

No longer Lost, no longer in the North

2010-07-12T11:20:00.002+02:00

I have finally reached my macrobiotic corner of Amsterdam, and apart from a parenthesis for the hitchgathering in August, it seems that I am gonna stay here for a while (a year or so?), because everything worked quite well with university application and such. Besides, Denise makes amazing food (both at work and at home), and every day at the market there seems to be plenty of fruit and veggies to harvest for free. What more would I need?

Hitching this summer was ridiculously easy, by the way, and lots of fun (except for a Bosnian driver, with whom Steffi and I had so much fun that he wouldn't want to leave us, and it took a while to explain to him that we had to go further, from Prague to Dresden). From Zajezova ecovillage, just after walking down the road we got 2 rides into Budapest, stayed there 3 days, and then hitched in about 10h to Steffi's mum close to the beautiful national park of Saxon Switzerland. We never waited longer than 10-15 minutes, even when asking cars at gas stations, and it took only 3 rides from Budapest to Prague. Also hitching to Berlin was so fast, but never as fast as yesterday, when I reached Amsterdam from Raststätte Grunewald in about 6h. When I got there by S-Bahn, at around 9:30, it was already full of hitchhikers waiting for their ride, and all going to Amsterdam! They had been waiting for over an hour, but after 2 minutes two guys found a Belgian couple willing to take them to Hannover. I joined them in the car, where they told me that a friend of theirs was waiting with the car at a gas station in Hannover, and they were all bound to Amsterdam. They took me with them, so basically I got a straight ride...

Unfortunately the memory card of my camera somehow broke down and I don't have any pics from Budapest on, but I will soon have some from Portugal. Sines, yes we come!

Paradise found

2010-06-09T16:47:00.007+02:00

I am in Paradise. Nothing more, nothing less. After talking for over a year about my project to visit Zaježová ecovillage, now I am finally here. There is no way I can describe what I feel now with words, only that I feel I have been here for ages, because I have known this place in my mind. Although it is not so terribly isolated (we even have internet), it is like living a dream, and therefore almost unreal. The sun is shining (in fact I am quite heavily sunburnt, in spite of the litres of suncream), the birds are singing, we make hey for the winter. We milk the goats, we make yoghurt and cheese, we water and harvest in the garden. We make a fire and spend an evening around it. It's like I've been waiting all my life to be here, and I can't picture the moment I'll have to leave, return to the "real world" out there. I am wondering whether I'll be a different person after one month, and whether I'll spend the next months longing for this amazing time here.

Getting here was the first part of the adventure. I left Berlin on Monday, May 31st, a bit too late for the 500km I wanted to cover. I spent some time looking for a decent spot toward Cottbus and Poland, and eventually stood next to the airport Schönefeld. It didn't go too well: I waited for over 3 hours and then decided to take a bus to a place called Bestensee, and then walk to the highway service station nearby. It took me 1h bus transfer to go there, plus 1 extra hour walking, of which 1/2h in the woods. At around 5 p.m. I got to the service station, somewhat wet because of the bushes I had to go through. No luck there either; no Polish cars, very few truck drivers, mostly already asleep. I saw there were some covered benches where I could have spent the night, and wondered whether I should stay there or try my luck at the next Rastplatz. Eventually, I decided to go and asked for a ride to Cottbus. I reached the gas station and found indeed a lot of trucks, but no covered benches, and the weather was not too promising. I asked around, until one Rumanian truck driver replied he was indeed going to Krakow, but of course the next morning. He spoke good English, probably Italian too and looked nice enough (he had a big sign in English with a golden cross saying "God is my co-pilot"), so I decided to go back to him the next morning. Nobody else was around, and I prepared to spend the night at the gas station. In fact, it was the first time that I ever did something like this, since I always camped or stayed at some couchsurfers while hitchhiking; it was cold and I didn't have a tent, so as early as 8:30 pm, I took out my sleeping bag and life saving alluminium blanket, wore all my clothes and lied down on one of the benches. During the night, I had to get up 2 times because of the pouring rain, and eventually, at 3 am, I gave up my plan to sleep, wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and started reading a book waiting for the first trucks to start the engine.

At around 5 am, after 2 long hours, the first drivers woke up. Since they were already sleeping at 7-8 pm, I thought they would wake up even earlier, but none of them did. I approached some Polish trucks, without success, until one called to me in Polish. Without knowing what he asked, I replied "Krakow", and with his hands, he showed me to the passenger seat. I jumped in smiling profusely. He was indeed a great driver. He spoke nothing but Polish, and I knew some 15 Polish words, but he was clever enough to speak in a way we could understand each other pretty well. I soon learned new words, and at some point, we crossed the border. At that point, he pulled up his seat belt, lifted his hands from the wheel and grabbed the handles over the doors, and cried Polska, kurvaaaa!! while the truck started bouncing up and down on the badly kept Polish motorway. All sort of stuff started falling down from the shelves of the truck, and the driver's eyes were lid up in a kind of ecstasy. At 9 am, he dropped me at a gas station in the commercial area of Wrocław.

At the gas station, I started looking out for cars. I soon realized that the biggest difference with Germany and Western Europe was not the quality of the roads, but who is inside the cars: a great number of cars that I intended to ask were stuffed with people and all sorts of stuff. I was considering to give up and go to the city to meet my Polish friend Piotr, with whom I had originally planned to travel to Krakow from Wrocław, when I heard a voice calling. Of course I couldn't understand what it said, so I ignored it. But at some point, it got closer, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and met the gaze of a reddish-bearded man, around 30 years of age, with an old-style backpack with metal bars in it, smiling to me and holding two big plastic bottles. Nie rozumię po polsku, I replied to his gasping smile. Luckily, he replied in English that he was calling to me from the other gas station on the other side of the highway, because he had seen me and as a sign of comradery, he wanted to give me half a liter of mineral water. I understood that he had found it somewhere, and thought I had no money. He also said I'm sorry, but I don't have any money to give you, and then asked me where I was going and started asking people in Polish and Ukrainian on my behalf. That random encounter was pretty impressive. After half an hour of asking without success, I looked into my pockets and gave him 5€, because he was going to Germany and obviously had no money (he said he had been sleeping on the concrete in the tent expo in Decathlon for days). Besides, he had done all that asking for me, and I am sure that if he had had any money, he would have given it to me. He stared at the tiny banknote, speechless. You're gonna need it in Germany, buddy, I said, and he just couldn't believe that I had just given him the equivalent of 20 złoty.

Eventually I met my friend Piotr and we decided to take a train to Krakow in the afternoon. The train was just 35 złoty and the journey quite pleasant. We couchsurfed there together, and the following day he flew to Iceland, I stayed a bit longer in Krakow, and then took a cheap bus to Zakopane, a very popular resort in the Tatras. I wanted to cross the border into Slovakia from there, heading for Rysy, crossing Poland's highest peak, 2500m. The most ridiculous thing that I encountered in Poland was indeed Zakopane. There, you have to pay for everything. I paid for using the hiking trails, for using toilets (rare in the rest of Poland), and as soon as I got there, everyone started trying to sell me some kind of accommodation, using all sort of signs that could be seen from the bus. I was looking for a cheap hostel and the tourist information office was already closed, so asking these people was no use. With the help of some English-speaking locals and a taxi driver I didn't buy a ride from, I walked one hour into the national park and to the beautiful hostel, which was hidden in the forest. The next day I packed my stuff and set off into the mountains. The weather was threatening, but it was not raining much. After a while I started worrying though, because I hadn't check the weather, I was alone and nobody knew I was going there, and almost nobody I saw was going in the same direction as me. I finally reached mount Zawrat, and there I found 3 hikers who told me they couldn't find the path from there because of the snow. They also told me that a tourist had died along my route a few days earlier. The weather was then very bad, and a lot of water was coming down from the mountains. Reluctantly, I headed back to the refuge, where I met a guy that was half Polish-half Venezuelan and his Polish girlfriend. They spoke Spanish to me and decided to offer me their company for the rest of the evening, until they had drunk a fair bit. Eventually there was a fight over a lost jacket, at the end of which my jacket was gone, because as I found out the next morning, they had taken it by mistake. They also left their camera in the hut, so the next day after a long search, I managed to find them again and swapped the lost goods. Everybody at the hut was telling me they were crazy.

I finally spent another night at the Goodbye Lenin hostel, and decided to hitch to Trstená and then down to Zvolen again. I was afraid hitchhiking in Slovakia was as bad or even illegal as reported on hitchwiki, but I found it to be actually very easy and fun. My other fear was the language but I managed quite well. I got six rides from Zakopane to my final destination, and in two of them the drivers spoke very good English, one German, and with the other ones I had to be creative. After my first ride, I was dropped in front of the bus station, where the lady pointed to the bus to Chochołów. I said thanks, but then hitched further, because I had no złoty left, and I wasn't sure where the bus would have taken me. It was a bit harder than I thought, because Zakopane was full of tourists that obviously didn't know where the tiny border village of Chochołów was, and in Slovakia I had the impression people looked down at me from their cars. My idea of the country was very different. I expected a developing, post-communist rural country not far from Poland in appearance, while what I saw was much better roads than in Poland, beautiful and well-kept villages, huge supermarkets and malls, nice cars, lots of people going shopping.

It got me fairly long to get all my rides, but they all came within a couple of hours. My main concern was the last bus from Zvolen to Kralová, that I needed to take to get to Zaježová, was at 3:50 pm, and of course I got there too late. But I started walking those 10km to Kralová showing my thumb and my big backpack at every car, until finally someone who was not going there (nobody was in fact going there, because I saw no cars) took me. From Kralová, I walked until the end of the road, until a dog came running at me.

I cuddled the dog and greeted a bunch of people sitting at something I later found out was the bus stop I intended to reach. I asked them if they spoke English, and if they knew where Zaježová was. One of them said: you're almost there. You must be Diego. We've been waiting for you. Now we can go. And they led me to the path through the meadows, to paradise Sekier.

...and finally, Germany

2010-05-15T17:29:00.008+02:00

I am finally back in Germany. The transfer was not easy though, since I spent most of my time in Iceland working on my thesis, that I finally finished not long before I left. Last Saturday afternoon, after I had the last meeting with my supervisor, and spent all my day working on it, my word processor miserably broke down. I closed it and went home, thinking that I had lost only the last 10min of work; but I had the bad idea to click on "repair", which brought the status of the document back to what it was the day before, so basically deleting all I had done on that day. There was probably a way to undo the repairing, but instead of wasting time on finding the way, I just did all the work again, which I remembered quite well. I even went out to get some fresh air and see the crazy Reykjavík night life still blooming as dawn was approaching at around 3 a.m.. Then I went home, i.e. to the "hole in the wall", made a pdf of my work, and packed my stuff. My flight (yes, I flew this time, unfortunately - the ship was too expensive this time, because the cheapest couchettes were already fully booked) had been moved to Akureyri, because eventually, after over 1 month of volcanic ash trouble, the airport in Keflavík was closed. After a tiresome bus ride started at 7 a.m., I reached Akureyri again, and in the evening, Copenhagen. On the train to Hvidovre I fell asleep for 3 minutes or so, which made me miss my stop in Nørreport. So it took me 2 hours to finally reach my dear Icelandic-Greek friends, at whose place I spent an awesome night.

No need to say that the following day, when I was supposed to make it to Berlin, I overslept. I really needed a good sleep, but the delay seriously jeopardized my trip. I stuck out my thumb at a crossroad in Hvidovre at around 11:30, where I waited for a good two hours. The first ride was good, as I covered almost half of the way to Gedser, and I was dropped at a lovely service area with German cars. While I was looking for the right one, a nice Danish guy approached me and offered me a ride south. I told him that I was looking for Germans, but he insisted, so knowing that most Germans drive cars filled with kids and stuff, I accepted. He dropped me in the countryside close to Nykøbing (Falster) at a toll area with a lot of trucks, that looked good. But always the same story here: German truck drivers are not allowed to take people on board. And the other ones, they weren't going to Germany. So I tried a couple of rounds, with no success. Then I walked up the road (a good 2km or so) and stood next to a sign saying "Rødby - Gedser". I stood for hours with my sign to Gedser, but everyone either played tricks on me, or ignored me. Eventually I went back to the truck spot, for another round with the trucks. No success. So after wasting all my afternoon like this, I walked up the road in the other direction, to the next village. I tried to hitch a ride anywhere, with no success. Just one car stopped to tell me that the highway to Gedser was closed... So eventually, at around 6 p.m., I took a train to Nykøbing (I was only 2 stops away), and took the cheap bus to Gedser (the railway was not working either!). At around 7 I was at the ferry terminal, where I saw that the next ship, the last of the day, was leaving at 9.

I had heard that the ferries to Germany are free after 9 p.m.. It's not really like that. It's just that the ticket sale is closed, and nobody really checks your ticket, so it's easy to sneak in. Also, the ticket is actually valid for a round trip, so at that time of the day it's clear that most of the passengers are going back and don't need a ticket. I was with a German guy that was asking around how he could buy a ticket, so eventually I had to buy one too, because the ticket counter opened just for us. The ship was nearly empty, so I didn't find any cars to take me on board. The price is great though, 7€ for a 2h ride, that you can take both ways. At around 11 p.m. we arrived in Rostock, where I started to look for a suitable place to crash at the harbour, but couldn't really find one. I decided to go downtown then, because it would take some time and just in case, I could easily stay awake until 5 or so, when I could have started looking for early birds driving to Berlin. Meanwhile, I had called my girlfriend to ask her if she could find me a place to stay in town. I stood for half an hour waiting for a bus that didn't come, unlike the shuttle bus driver had told us. Eventually, I realized it was not a bus that was supposed to come, but an "Abruftaxi", a taxi-bus that you need to call at least half an hour in advance. It was too late to call for the last one, so we were stuck at the harbour, 10km away from the city centre. My girlfriend told me that, incredibly, she had found a last-minute couch. I texted the guy that there was no bus and I was going to walk downtown. He replied that it would take me 2h to walk downtown, and that he was going to bed, but I could just call him and wake him up any time I'd be there. So me and the German guy started walking somewhere. We first got to the main road, which is in fact a motorway, and a nice sign was standing on it warning that it's forbidden to walk on it. I proposed that we should walk anyway, because the spotlights were good and the few cars driving by could have stopped for us. If the cops would come, they would have given us a ride, I said, and probably keep us busy for the rest of the night, which wouldn't have been as bad as sleeping in the cold. But the other guy didn't like this option, and since he kind of knew the area, I followed him. We ended up at a house were rail workers were staying. We asked a guy watching TV in there how we could walk downtown "legally". He said we couldn't, so ganz unoffiziell, unofficially, he showed us the way along the rail tracks (that were obviously forbidden too). We walked on there and ended up in another place, where we were supposed to go over a fence. In that moment, a car came and opened it. We asked for the way, and then for a ride, which we got, after the man had had a shower. He drove us to the tram stop, where the very last one came after 5 minutes, at 00:30.

At 1 I had finally reached my couch, and woken up the guy, of course. He welcomed me with a big, sleepy smile, and introduced me to his cat and to the fragrant, ready-made guest bed. I slept like a baby until 10:00 the next morning, when my host and his girlfriend greeted me with a Na, mister CouchSurfer? I had breakfast with them, and within half an our, I hitched a ride to Berlin. If there were a golden couch or some prize like that, these people would have won it, if it were up to me!

Berlin was cold. It was colder than Reykjavík and colder than Denmark, don't ask me how. When I arrived in Lichenberg, where my girlfriend was waiting for me at a friend's, she told me that the next day we would have had to leave with her at 5:30. It was like a curse then, I thought. The "friend" had decided to go away for 4 days straight after work, and didn't even think of letting us take care of the apartment. At first, I was baffled; then I calmed down, and realized that although I spend most of my time with perfect strangers that welcome me into their homes in the middle of the night, feed me, give me rides, and in many cases left me the house keys for several days without even knowing me, there is still a great deal of the world around me and these people that is not like that. My lifestyle isn't "normal", although when one lives deep into it, you may come to believe that it is, and than out there it's just a minority of people that are paranoid and ideologically refuse to be nice. We still have a long way to go.

On my bookshelf: The Vegetarian Myth

2010-04-19T15:10:00.004+02:00

One of the reasons why I loved living in Iceland was that I always had some great books in my hands. It happened this time again, since I was given The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, who spent 20 years of her life as a vegan.

By reading it, I wanted to challenge myself and my (political and nutritional) vegetarian beliefs, and sure this book is great for such enterprise. This is the reason why "everyone that eats should read this book", as stated on the cover. But thinking that I was reading about politics and nutrition, in fact the book surprised me as an authentic piece of neo-primitivist theory, ultimately stating that veg(etari)anism vs. meat is not the problem and it is not what will save the planet. The real critique is against our idea of civilization centred on agriculture. While on one hand it shares all vegetarianism's abhorrence of animal factory farming, on the other it is our diet and ultimately our society built on the cultivation of annual grains that is the problem, and the facts speak for themselves. After 3 years of vegetarianism and several thoughts about going vegan, I am now prompted to become an adult vegetarian, meaning that there is so much more that I, as a vegetarian, need to consider, first of all the destruction of huge ecosystems for supporting a grain-based diet - this being a common issue for everyone who eats grain and products of modern farming techniques, regardless of the meat intake.

Here are pluses and minuses about the book. Comments are welcome... :)

+ the true problem of modern, "civilized" diet is not meat eating, but grain production, especially in monocrops. Large parts of such grain is fed to animals, but even if nobody ate meat, this huge portion of the earth destined to annual crops would in any case imply topsoil destruction and the disappearance of pastures, forests and complex ecosystems for human exploitation. Even a plant-based diet can imply mass killing.

- true, soil needs animals, their manure and the corpses of dead animals, too, in order to be fertile. But not all soils are pastures: there are ecosystems that thrive without being fertilized by faeces of animals domesticated and/or hunted by humans. Animal farming is not so easy to justify in such terms. Plus, saying that the earth needs the corpses of dead animals doesn't really imply that it is our duty to kill and grind up cows or chickens (and why not dead humans?) and spray our fields with their blood and bones, or using manure from domesticated cattle and that that is the only alternative to fertilizers from fossil fuels. Permaculture (the cultivation of perennial, interacting plants) and especially the Fukuoka method proved that green manure and permanent mulching work just as fine for keeping the soil healthy and productive, and that even large-scale grain production is possible and productive with little or no human intervention. Masanobu Fukuoka demonstrated that rice fields almost don't need to be flooded, sprayed or weeded, and that a single field can support two different kinds of grain growing side by side, being thus much more productive than monocrops and if the stalks are returned to the field as green manure after harvesting, at the same time it improves the soil. Why is he still ignored?

+ that adulthood starts with acknowledging death as a natural process is for me the most valuable point of the book. Our problem nowadays is that carnivores and many vegetarians alike seldom know where and how food comes from. Regardless of our diet, most of us are ignorant and kept such. Some people embrace vegetarianism like a new religion, others see it as a way to widen their given horizons, in a process that should never end. For me, giving up meat was a way to try something new, question what I held to be unquestionable, learn about food and the world around me. What I ate ceased to be a meaningless, automatic act, and became a meaningful, conscious choice. I discovered new foods, preparations, combinations. Began reading labels, and seeing through a steak or a piece of bread everything that lay behind it. Yes, everything dies and is born again in nature's endless cycle, and for a living being to live and thrive, someone else has to die, either by human hand or not. Like many others I believe, of course I considered this when I turned vegetarian. I am fully aware of this and that is why I would never think lions should eat grass, or that Inuits should eat salad and not whale, or I wouldn't really mind killing (or eating, why not) a swarm of snails threatening my garden. I am not against killing for food, I am against pointless suffering and a sick industrial system of food production that is just morally, environmentally and economically unacceptable.

One needs to draw the right conclusions from the book. I don't think that the ultimate point of the author is that the reader should close the book and start wolfing on meat and diaries, but rather to fully understand how food and nature work, free of whatsoever ideological barriers. Although I mostly agree with the author, I am not going to run to the butcher's shop after reading this book. I will simply keep on thinking that if I ever will live in a successful organic farm, where absolutely no topsoil is destroyed, and where I act as a natural regulator of the animal population on the farm, or if I was living in Greenland or among some semi-nomadic tribes living the life of our ancestors in an unspoilt landscape, I will consider eating meat. But for the time being, I am not in any of such contexts, nor are many other people.

- embracing neo-primitivist philosophy doesn't mean being or acting as a hunter-gatherer. It means acknowledging the validity of (some) hunter-gatherers' societies as an environment-friendly, natural, and fair societal models. Adopting a grain-free diet is a possibility, but a diet largely based on game or even organically farmed meat is less possible for all mankind than a complete plant-based one, because the premises for it are just missing right now. Not everybody lives in the ideal environment for feeding on grass-fed animals.

And even if Mr. Keith does, she misses a big point: what is she going to feed her animals during winter? Domesticated cattle and goats (the main source of milk for human consumption) don't naturally stay in the same spot all year around in a temperate climate, but they either need to be fed hay (from annual crops fields) or, in case you're nomad or semi-nomad, be moved to a winter pasture. Agriculture is not only about grain, it is also about animal farming, and if you criticize or refuse agriculture, you can't leave anything behind. Even assuming that a farmer rotates his fields and lets animals graze in a different one in turns, he'll still need a monoculture of alfalfa on one of them that is not grazed but turned into hay for the winter. He still remains an agriculturalist, with all it implies. I am not sure how this fits into the author's primitivist or anti-agriculture mental scheme, or how much land you'd need to feed how much meat to how many people. In other words, I'd like to know how many people per acre her friend farmers can feed with their grain-free farms, and if they are really self-sufficient and 100% grain-free... but that, she doesn't say.

- milk. The author is a big fan of cow milk (called liquid meat, by extremist vegan propaganda). Too bad that the greatest part of the world population is lactose tolerant, and nobody really was originally. Those who are not can keep fooling their nature by taking diary pills, but is that not even less natural than feeding a complete plant-based diet to an omnivore? The reality is that our bodies neither want nor need milk. Most of the world's human population has made it so far without milk, which is but a recent innovation. In the America she dreams of, there shouldn't be any European-imported cows, and the bison-hunting natives who (or at least whose legacy) should inhabitate the region are naturally 100% lactose-intolerant. Like millions of other people, I grew up without cow milk and I'm perfectly fine.

- the nutritional argument may make a lot of sense in evolutionary terms, but only until the industrial revolution and the advent of modern cities. Except for some pathological cases (such as the author's personal history), experience clearly shows that a vegetarian or even a vegan diet is not necessarily more harmful than eating meat. A wrong veggie-based diet can be as harmful as a wrong meat-based diet. It is just common sense. I suspect that the serious health problems she developed can be ascribed to such cases, plus additional causes that may have been aggravated by a wrong diet. She can blame soya for a cancer, but millions of Asians eating soya in all possible forms (beans, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, sprouts...) simply prove her wrong. This is a huge controversy that cannot be solved by the personal clinical file of one single individual. 60% of all Indians are vegetarian and have been for centuries, maybe even millennia; some of them suffer from malnutrition, true, but how much of that malnutrition is due to actual poverty and how much to vegetarianism? Just as much as our progenitors changed diet and started hunting big ruminants because their landscape had changed (rainforest shifting to savannah), today our landscape has dramatically changed again and we have to cope with this in terms of nutrition. Vegetarianism may not save the world, but at least to a certain extent, I believe some version of it does make more sense than irresponsible meat-based diets in a time of overpopulation and overexploitment of natural resources. Maybe in some thousands of years, if humans will still be here, the brain mass of vegetarians will have shrunk, just as much as it grew from eating animal fat; but considering how much we use of our brain today, I don't see big dangers upcoming at least for the next few millennnia. Fighting annual monocultures is not on the veggy movent's agenda, true; we can start with reducing that, and doing it differently, more efficiently and less destructively. But by converse, can eating more meat really be a solution? I can concede that in some cases, it may well be (when grain and vegetables have to be imported at high costs from far away and ultimately damage domestic food production). But how much does that apply to those of us living in modern urban conglomerates that produce no food at all?

- so, what should we really do? The last point concerns foodstuffs that has been completely forgotten by the author: so-called superfoods. In these last months, I read a lot about them and I came to believe that it will be neither mainstream veganism nor meat to save us and the planet, but (less known) foodstuffs that are extraordinarily rich in some nutrients. Some of them are very easy to obtain, like spirulina, a seaweed that contains more than 60% complete protein (more than beef), and like all seaweeds, is exceptionally rich in minerals. Also, the way seaweed is farmed does not have anything to do with conventional farming (nor with animal manure): all you need is a water-filled vat or transparent pipes, sunlight and just any plant waste as its "feed". This combination yields the most amazing food on earth, that can provide so much nutrition in exchange of such little effort. Seaweeds can also be used as an easy, cheap and sustaibable source of oils to burn as biofuel. And this is but one example. The benefits of many lesser known seeds, berries, nuts, sprouts, unrefined bee products, raw cacao, and much more (even insects!), many of which are already found locally in many places, are huge, and none of these really requires conventional farming in annual monocultures. But as long as we keep on ignoring them, we'll be stuck in this situation, thinking that either chickpeas or meat alone will save us.

This is what I learned from this book: giving up meat is not enough. There is so much more to it, and nobody holds the truth: there is always more to learn, as many things as there are diets. Mediterranean, Arctic, macrobiotic, vegetarian, vegan, Ayurvedic, raw foodist, "paleodiets", urinotherapy (!!), even fasting and cannibalism... they all make sense to some people and situations. They are all ways humans have found to adapt to some contexts. Many of them are anthropological, i.e. they are indicative of a culture, or a sub-culture, like veg(egetari)anism, plus of a certain time of human history, and environment.

The next post will be on paleodiets and extinctionism.

Velkominn heim

2010-04-15T18:16:00.005+02:00

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 14th, at 6:30 p.m. I got off a car at Hlemmur bus terminal. After 10 days on the road and at sea, my thumb had brought me all the way back to Reykjavík.

I really don't feel like writing, I am totally overwhelmed by this weird feeling of being back home without having a home.

On the way from Voss, I dropped more than half of the things I had with me in my bag, trying to be as light as possible. I even gave up my tent and sleeping mat, and as the events soon proved, I didn't really need all that stuff. Of course, hitch-hiking in Iceland means accepting the possibility of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, maybe overnight. But it didn't happen.

Short before I left Århus, I contacted Eleonora in Tórshavn. She is vegan and I wanted to meet her and her German boyfriend Hannes during the 8 hours I was going to stay in Tórshavn. What she told me was that her boyfriend was in Århus too at that time, and could give me a ride to Esbjerg, because he was going to catch the same ferry. He drove me there, spent a nice time together with him and another French guy on board, and then he invited us over to their place to have an awesome vegan breakfast. His girlfriend made delicious chocolate-coconut waffles, and then we went on a city tour. They also invited me to stay over with them longer and take the ship later, but I really had to go.

Two immediate rides from Seyðisfjörður and Egilstaðir, off I go. The weather was great, the people, fantastic. Although our second ride was all the way to Akureyri, I decided to get off at Mývatn and look for jarðböð, natural baths. This didn't have anything to do with the so-called "Blue Lagoon of the North", which is just a swimming pool with a 2000kr entrance (provided that the water is free, and the building around it costs as much as any other swimming pool, I don't get why it costs more than 360kr). I am talking about caves with hot water inside. My driver had been there as a child, and didn't quite remember (of course, it's free, they don't advertise it), but he managed to find out and drove me all the way to the caves. You have no idea, but you will have as soon as I will upload some pictures...

However, I couldn't really enjoy the bath after I realized that I had left my bag with my laptop on the roadside in Egilstaðir. I grabbed my phone to call the police, but my battery was dead (and my charger was in the bag). Hitchhiking with a laptop is not recommendable, but if you're still pretending to be a student, like me, you're gonna need it. So I walked about 4km to the next town Reykjahlíð and called the police from the post office (why use a payphone when people have at the post office have nothing to do?). They didn't know about it, meaning that nobody had reported the bag yet, so it could have been stolen. I decided to hitch further to Akureyri with my French and Belgian travelmates, and waited 4h in the cold for our ride.

We got to Akureyri at 8:30 p.m. and I was driven to the doorstep at my host's, a nice Polish girl working as a researcher at the university of Northern Iceland. When she welcomed me, she asked me aren't you missing a computer bag? Now, how could you possibly know about it? I said. A Dutch couple hitch-hiking from the ferry had been standing after us at the very same hitch-hiking spot, found my bag, and although we hadn't exchanged names, because of the Italian text on the bag realized it was mine, and remembered that I had said I had a couch in Akureyri at a Polish girl's. They logged in, found her profile, and told her about it. In 1-2 days I'll have my bag back.

Yesterday, the Belgian guy and I got stuck in Varmahlíð, 100km West of Akureyri, after a long wait to get out of the city. It was just in time to meet Caroline, a nice German girl that seems to be everywhere I am or I want to be (she was with Eleonora and Hannes in Tórshavn too). She made food for us and stayed all over her lunch break. If we hadn't had luck, we could have even spent the night there. Now, isn't this awesome. You are in the middle of nowhere in Iceland, and you find out that a friend is temporarily there for a very short-term job. No matter what happens, I know something crazy is going to happen to me, like when I got forced to accept a 50€ banknote by my ridegiver last summer in Germany. Or getting there at exactly the time I need. When you start wandering where you'll spend the night, there comes your ride.

I am staying at a friend's now, but in the house where I was living in a whole in the wall until last October there is a vacant room, so apparently I'm even gonna get a room all for myself, for free, in house full of dear friends of mine.

Welcome home.

Farvel, Norge

2010-04-09T11:37:00.008+02:00

Hvor skal i hen? I asked when I opened the door of the white transporter that dared to pull over on the on-ramp close to Hjørring. The girl at the wheel threw a weird glance at me, but then she got it and replied in Norwegian Vi skal mot Tyskland, we are heading to Germany. I hopped in and we set off. To break the ice and start a conversation I asked them, so, you're gonna buy some booze, uh? Then I noticed he was talking on the phone. He said ssh, the cops are on the phone. Fuck.

I didn't even stand 10 minutes waiting for this ride, and I had soon put away my Århus-sign, thinking that it might get hard to hitch and so I got ready to accept nearly any ride south. I burst in a big smile when the two Norwegians pulled over, thinking that finally I was in Denmark and getting rides would get a lot easier than in Norway. So my surprise was even greater when I realized I had hitched a ride with two Norwegians... in Denmark. I got more scared at their request to make me drive than their stated intention of smuggling stuff back into Norway (why on earth do you have to tell me about that?). Thinking that the car was empty so I was not in any trouble yet, finding myself at the wheel had the uncomfortable inconvenience of being legally responsible for everything going on in the car; but on the other hand, I had the situation under control, and regardless of them drinking and smoking hash and talking to the cops who wanted to know where they were because of a witnessing business, which they wouldn't say, well, at least I could trust myself. The time was soon over and yes, I "dropped myself off" at a lovely gas station, where I was soon picked up by my Danish friends.

Certainly a luckier day than Wednesday. That was definitely not my hitch-hiking day. I knew that hitching out of Oslo was hard, if not impossible. I had a hard time to calculate distances, find the right spot and the right bus going there, and eventually didn't make it to the bus on time. In Denmark, it took me 1:30h to drive 150km, but for the same distance from Oslo to Larvik it would have taken me 2-3h instead and unpredictable waiting time. The train was way more expensive than a 4h ferry ride to Denmark, which I really didn't understand why, and once in Larvik, I walked forever to get to the ferry terminal. Larvik's ferry terminal is one of those places that clearly aren't thought for pedestrians (read: hitch-hikers). It took me over half an hour to get there from the train station, and almost walked in through the car lanes. Spring had come before me, so my Icelandic sweater did the job it was actually called so for. But I made it eventually. Next to me was sitting a whole family of Danish gypsies who, judging from the women's red-painted hand palms, had just come from a beautiful marriage in Norway. Certainly not the kind of thing you experience on a plain...

My host in Hjørring was great, and she saved me from sleeping on the beach in Hirtshals. I was totally pampered. And once at my friend's place close to Århus, we went to the garden and welcomed spring by harvesting nettles, which were soon transformed into a delicious nettle soup... and finally I got my new traveller's guitar!

On the road again

2010-04-06T13:38:00.006+02:00

Finally, on Easter Sunday, 2010 I left Voss after the longest two months since some time. I left with the winter, since snow was melting everywhere, and the lake in front of the hostel, that was my only balcony view for the whole time, was half defrosted, and some bold ducks had already started dipping their claws in the icy water.

I left a job that I had long thought was one of the best I ever had, without turning back. I made quite a lot of money (about 3500€ netto, if you really want to know) for having worked only 2 months on minimum wage, and I am happy to leave with some cash in my pockets. If I had been smarter, though, I would have taken a month trip during the dead period after Easter, and come back to work in the summer, where there is a lot to do and a lot of money to be made. But after several years of nomadic training, my daily budget is as near to zero as possible, and I am quite happy with the money I have now, and can now spend the whole summer travelling. Why work more to spend my money on travelling, when I can travel with almost no money now? Why wait for travelling, when everything you need to do is loading your backpack and stick your thumb out?

Keeping your budget low must involve a lot of hitch-hiking. I had tried it before around rainy Bergen, and worked quite well, although as I wrote before, I had never stood so long amidst so much traffic, without being picked up in a reasonable time. This time it was even worse, and it took me about 13h to get to Oslo. And I couldn't have been luckier! The day before leaving I have been observing the traffic along the E16 Bergen-Oslo, hoping that there would be enough cars. Unfortunately though, this doesn't mean much in Norway. Actually, if there are many cars around, you're very likely to be completely ignored by nearly everyone, while if there is less traffic, people will sooner notice (and maybe pity) you. Of course on Easter Sunday at 8 a.m. there were almost no cars around Voss. But the night before I got to talk to a guy at the local café, that told me he was gonna drive to Geilo with his girlfriend the next day, and asked him for a ride. In Voss there was no longer any snow, and Geilo - which is half way to Oslo from Voss - had just got 30cm the day before. So I gave them half of the huge pizza that I had baked with my last groceries the night before, and we set off on good time. But instead of taking 3h, we had to wait long for the ferry across the Hardangerfjord, and then 2 hours because of a snow-blocked mountain road that had to be driven through in a convoy. So eventually I was dropped off in Geilo at 2 p.m., got two small rides to Ål, and there I waited forever. I watched an endless row of Audis and Mercedes pass by; unlike other spots, here most drivers seemed to be alone at the wheel, and looked extremely bored. But instead of accepting the company of a lone hitch-hiker, they sped away without even noticing me. I have seldom felt so transparent before.

When I was already thinking about finding the nearest train station and/or a place where I could spend the night, I went to some trees to take a leak, and when I came back to the highway, there was a car parked next to my backpack, the driver trying to fix something in the dashboard. I looked in, and saw a happy family of four and lots of luggage, so I didn't want to bother to ask them to squeeze me in (I experienced a couple of times before, that people with kids sometimes seem to reply quite kindly to my requests, although saying that they would take me aboard if they only didn't have their kids with them). So I picked my sign and stuck out my thumb again, thinking that if they really wanted to take me with them, they would have called me in. And that was what they did! And as it was already past 5 p.m., I got my ride to Oslo. The guy at the wheel had been a hitch-hiker himself in his youth, and thought - probably because of my weird moustache - that I was from the Ukraine, Eastern Europe or something. For some reason, Norwegian hitch-hikers are an extinct breed, and nobody would have thought I was a local. Considering that you're likely to be driving an Audi Quattro at driving school, and that one driving lesson here costs 5 times the price you'd pay in Italy (which is already extremely expensive!), you'd understand why.

The queues on the highways were pretty long, but the two kids had quite a nice time interviewing me. Another little girl on a short ride I had hitched, asked me whether it was not skummelt (scary) to hitch-hike. It depends who picks you up, I said. But after hitch-hiking in 7 different countries since last summer, I never met anyone scary. Not that the world is free from scary people, of course; but they just don't pick me up, it seems. If the people who stop are somehow revealing the amount of nice people in a country, then the number of those in Norway must be scary low. With some people, everything you need to do is to break the ice, confirming the stereotype of the cold but under-the-surface-friendly Scandinavian. But I don't think that anyone in those Audis and Mercedes would have let me do it. And my experience in Denmark, Iceland and the Faroes says that there is a huge difference between Norway and its neighbouring countries, and that the lack of sunlight and cold-argument are plain bullshit. People are rich, don't need help, and don't give help.

I came to Oslo at around 9 p.m., after 13 hours on the road and about 500km. I got dropped off at Majorstuen.

Tomorrow I'll hitch to Larvik and get the ferry to Hirtshals. Hopefully I'll get a ride on board to my couch in Hjørring, as I'll be there after sunset.

Time for Vegan Potato Gratin

2010-03-28T16:32:00.007+02:00

Today I was desperate. I was desperately in need of something to eat, and why not, something to blog...

I always forget to go to the store before everything closes on Sunday. Willingly forgetting about shopping slowly became an automatic reflex during the past few years, triggered by the need of saving money instead of buying unnecessary things. That is to say, there is most certainly something hidden in your kitchen or in your fridge that you can recycle into something tasty. These days it is not bad at all, since I have a whole hostel kitchen for myself. But of course I can't use everything I want (especially when I'm not working), and my commitment to eat the least possible diary products and eggs has already been tried hard by the nearly endless availability of such delicacies. That's why I dumpster-dive in my kitchen!

Well, I don't really "dive" into any dumpster, but the kitchen bin is always full of tomatoes that the diligent breakfast staff throws all the time because of nearly invisible wrinkles. Sometimes, they are even thrown because they are ripen... it's almost worse than in some stores! So, just stretch your arm, and you'll find organic ripen tomatoes waiting for you...

Another thing my kitchen is teeming with are bread crumbles. There is a bread-cutting machine and a brush to clean and collect the crumbs. I had about 1/2kg of organic local potatoes on my shelf, so what could I do? It's time for potato gratin!

Ingredients:

1/2 kg potatoes
1/2 zucchini
1/2 red onion
2 slices of veggy ham
some bread crumbs
olive oil
salt & pepper

Preparation:

Boil the potatoes with the skin until they are soft. Then remove the skin and mash them in a bowl. Cut the onion and slightly pan-fry it, and then add it to the mashed potatoes and some more oil. Put salt & pepper in the mix.

Then cut the half zucchini (you can also use other veggies, if I hadn't had that I would have used the sliced skipped tomatoes!) and pan-fry it too. Take a gratin pan and oil it. Put half of the mash potatoes and level. Then add the two slices of veggy ham - I used it because I had it, but you can use seitan slices (when I make seitan at home, I always slice it for sandwiches, etc.) or tofu or other veggies, or just nothing. Then put half of the fried zucchini on top, put another layer of potatoes, and the rest of the zucchini on top. Cover with bread crumbs and a little bit of oil, and grill it in the oven at 200C for 10 min.

This meal has probably cost me about 1€ maximum (and don't forget that I'm in Norway). I ate half of it for lunch, and I'm gonna eat the rest for dinner, so that makes my day (the potatoes fill you up quite nicely). Almost all ingredients are vegan and organic, and it took me about 20min to prepare.

Weekend Hitchhiking Trip

2010-03-22T21:37:00.008+01:00

I finally got a long weekend off, and I quickly grabbed the chance to do some hitching in Norway. This is the first time I tried to hitchhike systematically in the country, as last time I was here, back 3 years ago, I wasn't yet a hichhiker. Hitching rides was a bit harder than I had thought, as a couple of times I had to wait for fairly long at spots that looked very good - but it went pretty smooth in the end. I started on Friday from right in front of the hostel - the E16 going from Oslo to Bergen stretches across Voss, and trucks even stop to rest in the hostel's parking lot - and after 2 rides I was in Bergen, almost as quickly as with the train.

Spring is on its way and Bergen was as rainy as it's famous for, and as in many modern cities, free toilets are a mirage. Even along the way, at gas stations and kiosks, it costs as much as 10kr to use the toilet. In these cases, waiting for someone to pay and sneak in after the door has been opened is a good option (if someone looks bad at you, you can always use the excuse that you don't have the only coins required and it's troublesome to change a banknote, which is very plausible). Another option is looking for a university building, although even at the University Library for Humanities that I often visit, you have to ask for the key at the counter (weird). Again, this is not a question of stinginess - if I have to take a big one and am looking for some comfort in a clean and nice toilet and soft toilet paper, I am more than willing to pay (especially because it doesn't happen too often); but 1okr for taking a leak is outrageous.

Hitching out of the city from the centre is nearly impossible, as there are tunnels and big roads where car drive fast and don't have space to pull over. There was almost no information about Bergen on Hitchwiki, so I had to find out myself. I took a bus to Åsane Senter, a huge mall North of Bergen, very close to the juncture of the motorways going North and East. I used that spot twice, first on Saturday to hitch North, and then on Sunday to go East back to Voss. It was great. The first day I had a small sign and it was pouring like hell, so it wasn't that pleasant. But my drivers were great, and already at 3pm I reached Førde, 176km further North.

This year Førde won the prize as the ugliest city in Norway for the 3rd consecutive time (I wonder why having this competition at all, if the outcome is already known). The city wasn't that special indeed, but the landscape around it is great and confirms its importance as fjord hub. But what was special was the reason why I got there: I was invited to surf a couch by a 46-years-old awesome crazy CouchSurfing lady, and I was crazy enough to go there. Her house was amazing, and I was treated like a prince. We spent the whole evening talking about hitchhiking, peace and love, hippy communes, naturism, and crazy CouchSurfing experiences. The world is still a great place as long as people like these are around!

I talked so much that it eventually exhausted me. I talked to the CouchSurfing lady, and to all my drivers (it was a big exercise in Norwegian, but I soon started to like it). I told them the story of my life, and soon wanted more. Like last summer, when I started hitchhiking in Iceland and the enthusiasm caused me to hitch all the way to the Netherlands, enjoying it in an endless climax. Switching language after crossing a border and starting telling the same stories again, first in Danish, then in German, and then in English - that's something that is more valuable than all the free miles that I was given. This summer is going to be even better, because I'm going to hitch from the Netherlands to Portugal, and I'll need to refresh my poor French, Spanish, and improvise some phrases in Portuguese (or something that resembles it). When the location of the Hitchgathering was set to Portugal, at first I thought no way, it's too far, it's gonna take me ages to get there. In fact, I'll need to be in Copenhagen 3-4 days after the gathering. But in fact, it's very feasible: by hitching 500km a day (I hitched almost 300 on Sunday in about 4h, and this part of Norway is not that easy), I can get to Portugal in about 4 days, and starting early in the morning could even allow some sightseeing. Hitching back to the North will be harder, but it'll be all about finding one of those Spanish trucks carrying tomatoes to the rest of the world.

One of the biggest surprises I got this weekend is the typology of people that pull over. I expected that at least some Norwegian women would pick me up, because Norway is (or at least says so) the world's leading country in women's emancipation. But no way, only one lady gave me a short ride to a better spot, but the rest were all middle-aged men driving alone. I got rides from women and even girls (17 years olds on the Faroes) in several countries, but not in Norway. One possible explanation is that women in Norway tend to use public transportation more then men, who are more eager to drive their expensive cars.

Aftur

2010-02-23T23:13:00.004+01:00

I am going back, aftur, to Iceland (it's a good word, because it both means 'back' and 'again'). Until last week I had no idea about it. Iceland caught me, when I least expected it. It'll be just a small detour from my trip from Norway southwards: instead of hitching Jutland down to the Netherlands, I will turn to Esbjerg and take my beloved Norrøna to Seyðisfjörður. This time, hitching backwards to Reykjavík along the North Coast. One day to Akureyri, and another day to Reykjavík. It's the best decision, because I was planning to go to the Netherlands 3 times before the end of the summer, but two is actually enough - once for my favourite summer course in Leiden at the end of July, straight after Slovakia; and once, for good, when I will move there at the end of August after the Hitchhiking Festival and the manuscript course in Copenhagen. The perfect plan has formed itself, without even the need of thinking too much about it (which I did already, though).

I know this will break my heart, though. There are just a few people left there of the many that made last year the most awesome year of all. It's not the same place, Hljómalind is a fucking fashion store, and even those who are still there are planning to leave. I have the impending feeling that during those two weeks I will dramatically realize that the time of me in Iceland belongs once for all to the happy bygone days. But how can I resist the need to go and bid it farewell personally?

This is today's picture of Voss, my immaculate snow sepulchre. And today I finished one of the best books I've ever read, One Moonlit Night by Welsh poet Caradog Pritchard (original title Un Nos Ola Leuad). I wish I could read more books like this. It almost made me cry, which is not common for a book. Tells the story of the journey of a boy into the grown-ups' world, taking place between the two world wars. Childhood friends leaving or dying, a mother that suddenly becomes mentally ill. So much poetry, inundating the page through the lyrical but simple words of a 10-years old. I only wish I could have read it in the original Welsh...

On Freud and Orpheus

2010-02-06T12:56:00.004+01:00

Today my head aches more than usual. Yesterday I worked my usual 7 hours non-stop, and had my 12 hours of sleep that I usually need during the Mighty Nordic Winter. But today, there is something wrong. After sprinkling some water on my face, I get my laptop and as usual, come down to the eating room for reading the news. And what do I find?

I find a post thread on the far best group on CouchSurfing, called "Alternative Ways of Living & Consuming". This group really rocks. I learned so much stuff just from random posts on this forum, than probably anywhere else in life: from no-shampoo lifestyle, to healing with plants, and living up a tree. So, this time there is this post about the Uberman Sleeping Cycle. And I have a sudden enlightment: yes! That's what I've always needed! And I suddenly realized that I might be neither lazy nor a long-sleeper, but that I might rather have a sleeping disorder, that in the middle of the Arctic winter reaches worrying proportions. And that I can actually heal that disorder by means of a polyphasic sleep cycle.

Apparently, there are several methods. The best-known ones are called Uberman and Everyman. The former consists of splitting your monophasic sleep into many naps, distributed over the day. The latter consists of a core sleep of 3 hours, plus an extra hour during the day, split into 3 short naps. After a while, your brain gets the training it needs to fall immediately into REM phase, without actually wasting most of the night waiting for it, as usual That's more or less how babies sleep, and maybe how humans used to sleep in primitive times, when they needed to be awake during the night in order to stay alert of incoming dangers. Another great advantage of polyphasic sleep is that I will probably be able to always remember my dreams. I've always had a great interest in dreams, and oftentimes I had great ones, where I have foreseen scenes that then actually took place. But I usually sleep so long into the morning, that I always forget my dreams, except when I have deja-vus (and I happen to get a lot of those). This is the right time to change something about it.

I am going to try Everyman, because as this awesome blog explains, it's much easier, much more forgiving if you screw up, and it takes less time to train your brain. So I am going to sleep 3 hours from 1 to 4, and then three naps at 8am, 1pm and 9pm. From 4 to 8 I am going to read books, something that I never do these days. My alarm is going to have some extra work. But I have great optimism and I know I can make it.

And yesterday I finally decided I will move to the Netherlands next autumn. I am going to remain a nomad for as long as I can, but at the same time take another degree. And with this current degree pending, this is the time I can actually use some extra time awake during the day.

Room with view

2010-01-30T12:20:00.003+01:00

OK, I will cut that BS that in Norway it's not cold after all. Now the wind isn't blowing, but it's freaking cold. About -18°C during the night. I barely go out, it's good enough in my new, tiny little room in the attic. But even going out, there is almost nothing here, which makes it the ideal place to concentrate on work, and spend the rest of the time with a nice warm blanket and a good book. Like a peaceful winter retreat for worn-out travellers like myself. And take a trip on your days off. It's definitely about time to learn how to ski, too...

Divine carrot and lentil soup

2010-01-28T17:10:00.005+01:00

Today at work I surpassed my very own cooking skills. Speaking without false modesty, I made a soup that was simply divine (I ate three plates of it). The nice part is that it was totally random: I just used the wonderful organic vegetables delivered by my boss. Lots of stuff comes from the last harvest on his farm, back in October. Actually, the soup itself is not so special. It's the way it is served, that is. Here is the recipe for 4 people:

a piece of ginger as big as one of your fingers
half a celery root
about 6 medium-size carrots
200 gr red lentils
spinach
the shredded peel of 1 organic orange and/or lemon
a bunch of parsley
olive oil
salt

Preparation:

Peel the ginger and cut it into tiny little cubes. Cut the celery root into slightly bigger cubes. Chop all the parsley and fry everything in olive oil on the bottom of your pot. You can also add extra spices at this point, like paprika or cumin (I didn't do it, because the soup is tasty enough at this point). This is the base of your soup, which is supposed to be both mildly spicy and aromatic.

Julienne half of the carrots and make sure they don't get dark while waiting (I used the juice of half an orange to prevent the oxidation). Put them on one side. Put the rest of the carrots in the blender with enough water. Now, add only the blended carrots to the soup base, extra water, and the washed lentils. Stir well and bring to boil (be sure the lid is not on when it starts boiling, lentils make foam!). Add salt. Meanwhile, chop off the hard part of the spinach leaves and add them and the carrot staves to the boiling soup. Chop the rest of the spinach leaves and put them in a bowl. Grate the peel of the orange and/or the lemon and prepare it on a small plate/bowl.

When the lentils have cooked and the soup has taken a nice intense-yellow colour, the soup is ready to be served. I put it in a deep plate first, put the fresh spinach in the middle, added a spoonful of olive oil and a pinch of lemon peel on top. Ready.

You know, it's a real pity to cook the spinach when it's so fresh and organic as the one I had today in my kitchen - it loses like 80% of its weight and in soup it almost disappears! - that's why I served it fresh, and I used everything of them. But since it's winter, and it's Norway, and you need something to warm you up, fresh spinach leaves put to soften in a hot ginger soup is the best you can get.

Same goes for the lemon. It's a pity to throw away the peel when you use organic lemons. And you can do so many things with it! In this case, it goes perfectly both with the taste of the ginger and the carrots, and it surprises the eater with its unusualness in soups.

A Nomad's Train of Thought

2010-01-21T19:43:00.006+01:00

Here I am again. Being in Norway again after almost 3 years now is probably the weirdest thing that happened to me this year (I specify: I always reason in "schooyears", so september for me is the start of the year). It's a full load: Iceland, the Faroes and Denmark in the summer; then Iceland again, short visit to Sweden (if you can call Malmö Sweden of course...), and now Norway. Luckily, it's not Oslo again. I'm in the Hardangerfjord, somehow in that part of Norway that I mostly regret not having seen when I left the country in 2007.

Even weirder than Japan. I mean, Japan was a total blast. I don't even have the mental strength to produce a post about it. Maybe I will, though, but not now. For now, may it suffice to say that Denise and I hitch-hiked from Nagasaki to Tokyo in 10 days (1300 km), soaking in hot springs for most of the time in between the rides we got. Unfortunately, Japan is not a good country for CouchSurfers, so we had to pay for accommodation sometimes. But still, we kept our budget as low as possible, around 1000 yen per day, accommodation excluded. We crashed for free most of the time, managed to surf 2 couches (in Niihama and Tokyo), went to a hostel 3 times (in Aso, Beppu and Matsuyama, each time around 1500 yen), "alternative" accommodation twice (in Kumamoto and Tenri, both times for 1000 yen), and two times crashed at manga cafes (1700 yen in Nagasaki and 800 in Tokyo). We also paid for a ferry 2 times, plus 2 times to and from the Goto islands. The balance? Japan is no good country for a) vegetarians, b) couch surfers, c) non-Japanese-speaking people. It is a great country for hitch-hikers and it is great to travel in the winter, when your limbs will benefit the most from soaking in hot springs.

Briefly summed up, this is what I have seen in 18 days in Japan:
Arita > Goto > Nagasaki > Shimabara > Kumamoto > Aso-san > Yufuin > Beppu > Matsuyama > Niihama > Osaka > Kyoto > Nara & Tenri > (Nagoya) > Tokyo.
I had to put Nagoya within brackets because we were trying to get a ride there, when we actually got one to Tokyo instead. We didn't catch the night bus that we had booked from there, and got to Tokyo at 2 am. Denise crawled into the truck driver's sleeping den, and had to hide from the police (there was only one extra proper seat next to the driver's).

After only 4 days since this was over, here I am in Norway again. I'm in an empty hostel with a job I just realized I no longer need (plus, my father just paid me all at once and unexpectedly all the translations I made for him since he started his business some years ago). I'll soon need to cater for 100 or even 150 school kids who only want French fries and who will hate you if you feed them anything else than that. And I have an M.A. thesis that I desperately need to finish before April. And too much to figure out for the future. If I am really going to get a teaching job in Italy next year, as it seems feasible right now, I might even go back to Iceland in July to do some more language study, and even back to Copenhagen in August to work with some Icelandic manuscripts. Now, as you can imagine my only goal would then be to stay away from books between April and July, or I go mad. Too bad this year's European Hitchhiking Festival is gonna take place in August (on the 6th), most probably in Finland (a bit out of the way, but still). If I come with the ferry from Iceland to Denmark, then I'll have to go to Finland and then back to Denmark again. Is that cheating if I take the ferry from Sweden or should I go all the way through Lapland?

Illusions

2009-12-18T01:13:00.000+01:00

It's time to leave. If you were wondering why I didn't take any exciting pictures during this month of travelling, is because I've been strongly advised to leave my camera home. And my cell phone, too, although I didn't do it. Everything you have with you can be used against you if you're arrested. Having certain numbers in your phone can cost dear to your friends, and to you, even if just your friends have numbers of people. Not people that have killed or beaten up someone. Just people who were involved in a group, in a movement. A group that even in a democratic regime apparently has no right to exist, or to gather its members in a public place and speak up their mind. People whose only crime is to refuse to sit down.

I might be exaggerating a bit. Maybe I am. Or maybe it's those who since last Friday have arrested nearly 2000 people. I's stunning to see how the police think anarchists work. They think there is a leader of the anarchists. That if you arrest the spokesmen, the group is headless. Funny. Or tragic.

I have no problem to say that I'm different. Going to the street and scream my rage, it's not me (although I was there, but silently marching). Joining the action to break in and take over the climate summit, that's not me either. Even supposing that might succeed, then what am I supposed to say to the people there? Please, dear prime ministers of the so-called developed countries, can you try to be a bit less capitalistic? Can you put aside your lobbies and corporate interests? And be, maybe just for one time, fair?

I believe neither in democracy, nor in revolution. I have respect for those who do though. Democracy is a dream long dead. Those who say that anarchy is not realistic and as a proof try to demonstrate that there never was a real anarchist state (state?), should please name one republic or whatever that has really been or is truly democratic. And please, leave that ancient Greek bullshit - nice words sure, but as long as I know it was only in a few places, that would maybe count as a few thousand inhabitants, were women, foreigners and many slaves had no rights at all. Revoulution stinks of violence and guarantees no future. I want construction, not destruction. Anarchism for me means being free to construct something. In German it's called Bildung. I love this word: it contains the idea of educating (Ausbildung), of imagination (Einbildung), and of concrete realization, made of many, tiny bricks (bilden). I have reached the conclusion that those who really believe in democracy are more idealistic and unrealistic than those who, like me, rather believe in an inner revolution.

The real problem is that some have arranged our lives in such a manner that the basic necessary requisites for this inner revolution to take place are missing since the very beginning. We are born, go to school, watch TV and maybe read a newspaper, go to work, and until we die we always listen to the same story, thinking we're really free to choose our own lives. We are only free to choose the life that someone has created for us, and that gets delivered through family, education, media. We are not forced, we are manipulated, which is different, because you can be forced to act in a certain way but you keep your own mind; if you're manipulated, you just act that way, thinking it's you who decides.

Fascism is forcing others. I've seen it. I've seen it growing, on the streets. I've seen the police being given special powers, and taking over a whole advanced, 'democratic' country. Thousands of policemen constantly patrolling a relatively small city. Acting like wardens, the houses on the roadside the bars of your cell. Inside, you can mostly do what you want; but outside, there is always someone checking on you. And there are even more than you think. There are the noisy ones, going around playing with their sirens. They're not chasing someone, they're chasing everyone. They want to scare you and let you know who rules in this town. But there are also the silent ones, wearing kefiahs at the demonstrations and beating people up on the street and threatening them. Maybe I can also beat, handcuff and pepperspray someone on the street - people will think I'm an undercover policeman. Now they're used to seeing this.

But there is also another fascism. Maybe that's not the right word for it, but I can't find another one. It's the violence of being manipulated since your arrival in this world. The violence of you telling your mum to buy you a toy you've seen on TV, to eat what you see on TV, learning useless or false things at school, of never having been taught how to improve the world around you, of you competing for better grades and that's it. Of getting a proper job, only to buy stuff you don't really need. Of having children that will do the same, if not worse. Of electing someone to govern you that doesn't care about you, or that acts according to the system. And all this, while the only one that bears the responsibility of what you do or think is but you. I am much more afraid and disgusted by this kind of violence, than by any other kind. Because while it's being perpetrated on me, I don't even realize it.

I'm not saying that who doesn't realize it is stupid or even unlucky. Not at all. That's just the way it is. That's also what the human nature is about. You can read this, and go on with your life. I don't care. Eventually, happiness is nothing but a perception of happiness. In other words, an illusion is no illusion for who receives it, but only for who observes it. I have my own ones. All I ask is not being forced to live someone else's illusion, be it everybody else's.

Q & A

2009-12-13T00:07:00.000+01:00

Fuck, I missed the bus to Malmö tonight. Sure you can always take the train, but Säfflebussen is 40DKK, which is almost like a Falafel bought in Strøget. I'm back at Andy's place - although he's at a French-fries party with a Belgian girl whose main mission seems to be to remind the whole world that fries are Belgian not French. There were 100.000 people today at the 'Change the System - not the Climate' demonstration, and when we finally got to the Bella Center, I needed to go back to the centre, but I wasn't alone. Although the metro was running every 2 minutes, it took ages before I could get on a train, and when I did, it took half an hour to go pass 3 stations...

So, this time your favourite blogger decided to make a Q&A's post - using some interesting material I found on The Guardian (by far the only newspaper I can think of reading). There was a recent article about the link between meat and diary consumption and environment, and lots of people felt like leaving interesting, sometimes really funny, comments. Tonight I feel like commenting on them. There you go.

1. Have no fun, stay in your village, don't keep any warmer than required to survive, no lights on - your on a losing wicket here need to be a lot more creative in your approach.

Easy one. Here you see how our idea of a) fun and b) quality of life are so extremely consumption-based. For many people there is no way back. Either endless consumption as the only means to achieve happiness - or leading a life like in a retirement home. It is also implied that you can't keep yourself warm (and healthy) without burning fossil fuels, which is wrong. Why are the few who can claim to be self-sufficient apparently happy? Maybe even happier then others?

2. "SUBMIT SLAVE!!"
We are to be made to live like peasants eating raw vegetables around a carbon neutral camp fire while the scammers fly around in Lear Jets.
"Have we saved the world yet, Master?"
"No, it's getting worse, maybe in another ten years when enough of you are dead".

This is the class argument, one of my favourites. Unlike the previous one, it is not only about quality of life, but here there is a political problem being addressed: it's always only the poor working class that has to make sacrifices, this time even to save the planet. I think this pov is especially interesting because it clashes with the new high-class trend of being 'green'. Right now, who can really make choices that influence the market (e.g. buying organic, vegan, etc.) are mostly those who have the money for it. The working class has to go to the discount and eat pesticides (?). I think that as long as commercials instruct people about housekeeping, many will never learn how they can be at the same time satisfied, cheap, healthy and ethical. But that's a long story. The real challenge is making sustainability less of a luxury and make sure that it's accessible to everyone.

3. The ruling class intend to return us all to a state of medieval serfdom - half-starved, diseased and freezing. Next some 'sustainability committee' will tell the government that our life expectancies are all far too long and something should be done about it to 'save the planet'.

Can you see why the greens are far worse than the communists?

Similar thing. Here we're even back in the Cold War. These people can't see that they are already slaves. Like everyone, you're slave of the system, as long as you go to the store and buy the usual stuff you see on tv, blabla. Thinking that eating more (local & organic) vegetables makes you starve is childish. I'm not sure when exactly the diseases joined the party, but keep on going to the store to buy industrial meat, and we'll talk about it in a few years. And again, there's nothing wrong about being many on this planet and living a long life (although I believe life expectancy hasn't really become so long as they want us to believe); it's like 4 people living in a room for one person, if they are all responsible and nice to each other, they're gonna survive, but as soon as someone starts using more space and resources, the equilibrium is broken. A bit like Big Brother.

4. Note the emphasis on consumers changing their ways, not on producers or retailers.
If supermarkets are selling unsustainable fish, why are they allowed to? If the vast majority of breakfast cereals could properly be re-classified as confectionary, why are they sold with using fake healthy imagery? Why is it tolerated to strip the seas in order to feed to farmed salmon?
The whole food production system encourages over-production and waste, and the problem needs to be tackled at root, rather than leaving it up to individual conscience.
People buy and large eat what's there. Want to save the Cod? Stop putting it on the shelves.

Very interesting point. Very true, too. I don't trust people too much either. But I trust much less people who force things on other people, although for a good cause. If the problem are the supermarkets, for instance, you might find it hard to use the law to either change their policies, or even shut them down (especially if they are big chains/corporations). Let's face it, democracy doesn't work. Then you might just give your support to a dictator or some totalitarian regime, and you'll have it done faster (seems to be working). No thanks, I don't like that, I don't need more prohibitions. I need people to understand, think with their own brains without being manipulated, and decide by themselves whether going to the store or to the local market and/or starting growing something in their garden, balcony, indoors even. Can you see now why the greens are far worse than the communists?

Free Copenhagen

2009-12-04T12:04:00.001+01:00

Great evening yesterday night in Christiania! My friend Andrea just joined me here in Copenhagen and we both moved to a nice commune in Vanløse. People share everything here and they do it in a very effective and organized way. For example, there is a dinner list where who wants to eat dinner can sign up, or even crossing the box "save some for me". I borrowed a bike from my previous host, and Andrea found one here. So now although we live pretty far from the centre (8km), we don't have to spend money on transportation. We are basically living for free; I stopped spending money several days ago, and if everything goes on like this, I won't spend any, but for the occasional cup of coffee or beer, until the end of my stay. Now I want to involve the local CouchSurfing community in order to create a page called Free Copenhagen modelled on the one I wrote about Iceland last year, with all things you can do for free and how you can survive without money in Copenhagen. This is tourism for the next millennium.

So yesterday we took our bikes and cycled for almost an hour to get to Christiania. People's Kitchen was supposed to start at 7, but at 6:45 everyone was still cutting vegetables. They told us the food was not gonna be ready until 8, so we asked if we could help. I thought it was hard to get in unless you knew someone, like everywhere in Christiania basically. But not here: we started cutting, slicing, mixing, and all that. People were getting really hungry and since we had a lot of bananas, we just made litres of banana smoothie and served it as an appetizer. We also had huge bags full of fresh bread (that had already been thrown out by the bakery, for some reason) and pizzas, that also went into appetizers. The menu was very basic, and it was exactly the same that we would have many times in Reykjavík: a stew, rice, salad and fruit salad. The stew was almost raw and too watery, so at the end people had to pour most of the water out, and eventually all the taste was gone. That was so typical! I guess next Thursday we'll try to take over the stew-making process, if there is nobody who can. Tonight food at the Candy Factory!

Waiting for the summit

2009-11-29T18:10:00.000+01:00

Today I read an article on the Times online about the so-called Climate Gate. It is about the scepticism of some scientists regarding global warming and related issues, and how there is barely any available data on the exact impact of human activities on raised temperatures. This all came up as a scandal, giving way to the question: "so they have been lying to us, saying that the earth was not unnaturally warming up!?". I think this is no surprise that things evolve like this, once the issue of global warming has become private properties of the mass media. I'm not talking about corporations controlling media, although they have a fair share in the scenario of global manipulation. I am talking about an issue that ceased long ago to be of scientific relevance, and was turned into a political problem. That is also why politicians are now managing it, when it should be rather scientists doing it, and also telling the public the hows and the whys.

The next step was to involve economists and demographers. The first started quantify how much Co2 we were emitting and how much we should be emitting, the latter started blaming countries like India and China because of their big populations: it was now their fault, because many pollute much, especially if they are so medieval that they don't know how to work with renewable energies. Everybody suddenly forgot that China (not Denmark) is now the world's biggest manufacturer of wind power station, that millions of Chinese (not Danes) cycle to work every day, and that in general the average Chinese or Indian has a simpler and cheaper life than the average European or American, eats less meat and drives less cars, travels less by plane, and so on. Many Chinese families have a human manure converter in the garden that provides them with methane for cooking and heating water. And they are the only country in the world that is strongly doing something for keeping population growth under control. China pollutes quite much only because it is a big country with a lot of people that happen to abide within common borders. Any Westerner pollutes per capita much more, and if the situation in China and India is changing, that's only because of Western influence and a wrong idea of progress that the West has promoted for centuries.

The problem is not Co2 or global warming. Personally, I believe it's irrelevant and in away, the discourse is serving multinational corporations too. Suddenly, big business becomes "green", and we sell and buy Co2 emissions quotas as if they were banknotes from a board game. The planet may or may not be heating up because of human activity. That is irrelevant, and it may not be the case. The Inuit settled Greenland after the end of the so-called Medieval Warm Period, because there was ice again on the sea and their hunting territory expanded considerably. As they came, one day they could be forced to leave or to modify their sustenance means in order to survive. Before the Inuit several other peoples settled Greenland, Scandinavians included. All of them failed to survive, but not immediately; they stayed there for hundreds of years. The Inuit came as late as the 16th century, just a few hundreds years ago. They could be facing the same problems soon.

But this is not going to happen, and that is exactly the point. Their lives are already changed by contacts with the West. because they are no longer fishing for their own needs only, one day they could end up without any more fish in the sea, just like in the Mediterranean. Back in Europe, there is only jelly fish in the sea (70% of the fish eaten in Italy is imported from the Indian Ocean), the earth is so much exploited, that it is no more fertile. Under natural conditions, the soil increases its fertility naturally, year after year; because of monocultures, the land does not yield anything if it's not artificially fertilized, and the natural predators of the plant infesters have long become extinct because of the pesticides. In developed countries, we are eating so much meat that we destroy rainforests to grow soy for feeding to animals. And it's not something new, we started centuries ago with our forests back home. Biodiversity is seriously at risk in many parts of the world. But this is no news.

Our planet is fucked up, and even without global warming. What we've done to it is the result of millennia of our civilization, the civilization of exploitation. It's not only about modernity, it's about us. Monocultures are not new. The pilgrim fathers in America saw the Indians planting corn with beans on the same field, and then go hunting and come back to harvest after several months without ever working the land or having to let it fallow; then, they started growing fields where only corn was growing. But the problem became serious only after the we have become so many. And after we opened the first supermarkets, of course. Still today, they are fucking our minds telling us that it's bad to drive your car. Driving a car is not *bad*, it's stupid, if you can take a train and avoid leaving 4 seats unoccupied. What is really bad, is what they don't tell us: that eating beef is far worse than driving your car, that our seas are empty, that nothing grows on this earth any longer without chemicals. Burning stuff for power is not too bad; it is bad when you burn it to power your Bill-Gates-owned computer that is on 24/7 on Facebook.

We don't need any "carbon-footprint-theory" and carbon trading to understand this. What is "this"? That our civilization is the problem.

Trafikken

2009-11-28T12:13:00.000+01:00

...is the name of the commune where I'm staying in Frederiksberg. Lovely people. They welcomed me like one of them, fed me after I hadn't had almost anything to eat for 48h on the road, and spent the whole night playing board games. Every night there is a communal dinner, and tomorrow I'll be making some taboule.

I cannot say hitching was unsuccessful yesterday, although I didn't make it all the way to Copenhagen. I set off from a little village between Hamburg and Kiel and already at 10 I was at the docks on the island of Fehmarn. The ferry leaves every 30min and costs 6€ for foot passengers. The Danes are going to build a bridge to make their beer-shopping trips easier, maybe hitching a bit harder, since everyone's car will be probably be loaded with booze. I had had nothing for breakfast and I was starving already from the day before, so I desperately needed to get some food before being forced to face the ferry's menu, which I didn't want to. So I turned around and spent more than an hour looking for a bakery in the village of Puttgarden. I had almost the impression of being somewhere in Iceland: nobody was around, the landscape was harsh and constantly swept by the wind, there were no shops whatsoever but 8km away. I regretted not having bought anything at the gas station that morning. It was not a big problem though because I used my legendary but a but miserable emergency food supplies (i.e. rye bread with tahini and vegan salami, plus some dates and a dehydrated royal gelly drink). But I thought people came to Germany to shop; I forgot though, that they come with their cars to shop, so they don't need shops at walking distance. And I was the only foot passenger.

I got some small rides and got first badly stuck near Nykøbing; stood on the ramp, it was raining and I had bad luck. I waited almost an hour before a nice lady brought me to a roadhouse on the island of Farø, where I got stuck again. There were really few people there, people not quite friendly or going in other directions. While I waited for someone, it got dark, already between 4 and 4:30. My chances to get a ride to Copenhagen were shrinking. Eventually I asked a man that took me to Næstved, where I took the train for the remaining 80km. It wasn't a great deal, because by hitching I saved around 80kr compared to taking the train directly from the ferry. I met nice people though, but although I have to admit that it wasn't cold at all and at this time of the year it should freeze at night and it doesn't yet, it wasn't really pleasant. Or maybe it's just the disappointment of the train.

I have to admit I had overestimated Denmark. I though it was a great country to hitch-hike but it probably isn't. The reason why I thought so is that people that pull over are very nice, and they happen to be solo female drivers as well, which is quite uncommon in most other places. But sometimes you have to wait quite long for meeting some of those. My problem is also that I usually have really bad luck with truckers. Either they just refuse to take hitchers on board, or they're impossible to find or to talk to, or I just don't get rides to service stations. Or maybe I just lack boobs (sad but true?). Yesterday there were two trucks at that rest place in Farø, but they were empty and the drivers were nowhere to be found... probably I should plan my trips with a good map of the service stations, pick the best ones and ask for rides hopping from one to another.

Well, this is the balance of my trip from Italy to Copenhagen now (total 62€):

- Bologna-Munich night train: 23€
- Munich-Berlin with a shared group ticket: 8€
- Berlin-Hamburg with car sharing: 13€
- Ferry Puttgarden-Rødbyhavn: 6€
- Train Næstved-Copenhagen: 12€

If I don't hich-hike, I need a good reason not to. For example, eco-friendly solutions that are also reasonably priced. I figured out one for getting back to Germany that I could have thought about before: BerlinLinienBus from Copenhagen to Rostock for 26€, then Mitfahrgelegenheit (car pooling) from Rostock to Lübeck for 8€. Not bad. Unfortunately I had to book Ryanair to get back to Italy from Lübeck, but what can you do when trains are so hard to book? Why do I always get the price and all the details when I look for flights, but almost never for trains travelling between two different countries?

Tomorrow Copenhagen

2009-11-27T00:42:00.000+01:00

I'm here, and almost there. I chose not to fly, and the problems have not been few. I already didn't feel too well when I set off on the night train from Bologna to Munich. Then things went better, and meanwhile, I spent some time with awesome people, like Marieke and Evan from the time I was a European Volunteer, and Hugo and Marie, that I hosted in Reykjavík in September, and who now hosted me; I also took part at a creative writing workshop on climate issues, and I'm going to meet the same people in Malmö in 2 weeks. Yesterday I was planning to visit the Kombinat Gatschow, a rural commune in the middle of nowhere in Mecklemburg, near Demmin. Train ticket was too expensive: 30€ for just 200km, obviously with slow trains, two changes, and the last part of the journey would have been on a bus, because the rail didn't work. So I decided to try to hitch-hike at least as far as Neubrandenburg, and then go on by rail and bus. Unfortunately though, I didn't organize my trip too well, and the place where I was going was just in the middle of nowhere. I stood at the wrong spot, with basically no traffic in my direction, and I was feeling so tired that just after a few hours I came back to Berlin, where I soon decided to try another way. Since I didn't have an accommodation in Rostock, where I was planning to take the ferry to Gedser on Sjælland, I preferred paying a visit to my friend Stefan near Kiel. Today I got a ride to Hamburg and then later joined him in his village called Altengörs. Tomorrow I'm gonna hit the road again, hitch to the ferry place on the island of Fehmarn, probably get a lot of "nos" from Danish drivers whose cars are too full of beer from the shop or early Christmas presents to take extra passengers, embark on the ferry to Rødby, and then get ready for a 4-hours hitch to Copenhagen. I already have a couch in a nice commune in Frederiksberg. If it gets dark, the train from there is not too expensive.
So, today's outcome resulted in a somewhat unexpected visit to the Hansa-city Hamburg. I had been there a couple of times before, without getting too impressed by it actually (I don't understand how some people can get so excited by it), but this time it was like a culture shock. I left Berlin, which in spite of its ever-changing facade has an irresistable hippish retro aura, and was thrown into Hamburg's premature Christmas shopping frenzy without being at all psychologically prepared. The city looked like an old ugly lady, who talks but nonsense and has nothing to offer but her money, and thinks that being all covered in glittering jewels and expensive trifles will make her look younger and more beautiful. The streets were full of lit-up wreathed Bavarian-style huts selling all kinds of sweets and sausages, as if the Alps had been moved to the Elbe. The crowd on the street was everything but the melting pot of people that really live there; the voices were those of well-educated and well-positioned Germans, some English speaking exchange students, quite many Norwegians attempting to solve the obnoxious problem of having too much money and not knowing how to spend it. Smoking blondheads walking in chain constantly pestered their golf-playing husbands with the question hva skal vi kjøpe, what shall we buy.
I had to spend some hours there and felt helpless, the more I walked into the city centre, the more the situation got worse. Luckily I found a bookstore with big, nice yellow armchairs, that was full enough of people to allow me to sit there reading the newest up-to-date Japan travel companion.

The world is teeming with purposes

2009-11-23T16:36:00.001+01:00

Darkness wraps Berlin. The air is heavy, as if it were always going to rain, but it never does, and mild, as if autumn were too lazy to give way to a new winter.

I got to Berlin, this time sitting lazy in cheap trains, but barely managing to get some sleep. Now Iceland is out of the map, so instead of London and Copenhagen, Berlin is now my new centre of the universe.

I don't feel like writing much - actually I don't feel like doing much at all. I'm only passing by; meeting people after a long time, talking about love and mother earth, having a few cheap drinks in bars that look like they've survived atomic warfare. Everything goes, I will go, the coins in my pocket will go, and Berlin will stay. Next time there will be another Berlin, like each of the probably ten or fifteen times I've come here before.

It's hard to become a nomad again. I don't feel out of place. I lack a purpose. I should grab one, the world is teeming with purposes. Just make sure it's really yours then and that you didn't just borrow it.

I need to get rid of this autumn bed mood. To most people, beds are to sleep; to me, they're the place from where I see the world, a mental point of reference. In summer it's easier, because just anything can be a bed (when it's not raining). In the winter, I tend to be an advanced homestayer. Or a couch potato.

One really positive thing of nomadic life is that because you have abandoned your bed, you sleep less. Of course it doesn't help if you spend the rest of the day in bed anyway, but still. You have a bit more time to think.

Letter: The cruel destiny of refugees in Iceland

2009-10-18T16:30:00.000+02:00

This is a copy-&-paste of a letter that I posted to the website of Casa Robino in Amsterdam.

Dear friends. I hope some of you there remember me and my vegan summer pizza. But anyway this is not about me or pizzas, it's serious stuff and please open up your ears.

My time in Iceland has come to an end, and not in the best way possible. The only organic coop-café Iceland has ever had closed about 3 weeks ago, due to the current crisis and a criminal landlord. My group of co-workers and friends also got involved in some activism concerning refugees and asylum seekers in Iceland. You should know that although Iceland has a really tiny number of asylum seekers compared to other European countries, nearly all applications in the past 20 years have been rejected. But there is more underneath this fact: asylum seekers, who mostly got stranded in Iceland after having been rejected by Canada, are put in a sort of hostel in Keflavík, close to the international airport and in the middle of nowhere. They are given something like 10€ a week, and food and shelter. It doesn't sound so bad, compared to the filthy prison-like building where they are secluded in countries like Italy, Greece and Spain; but in fact, they are in a prison, and they are only in theory free to move, since with the money they are given they cannot even buy a return ticket to Reykjavík, where they could get someone to talk about their case. Many speak no English and cannot do anything to help themselves. They just sit in there, waiting for the police to deport them to the first Schengen country they arrived to after fleeing from their own countries. In many cases they can wait for years before their case gets processed by the Directorate of Immigration, during which time they are neither allowed to work nor go to school. Nobody knows the criteria according to which the Directorate decides to deport someone.

This is the story of Nour, a 19-years old rapper from Baghdad. He got deported to Iceland 14 months ago, and spent most of this time in the "hostel". He and his family fled from Iraq about 3 years ago, and he wandered about in Syria, Turkey and Greece, before trying to get to Canada. His father was killed by some terrorist group, because he was collaborating with the US administration. Finally, thanks to some activists, he managed to spend some time in Reykjavík and get the media talk about him, about the fact that he could have been deported back to Greece any time, without notice. Slowly, I managed to get him a job at the organic café, and eventually he got a temporary permit to work and live in Iceland, lasting 6 months. After the café closed, he was already going to start a new job, and maybe one day he could have taken a language course and finish high school. In spite of all this, a couple of weeks ago the Directorate decided not to grant him refugee status, and that's a decision that no lawyer or humanitarian organization can change. 4 days ago the police broke into his home and told him "time to go". They tricked him by saying that he could pick up his stuff and his last paycheck from the café later, and that he had to go with them first. He could make no phone call and after a few hours was put on a plane to Germany and then to Athens. He spent the night on the floor in a prison cell, and the following day he was set "free", i.e. put on the street, from where he could be pulled off any time and deported to Iraq, where he has no family anymore and he would risk his life. He has no money with him and no hope for the future. The chance that he can get any humanitarian support in Greece are really few, given the high number of asylum seekers and migrants there. The decision of the Icelandic government to deport these people esp. to Greece has been criticized by my group of activists because of the evident basic human rights violations that have occurred in that country recently. The situation is very similar in other places where usually asylum seekers get deported, like Italy and Spain. And I specify that I'm talking about a government that defines itself "leftist", "progressist" and "green", and that put a woman as a ministry of Justice, who goes around giving speeches about human rights and stuff, but then from her office sends people off to die.

It is extremely important that, if you know anyone who is in Athens right now and could care for this issue, you tell him about Nour and try to help him. He needs a place to stay, I think he can manage with food, but first of all he needs to regain love for life and hope. This is his e-mail address: smdel_992006 [at] yahoo [dot] com

Here you can read more about this issue:
http://this.is/nei/?p=4566
http://aftaka.org/2009/10/16/bref-fra-noor-al-azzawi/
http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_a_id=322381
http://www.grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/News-In-Limbo

Italy's Real Dangers

2009-10-13T00:47:00.000+02:00

Today I opened the website of one of Berlusconi's newspapers, Il Giornale. Some days ago there was a huge demonstration in Rome for freedom of information, and I was curious to have a look at one of those papers I never read. Well, Berlusconi says that since he started doing politics, he never even picked up the phone to overlook his immense media empire... in fact everyone knows this is a lie, a lie as big as his mediatic figure. Il Giornale is own by his brother, and here is what I found.

I found an article about a declaration given by the Ministry for Gender Equality Mara Carfagna, who said she will soon make a law to ban Burqa and Niqab - two popular Islamic shrouds that let not see anything of the wearer - in all schools of the country. I was shocked at this, especially at the thought that some people may think this is a issue at all in Italy these days. I mean, I lived there for over 20 years of my life, and on and off after that, and I have never seen a Burqa or anything like that. All my muslim friends from schools were even more Italians than I am. Both me and my brother had muslim classmates that would eat pork at the school's canteen, something that I am not doing anymore since years. I have barely seen "normal" shrouds around, and I think nobody of my age would ever think this is a problem.

The only time I got shocked by a shroud is when I first left Italy for a long time in 2006, and in the hyperliberal and ultra-Americanized Norway I was suddenly surrounded by Somali women covered in a fashion I had only seen on picture before. As a matter of fact, most women who dress that way are from Eastern Africa, curiously, from the same countries that were colonized by Italy until WW2. For some reason, migrants from these countries are extremely rare in Italy, which is mainly the target of immigration from Northern Africa and Pakistan, and concentrate greatly in Scandinavia. For another irony of history, these people are all victims of a bloody war that has plagued the Ethiopian borders with Eritrea and Somalia, a border being the symbol of a hatred that fascist Italy fed and exploited. The problem is that now Italy is far away from these problems, and having mostly to do with large numbers of people from Western Africa and Arabs, has forgotten that it bears political responsibility in a corner of the African Continent that has been in a terrible war ever since the Italians left. Italian rule in East Africa was rude, but there was not only that. Like in numerous other colonial dominions in the Continent, places with high ethnic, cultural, religious diversity were ruled in such a way that the foreign ruler eventually became the only factor of stability in the region - and it goes without saying, colonial rule has its own means to keep "stability". For example, Italian rule created Eritrea in a region where at least a dozen different ethnic groups have historically been living together. Eritrean troops prooved to be very loyal, and were mass employed for invading the Ethiopian Empire, a soveraign state that according to international regulations, nobody had the right to invade (all other were somehow "for sale"). Much later, after the war, the UN, who had temporarily given Eritrea to the British, decided that it should no longer exist and Eritrea became an Ethiopian province. The story in Somalia is not much different: there, the Italians had promised the Somalis (who are a huge minority today in Ethiopia) to unite them again under a big Italian-ruled Somali province. This plan died with WW2 and there has always been great tension between the Ethiopian-Somali border, and political instability in Somalia.

Being so blind against the manifestation of another culture, that is being absorbed into the Italian way of living anyway (and not without problems), means to ignore Italy's own history and responsibilities in the first place, and secondly, it means ignoring what is going on in other European countries that have managed immigrations in a different way. Plus, a refugee is not an immigrant; an immigrant should be someone that wants to expatriate, and the element of exploring a new culture and a new way of living is dominant. A refugee is someone that was forced to leave his country for safety reasons. How can our law be so irrespectful of this basic difference? I have seen more veils and burqas and niqabs in a few months without even going to Africa, than the average Italian will see in his life; and the difference is that he is afraid, and I'm not. I'm not afraid of diversity. I'm afraid of bigotry and ignorance. And of a country that has a totally distorted idea of his own traditions. Maybe I'm a romantic, but I am deeply convinced that going to an organic store (or directly to the market) and buy some local vegetables with a tissue bag is an immensely bigger sign of love for your own land than any campaign against veiled women.

People say veils conceal stories of women repressed from their husbands and relegated to the outskirts of society, sometimes even sexually mutilated. Maybe. But are these people really isolating themselves, or are they afraid of us Westeners? I can understand them so well, if they are. I can understand why they set up their intercontinental TV-sets and prefer watching TV programmes from the other end of the world, where there are no stupid naked women who do nothing but smile, and men who treat them like shit, and all this sponsored by the government and tolerated by the Vatican in return of political influence. I understand all those people from faraway countries that think that Italy is a decaying country, which looks very little like a democracy, and still wants to teach other people how they should live. I admire all those who, by leading a simple life, managed to have a decent life where the victims of consumerism cannot.

I have always respected other people's opinions, even when they are radically different from mine. I have always been a relativist, and thought that the way I think is given by the way my life turned out, and if something had gone even slightly different, I would think different today, maybe like one of those whom I politically despise. But if a certain number of issues is just left to our interpretation, one the other hand there are some issues where factors like ignorance come into play. We are ignorant because we are kept ignorant, and ignoring the signals that should allow us to change such hideous state of mind is a crime. And we are ignorant because we ignore the world around us, just like today's ruling class is ignoring foreign press which is describing Italy as Europe's last dictatorship, together with Belarus. The best argument that the government can produce is that "the government is an institution empowered by the people itself, and criticizing it means to object one of the basic democratic principles". The reason why nobody really takes this claim seriously, I believe, is not only because of the governmental control on nearly all media, but also because people are not completely ignorant. And they know, for example, that both Belarus and, take, Nazi Germany are/were democratically elected governments, while Italians always hid behind the excuse that Fascism took power by force, as if nobody had ever been fascist.

Satan's Temple

2009-09-26T04:20:00.000+02:00

During the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) I finally watched Antichrist, Lars Von Trier's last work. I was well prepared for it, and it didn't shock me too much; I knew enough about the plot, the genital mutilation(s), the psychodrama, the talking fox. And of course I knew that Von Trier is fucked up. So, the film didn't surprise me too much, and although I left the cinema with a very weird feeling about my genitals, I wasn't too much disturbed about it. I still don't know whether I liked it or not, though; that's something I'll have to think about over the next days. I really liked the photography and the technical choices of many scenes, but my overall judgement of the film is kind of suspended as to now. I probably expected the plot to be a bit more complex; for instance, I would have expected the murderous instinct of the female protagonist to have developed in a much more complex way, although probably that would have been what I would expect from a book and not from a film.

Beside liking it or not, a couple of statements from the film gave me enough to think over. There was something in the film that was just ages far from the way I think. Beside the love/hate/madness relationship shown in the film, Von Trier displayed as background witch hunt and Satanism, and I found that weird, namely because I never believed that witches had anything to do with Satan. But it was the female character in the film that uttered something about the "bad nature of women", almost justifying witch hunt, that highly disturbed me. I guess that was the prelude to her madness and homicidal instinct that followed in the film, but still I believe that Von Trier put it there because he wanted to say something about it. The most disturbing element was that their trip to the summer house in the forest was depicted as too negative an experience for my taste. The forest itself was clearly a beautiful place, that Von Trier and his character distorted into "Satan's Church", as they themselves state.

Forests and non-anthropic places have always been the domain of the divine for ancient people. Even to us modern people, they inspire a sort of holy terror, but not a demonic one. Satan is a construct of Christianity, and even in Judaism it was often not related to what we call "evil"; it often referred to foreign gods (such as the Phoenician god Ba'al, or the Philistine Beelzebub), and in many cases, Satan was just one of God's angels whom He would send around to test people's faith, notably Job and later, Jesus. In Judaism there is little notion of any absolute evil or Devil, that was developed at the time when Christianity spread across Europe, gradually turning Christianity into a sort of new Manicheism. It was an easy tool for converting people, and gradually habits, practices, beliefs and places that were connected to the previous religion, became "satanic". This is what happened to the forest, home to forces that humans had to deal with carefully.

Lately I've been a lot interested in magic mushrooms and I've read quite many things about them. It seems to me very likely that the mushroom was humanity's first deity, and where the concept itself of divinity and otherworldness came from. In shamanic belief, everything is regulated from beyond the threshold: deseases are caused by presences, that need a trip to the other world to be dealt with. This is not far from a modern Christian exhorcism, i.e. the belief of a demon occupying someone's body has definitely shamanic origins, and it resembles all in all a "bad trip". When you take a mushroom, you feel its presence within you. It's like being a host to a divine presence, that is taking you to another world, can could be either good or bad. And since Christianity came, much of this belief system has been labeled as "devilish". And the relationship between man and nature, and especially the forest, which is home to the mushroom, has radically changed. I believe that the broken link between man and nature caused by the advent of Christianity is in the aftermath responsible for the great damages that people have inflicted to the planet.

Something has been saved though, usually in places that have been less heavily affected by Christianity. The whole Christmas symbology is related to Shamanism. Originally a Roman holiday of Sol Invictus, celebrating the sun being newborn after its death in the winter, lately it acquired its modern symbology from Northern European shamanic belief. Santa Claus himself resembles a shaman, and wears the colours of the Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria), the most powerful allucinogenic mushroom. He flies up in the sky like the shaman-god Odin (he was recorded to lead a great hunting party through the sky at Yule), and has reindeers which are extremely symbolic for Northern shamanic tribes. The symbology of the Christmas Tree is not related to Santa Claus (as in many places gifts were put into boots, and even in Italy socks were used until a few years ago), but eventually it spread a bit everywhere, as the tree as the place for gifts recalls the tree as the place at whose bottom mushrooms grow.

I don't know how people can still think that witches in the middle ages and later really were "Satanic women". In a way, they were, but since I don't believe in Satan, this doesn't make sense to me. I also think that Satanism is just an act of protest, an anti-Christianity that uses its own symbols turning them upside down and "perverting" them, but it can neither be considered a real religion nor a threat. Most importantly, it forgets about where everything started, i.e. in traditional, pre-Christian religions (what I call "natural religions" as deeply rooted in the culture that practices them and were not "imported"), that had no distinction between good and evil. As I wrote above, Christianity itself as a run off from Judaism had little or no notion of good and evil, and the concept of sin was rather anthropological than religious, i.e. it involved clean and unclean things and practices, like eating pork, marrying relatives, dealing with blood, and so on.

Closing Time

2009-09-05T03:26:00.000+02:00

Time is up, this time for real. Many times this year it seemed that Hljómalind would have to close, but somehow we always managed to survive, but this time we are closing for real. We already stopped to buy food, because by the end of the month everything will have to be gone. We're going to have a staff party on the 14th, and probably a huge sale at the end of the month, where people will be able to buy anything they want from the café, even the equipment, and bring it home. The place that made my stay in Iceland so special, that allowed me to support myself during my studies, that gave me food, friends and even shelter, will be soon gone forever, and with it a huge part of the feeling that tied me to this country. People are leaving, I cannot get any unemployment benefit after losing my job because I'm a student (students should take a study loan, they tell you, but yeah, only Icelandic students, so for me there is nothing...), and Iceland, just like Italy, will become for me a mere (and cheap) holiday destination.

There is a growing rumor that the Icelandic economy will not survive the winter, also. I'm not sure this is one of the many cases of mediatic terrorism that someone will profit from - I remember last November it came in the news that stores were running out of basic goods like noodles and oil, so that some people ran to the stores and bought everything possible. It may well be a false alarm - but it seems clear that, sooner or later, something like that is bound to happen. And there are still people that have the courage to write on newspapers that capitalism is good. A recent counter-article argued that capitalism is long dead, and what we have right now is the pale out-of-control shadow of something that has died out - or rather degenerated, I would say - long ago, basically when the most important currencies went for the first time out of the gold standard (1932 and again as a consequence of the Vietnam war in 1971). Right now there is no government using gold standard, meaning basically that any currency is in fact worth the paper or poor metal it is made of. Maybe I'm being simplicistic and I don't understand much of this, but after all, who said that everyone who has the right to vote needs to be an economist, or rather, the less you think, the better the system fares. And the politicians that are elected by "the people". Never heard of Zeitgeist?

I only have one thought in my head: besides that I have decided to leave because of so many other reasons, why should a foreigner in Iceland leave the country just because of the economic crisis? Is it a good reason to leave, i.e. escape from a disaster that in fact anti-capitalists like me have but advocated? I don't really believe that such "disaster" will quite harm people, as a sympathiser of primitivist theories. This can be a good chance to go back to a more traditional, less consumeristic way of living, and reverse a mentality centred on the accumulation of wealth. I do believe in all that, so leaving makes me feel like fleeing a monster that I don't fear at all. But I do feel something scary in the present situation, because things I have been enjoying are over. But let's ask the real reason why they're over: Hljómalind is closing because of a landlord that is at the mercy of some banks; the house will go to back up some of his loans that still (incredibly) support his crazy business. The only thing folks can do right now is hoping that he won't be able to do it for long.

Nevertheless, as long as you live in this world and haven't chosen to alienate - that's exactly what I'm hopefully going to do in Slovakia - you need to play by its rules. And the rule is that you need money to do things. Sometimes it's not much, because the system is not as bad as it could possibly be. For instance, I pay very little tuition fee for going to university, but in some way I have to support myself. So I'm happy that in order to study, I don't have to take a loan that it will take 20 years to pay back afterwards (especially because not doing it won't influence the direction of your studies, allowing you to freely pick what you like and not what will make more moneymoneymoney), but if I didn't have to work, I would have probably already handed in my M.A. thesis by now, as I intended to. This is not the only problem, but in a time when I'm desperately thinking about finding a job for the next months that will allow me to go on with my education, this seems terribly relevant. What I'm afraid of, is that this need will push me to situations that won't do any good to me - like, is it really the right thing to do, to spend the winter in a ski resort where I can make a lot of money but where probably I'm not going to feel any good? Is it really worth it? Is running after money what I really want? Or am I too much an idealist if I think that I can make so many nice things without money?

That is surely true for some things, but not all of them. Opting for the free things is for sure a nice choice, but there is more in life, or there are things that not everybody can achieve by himself, like it or not. To take an example related to school, not everybody can self-teach the piano, but if you spend most of your time working for paying piano classes, you won't practice so much as you need and you're going to be a bad pianist anyway. That's why you need both working and not working, i.e. the best solution as long as you live in this system is to accept a necessary evil using it for your purposes without becoming slave of it. Making money is necessary and acceptable as long as the purpose of doing it is not making money itself. I dislike many things that I do every day, included using a computer to communicate as I am doing now; it's consoling, though, that I'm aware of it. But no, I don't believe that looking beyond it is idealism, rather inspiring realism.

Two months

2009-08-26T15:13:00.000+02:00

...is the time I am planning to stay here in Iceland, roughly. Maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more.
The Summer Course in Manuscript Studies at the Árni Magnússon Institute here in Reykjavík is finally over, and with it all this row of summer courses I took. Now it's time to start working again and take it really seriously; besides, while Europe melts in a 40°C summer heat, here it's raining, windy and it's clear summer time is gone. Hopefully I'll be able to enjoy a bit of my favourite season in Italy, i.e. autumn with its scents, melancholy for the approaching winter, roasted chestnuts, mushrooms, and the first fire coming up the chimney.

The course was really good, the group was awesome, teachers included. We transcribed and edited Bartholomeus Saga Postola and the Old Icelandic translation of a Latin hymn, Personent Hodie, which we eventually even sung at the presentation. I'll most definitely go to Copenhagen next August to take the Master's Level (this year I was in the Advanced), since it's a so-called ping-pong course, alternating between the two Arnamagnæn Institues, on the Continent and in Iceland. On Sunday we went on a trip to Flatey, where the famous Flateyarbók was written; we spent nearly the whole day sitting on the bus and on the ferry, and eventually spent about 2 hours on the island, of which one and a half at the restaurant. The food was excellent though, they even arranged fancy vegan food - but besides that, we didn't do anything special, except eating harðfiskur and drinking brennivín at the arrival, and visiting Iceland's first and tiniest public library with a replica of Flateyarbók, which is now of course in Reykjavík.

My friend Sarah from Belgium has just come back to Iceland - and as soon as I met her, she put a really bad bug into my head (which is not very hard...): she went back to Belgium to work for the summer, bought a used caravan for 250€, put it into a monastery's yard, and there you go. I had no idea she had lived in a caravan in Copenhagen for two years, and now I'm seriously thinking of something like that, especially if I don't want to work like a madman for the rest of my youth years instead of learning and living (check out my most recent loan from Hljómalind's library); and especially because it's very easy and cheap to find a piece of land to grow some crops on, but most of the time you're not allowed or it's just too complicated or expensive to build on it. Much better to put a carvan on it, even if it's not completely legal - I heard that in some Italian regions like Trentino, even keeping a caravan unused in your garden requires you a number plate and insurance! have you ever asked yourself who made such laws, clearly laws that no completely sane citizen could possibly agree with? So, that's why people get rid of those. I've also been reading about how to convert a caravan's chemical toilet into a compost one, although it is much more practical to do it outside the caravan, possibly as a treebog (outhouse).

But going back to growing your own food. I recently found out about forest gardens - a practice linked to permaculture - what a simple and great idea... I had already read a lot of things about primitiv(ist) egalitarian societies of present and past eras, that leading a hunting-gathering lifestyle with little or no agriculture, have comparably a better and longer life and much more leisure time than agricultural societies, especially those who are founded on monocultures (like grain/extensive animal farming), whose harvest is generally poorer and threatened by fast-spreading diseases and famine. But I always regarded it as a romantic idea, that makes sense ideally but not practically; I could never imagine myself living a hunter-gatherer's life. Forest gardens are on the other hands different, since they try to reproduce a spontaneous (woodland) eco-system, rather than a landscape which is completely modelled according to the needs of a monocoltural farmer - which would not be natural, even if everything is done organically and all that. It's not spontaneous, but it can at least partially be, but it works in a way it normally does when humans are not around, the only difference being that in this case the forest is ideally entirely made up of plants that have yields directly useful to humans. The trick is finding out about so-called companion planting, i.e. planting plants on multiple levels in a way that they interact and most importantly, use the ground's resources and minerals at different levels, thus not exhausting it as a monoculture would do. It is terribly easy and it works, but as widely known, us modern people don't like simple and harmless things.

When I go back to Italy in November, I will spend some days (or maybe 2-3 weeks) wwoofing in the mountains, as long as the weather is good (I remember 2 years ago I took a course in natural baking there, and we were having lunch outside on the benches and the sun was shining...), and see if I can find a job for the winter, maybe in Norway where I can make enough money and refresh my Norwegian. On Sunday I'm moving to a new room, where I will stay until the end of September.

Amazing Things

2009-08-19T03:57:00.000+02:00

On every CouchSurfing Profile there is a section where you're asked to mention "One amazing thing I've seen or done". I decided to make my own list of "amazing things" that I have seen/done, that I am about to do, and that I will do one day. And link it to my profile. Suggestions and comments are very much welcome.

Amazing things I've done:

- self-taught my ancestors' forgotten beautiful language
- left Italy and forbode by parents to support me financially in 2006
- cut it with Italian ham and salami and became a vegetarian
- learned Norwegian to the point of understanding most Norwegian dialects
- touched the bottom by working at McDonald's for 7 months, moving trash in the middle of snowstorms with only a McDonald's shirt on
- found a beautiful German girl who shares my nomadic lifestyle
- lived in Iceland during the 2008 great depression and learned Old Norse
- Hitch-hiked from Iceland to the Netherlands and climbed up 1000m on a glacier (risking my life without a jacket)
- gave up using shampoo and found myself with much healthier and cleaner hair
- grew a nice fluffy beard

Amazing things I'm about to do:

- live as a nomad for over one year
- learn how to knit a sweater
- live on an organic farm for several months
- learn Slovak, Dutch and Welsh
- learn macrobiotic cooking
- how to make soap, clay pottery, wave baskets, identify wild edible plants
- reconstruct Proto-Indoeuropean roots
- play the mandola

Amazing things I will do some day:

- go to India and Nepal and back without flying, hitch-hiking most of the way and back with the Transiberian train
- spin dance with Sufi mystics in Iran
- join an ashram in Nepal and learn Sanskrit, tantric yoga and meditation
- eat cooked insects
- buy a second-hand carvan and put it in the middle of a field where I will grow my own edible forest garden and make it my home
- become a father of a better person than myself

Last days in Holland

2009-08-06T01:12:00.000+02:00

Whoa, my trip has reached its end! Since I arrived in the Netherlands I seldom had the possibility to write a post. These two weeks have been so intensive!

Everything started in Germany on July, 25th. Denise and I took a SchönesWochenendeTicket and after 7 and a half hours sitting in a train, we reached Enschede, the last station we could go to with the regional train. we found a Mitfahrer, so we basically went to Holland for 14€ each, which is not bad. There we surfed a couch on the University Campus, that apparently is only populated by computer nerds. The guys who hosted us had a recycled computer in the kitchen with soft keyboard on the fridge door, an intranet to share films and media on their TV, and they even nailed a couch onto the kitchen roof, so that it swang like a hammock, and installed a subwoofer in the couch!

After crashing in the laundry room, the next day we started hitch-hiking West at around 1 p.m., although we wanted to start much earlier (usual). We had 4 hours to reach Leiden (160km), because I had to attend the welcome reception in a restaurant at 5. At first it seemed that it would have been a bit hard: we quickly got a couple of rides, first to the motorway and then to a big gas station/restaurant. We got bad luck at the gas station and moved over towards the restaurant's parking lot. I tried to talk to some truck drivers, but all of them were sleeping or didn't want to have hitch-hikers around, like the Polish driver that I greeted with "Autostopowicz", without success, as if I had named a bad infection. The Spaniards were really nice and sociable, but unfortunately they were going to Spain: they would have actually taken us to Madrid, they said, if we had wanted, but had to go the other way...

We had a sign, and experience says that with a sign it takes a bit longer, but then you find the right ride. So it was. We waited almost one hour, but eventually two cars pulled over, one bound to Rotterdam and the other to... Leiden. They were a nice old couple who showed us pictures of the royal family from a glamour magazine, and brought us all the way to the restaurant. We got there at 5.15, so I was 15 min late and had missed nothing. Later on we reached our first host, Tommy, the CouchSurfing ambassador of Leiden. He had an insane passion for Norway and an even more insane sense of hospitality: he lived in a one-room apartment and managed to host 6 people at the same time, with 3 mattresses and 2 couches. It was weird but also in a way cozy, and the other people nice, although I had to listen to the adventures of an American girl in Rome, who found funny that taxi drivers there would pinch her butt. The other Surfer we stayed at, Klara, was less fun but finally a civilized place to stay, and a clean kitchen where we could finally make a nice dinner.

In the weekend, we packed our stuff once again, wrote a carton sign bearing the title "A'dam", and hiked to a gas station. After 2 seconds we found a ride to the City, and in less than 30min we were there. Amazing. Without knowing it, the guy stopped at a coffee shop on the way to the centre, where I realized that we were 5 min walking from the Casa. We went there and everybody started hugging us. I felt like joining an ashram, and we were offered delicious (but sooo hot) couscous at 10 pm. Then people decided to go out, and got the key of two bicycles. They have a system with bikes: they have a frame on the wall with nails and keys, and the names of the bikes; the bikes are locked in pairs, so the keys are also organized in pairs, and if some keys are missing, you automatically know which ones are available and which key you have to pick. Apparently, the bikes also have a profile on their website.

Downtown, everything was full, and we eventually ended up sitting on the pavement, which wasn't bad after all, it just felt so much like Italy. The next day we watched the Gay Pride Parade, which was even grander than I had imagined, especially because afterwards the street likened an immense open-air landfill (apparently you cannot get money for returning beer cans in Holland). In the evening, I cooked vegan pizza with fresh tomatoes, aubergines, capers, garlic & herbs tofu and olives. The kitchen was full of dumpster-dived artichocks, and every evening people make amazing organic bread out of sourdough brought over by the PastaMadre project.

The Casa was an amazing place. I found it because I wanted to find it, and I surfed it because I really wanted. It's not a place where people end up by chance, it's not a squat, it's not a commune, it's just magic. It's a magic bunch of people who made me feel more at home than in any other place where I have lived. Depending on when I will finish writing my thesis, I have to go back, do some activism in Amsterdam and learn some Dutch.

I think I understand now why people at the Casa don't do CouchSurfing. CouchSurfing is great, but it's limited. The Casa is unlimited, is not for tourists or backpackers, it's a living thing, that calls you for becoming a living part of it.

Right now I am in a wonderful apartment in Leiden, hosted by two great hosts with two beautiful huskies. I will stay here until Saturday morning, and then I will hitch-hike to Maastricht, where I will spend the night, and move to Cologne the next day, and in the evening fly back to Reykjavík.

The course that I am taking is really challenging. I am basically taking a 3/4-months workload in two weeks. I have even reconsidered my wish to take a master's degree here in Leiden, because the level is so ridiculously high, and the time when you're supposed to complete your studies so tiny, that I would probably die on my books, and I most certainly don't want that. Leiden has a huge team of top scholars, and they do things their own way: I learned Proto-Indoeuropean in Italy with the /a/ and some schwas, but here, even in the Proto-Germanic class, after one day they started putting laryngeals everywhere, not to mention things like Balto-S lavic accentuation, which apparently nobody understands yet...

Next post after my comeback to Iceland!

In Leiden op de couch

2009-07-27T22:24:00.000+02:00

Finally the Netherlands! Last Saturday Denise and I bought a SchönesWochenendeTicket and took all possible regional trains to the Dutch border; since we found another guy to share the cost of the group ticket with, we both paid around 14€ for getting to the Netherlands nicely sitting in a train. We thought about hitch-hiking, but after the exhausting experience on the Danish border, I thought I might prefer sitting in a train for 7 hours instead, although our hitch-hiking trip to Berlin (we visited my ex-collegue Marieke) was extremely succesful: we found 2 Spanish girls, who apparently had very little experience at hitch-hiking, but nonetheless found us all rides! When we came, we saw them on the first intersection in Halle towards Berlin, and thought the spot was horrible to hitch a ride. We hadn't said that yet, that a car pulled over and collected them, so we asked the lonely driver if we could join them, and we were brought all the way to Potsdam. Without us, those two girls would have probably never made it, most importantly because they didn't even know where Potsdam was... later, we split at a gas station: they stayed there and asked the drivers, and we stood on the street further on, until they had found a ride and took us with them again. Brilliant!

So, on Saturday we went to Enschede with the train, and since we managed not to write our name on the ticket, tried to sell it again at our destination, but found no buyers. So we surfed a couch in the student village on the university campus, and were offered dinner and breakfast with the other students. The next day we packed our stuff and went to the street to Hengelo, where the motorway started. With two rides we were at a big station on the motorway, where we stood with our sign for over an hour. At around 3 I started losing hope that I could be at the welcome reception for arriving summer school participants in Leiden, scheduled for 5 p.m., but then suddenly two cars stopped on the ramp we were waiting at, at the exit of the restaurant. One of the two was a retired couple who were going precisely to Leiden, so they brought us all the way to the reception, about 150km, allowing me to be there only 20min after the start.

In Leiden, we are staying in an unbelievable place. The guy is actually the CouchSurfing Ambassador of Leiden, and he's completely crazy. He has a 1-room apartment of a few square meters, and shares bathroom and kitchen with 4 other students living in the house, and yesterday we were 7 sleeping here, with 2 American girls and 2 Russians, sleeping on 3 mattresses and 2 couches. You couldn't see the floor between the mattresses. We spent the night at a nice pub and celebrated the last night of the Eurotrip of the two girls from Atlanta, and we all went to bed like a nice, happy family. Tomorrow I'll probably start uploading some pictures.

Finally Germany, amazing!

2009-07-17T14:46:00.000+02:00

I am totally amazed at people. Even when everything seems to go wrong, someone makes something nice happen. And this time it was nicer than I could ever expect.

I left my good company in Århus on Tuesday evening, right after the farewell reception at the summer course (= free food and booze). I had found a very cheap ticket (in Denmark they are called "Orange Tickets") to the border, leaving at 8 p.m., so I took the train and arrived in Padborg at 11 p.m.. Everything was dark and I had no idea where to sleep, but I was confident I'd have found a place. So I started walking in the darkness, until I spotted a sign indicating a forest. I followed it and I arrived close to the woods, probably the same woods that mark the border. After having tried to camp on what was definitely meant to be a grazing pasture for sheep, since when I tried to enter it I got an electric shock (!) from the fence I couldn't see in the darkness, I got to a havekoloni, i.e. a relatively big area of little huts surrounded by heavily cultivated vegetable gardens. I peacefully pitched my tent there, confident that I'd be able to find some water close to the houses the following morning. The plan was to get up very early, so that nobody would report my tent, although very unlikely, and I set my alarm at 6 a.m. Sleeping was hard, and from very hot it got quite cold during the night, and then hot again after sunrise. I almost preferred camping in Iceland, where it is always cold anyway at around bedtime...

The following morning I realised the ground where I had pitched my tent was covered with raspberry bushes, so I had a very nice, free breakfast (see pic)! The next thing was to find water, but I could strangely find none around the garden huts. I wondered what those people use to water their plants with. So I started walking back to the village, where I finally found a garden tab and could wash my face and fill in my bottle with precious water. I had checked the map on the internet the day before, so I had a kind of idea where the motorway was, or at leas where Germany was, so I slowly started moving toward it, under the amazed eyes of the local population, who would stare at me as if the had never seen a backpacker before. Well, I guess I really looked like I was going to walk to Germany - but that wasn't too far from what I did.

I reached the toll zone, where apparently a lot of trucks had to drive through to declare their cargo. A little beyond it, the road led to the E45 motorway. I reached a good spot where cars could have pulled over, and stuck my thumb up. I waited something like 3 hours and changed spot a couple of times, I shitted in the bushes after I found interesting big leaves suitable as toilet paper, and exhausted, I ate all my food and drank almost all my water. Absolutely nobody had stopped, cars were really few, and truck drivers wouldn't even bother to look at me from their majestic high seats. I started thinking that maybe I should have gone into the toll parking lot and ask the drivers directly, but it was huge there and people would pop up and get very fast into their road monsters, so it was hard to get in touch with them. I hiked back to the village and down into the other ordinary street leading to Flensburg. This hiking took me a long time, but eventually I got there and not long afterwards a nice man with his two young daughters in the back pulled over. We just told each other that we were going to Tyskland, Germany, and that was enough for me. He didn't look Danish, and he told me he was Albanian from Kosovo. We exchanged nice words and meanwhile he kindly brought me to the entrance of the motorway, which was not where he was going. I soon realised that it was impossible to hitch on that spot, and I moved over down on the motorway, reaching what vaguely seemed to be a resting area, but was not. At least there was some room for cars to pull over. Everybody was driving very fast, and I was hoping to be noticed by those who had just entered the motorway and were driving slowlier. Pretty soon a German guy pulled over, and I jumped in. I told him I wanted to go anywhere South, and that I absolutely wanted to get away from that spot. He said he was going to Schleswig, but eventually brought me all the way to Rendsburg. He was an architect driving from one construction site to the other, and on the way he told me the story of his life, his studies, the army, the history of the Bundesland Schleswig-Holstein, and most importantly, his buildings, and eventually his vacation plans. The last site he had to visit was a big bakery, where they were building a new part, which was supposed to turn old unsold bread into animal feed. He talked long to the baker and got out with two sandwitches, cakes and a new water bottle. For me, he said. It was not necessary, I said. Well, free lunch today, I didn't expect it!

In Rendsburg I was released at the train station, where I could look at the city map and finally go to a real toilet. I checked the trains, but the train to Hamburg (90km away) cost 20€, and that was a lot. I had little over 20€ with me, and decided to save it for the end of the day, and see what would have happened. I texed Denise that I hoped to be either in Hamburg or in Hannover in the evening, and that she should try to find me an emergency accommodation through CouchSurfing. It was already 2 p.m. and I started walking to the next village, where I could get to the motorway. I walked for almost one hour, under the Channel Tunnel and under heavy rain. Eventually I reached a spot where a fairly laid-back-looking guy in an old car picked me up. He told me he would have brought me 3 km further towards Hamburg, and I accepted, hoping he would have brought me to a better spot. In fact he drove me backwards, 6 km before Rendsburg, but to a spot that was supposed to be very good, he said. There was a big parking lot and the motorway right next to it. The guy told me he ran a milk farm with 1000 cows, and that because of that and his 2 kids and ex-wife, that was what his life would have looked like for quite a long time. Although he was only 10 years older than me, he said he envied me and the years of youth, and that everybody should get going and see the world. I perceived a great emotion flowing in his words. Before dropping me out at the parking lot, he took his wallet out and said he was gonna give me something. At first I thought he wanted to give me a visit card, to let him know how my journey had gone; but then I saw that he was checking his notes, and they were all 50€'s... he shelled out one 50€ note to me, and I said that I couldn't accept it, and seeing that he was damned serious, I said that it was 50€, spinnst du, are you kidding. He yelled nimm es, oder ich steck's dir in den Schuh, take it or I'll stick it into your shoe, so I took it and hugged him. Then he said that he was going to drive to that street later at 6, to see if I had had my luck.

I stood on the roundabout for at least two hours, and although the sign pointed at Hamburg, apparently nobody was going anywhere close to there. Two cars bound to Kiel pulled over, that I had to refuse, and nobody else, until at 5 pm a young rollie-smoking kid offered me a ride back to Rendsburg. I asked him to drop me at the station, and there I checked how much the cheapest ticket to Halle/Saale was. 55€. Now I almost had 70€ with me and I thought that that was the best way to spend that money that I had so surprisingly earned, so I bought the ticket and I sat 6 hours in the train, until I arrived in Halle at 0:16, where Denise picked me up and brought home.

Well, I didn't expect to find such a few rides in a country with so many hitch-hikers. Although I was in some quite good positions, I didn't talk to any truck driver going long distances, and almost nobody else stopped. But those who stopped were far kinder than I could imagine. These people saved me and showed me a great piece of humanity, and suddenly turned a bad day, where I stood in the burning heat for most of the day and I also got a nice deal of rain poured down on me, into an amazing adventure blessed by luck.

Next step: Saturday 25th Denise and I will use the weekend ticket to go as far as the first Dutch town beyond the border, Enschede, will surf a couch there, and the following day we will try our luck on the road to Leiden. It's only 2h by car, and apparently it's very easy to hitch in the Netherlands, so let's see what happens!

Summer time in Århus

2009-07-03T10:20:00.000+02:00

Another surprise was awaiting me at my arrival in Denmark! Last Tuesday at around 7:30 am Danish time, the ship Norrøna finally berthed at Hanstholm, a harbour village on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula. It was already very hot, and it was going to be around 30 degrees Celsius. With all my stuff on my shoulders, plus a nice 6-pack selection of Føroya Bjór (the only Faroese beer) for my dear hosts, I walked up on a hill from the harbour onto the main road. There I immediately found a ride to the small town of Thisted, where I got lost, because I wasn't dropped off on the road again, but at the work place of the girl that gave me a ride. It took me almost an hour and a good load of luck to reach a good spot to start hitching again, because the main road to Århus was far and it was hard for cars to pull over on the street I was on. But a nice lady stopped and asked me if I needed help when I wasn't even lifting my thumb up, but rather trying to reach a petrol station. She brought me to the main road, and another lady who told me she was a breeder of weird little fur animals took me a bit further on the road. Two rides more and I was in Århus at around 1 pm, very nice timing for having lost myself and gone further mostly with small rides. Although it is not as easy to hitch-hike as in Iceland or other places I've seen, people are extremely friendly and helpful. I got rides pretty easily, and enjoying the beautiful and idyllic Jutlandish countryside, where you find nice little wagons with potatoes, berries and herbs on the side of the street, with nobody there, and people can just take what they need and chip the money into a box or a bucket. This is really another world to me. The pastor at the parish where I live now with my friends is a nice 27-years-old girl, daughter of the former bishop, and she was even younger when she was appointed that parish. This is really another world!

Anyway, when I got dropped off on Århus outer ringroad, I wanted to reach the road south to Skanderborg, where my friends and hosts live. But the area was further into the city than I thought, so it seemed very hard to find a ride there, and started looking at the bus stops, when suddenly... someone drove pass me shouting "Ciao bello!", and it was my pal Colin with my hosts, who hadn't read my message saying that I was coming that day rather than the following, and were thus going on a road trip to some dolmens and megalithic tombs in the region of Djursland. I joined them and finally reached their home in the evening. Once again, great trip, great whether and great people. Finally all shops have (unexpensive) alcohol (unlike Iceland and the Faroes), people are relaxed and sunbathe in public parks almost naked, and there are even associations of women who advocate that swimming topless should be allowed in swimming pools just as it is allowed on all beaches. This is a really beautiful country. Pictures to come.

Leaving Føroyar

2009-06-28T20:05:00.000+02:00

The end of my stay here on the beautiful Faroes is coming to an end. Tonight I'm taking the ship further to Denmark, check-in starts at around 10 p.m., and I'll have to spend a day and two nights aboard. Arrival is scheduled on Tuesday at 8 a.m., but it's always a lot earlier and they get you out of bed a couple of hours before.

I feel sorry for leaving, because I have done so little here, although I was always around. But I am utterly amazed at these people, they are absolutely the most kind, open, gentle and hospitable that I have met so far. I have already mentioned how I have a whole apartment just for myself, and how kind my host has been to me. Now it's time to tell the rest!

On Friday night after the pizza me and my host fell asleep together in our clothes while we were trying to watch an old funny Danish comedy show. It took less than 5 minutes, and that night I slept as if I hadn't been sleeping for years. In the morning I decided to go to Suðuroy, the southernmost island, because of a big festival called Jóansøka. The Faroese have kept all saints' celebrations even after the Reformation, while everyone else in the Nordic countries lost memory of them - apparently, everyone seems to have alsways forgotten about the Faroes: they were part of Norway until the Kalmar Union (the period when all Scandinavian Countries were one kingdom under a Danish king), and when Norway became independent again, they just forgot to bring the Faroes with them, so they remained part of Denmark. And after the Reformation, nobody really thought of travelling as far as here to update the Faroese on saints' festivities. So they kept on their own way, as with ship building - they are the only ones, I was told, that still build ships as the Vikings did.

So I took the ferry to Suðuroy at 10:00, and since I was late, my host Eyðbjørn ran with me to the docks and told me to run up through the car deck. During the 2 hours of the trip I spent some time chatting with two Norwegian tourists, reminding myself how nice is to talk Norwegian and how much easier it is than Icelandic. There on the island there was supposed to be a big celebration, but apparently the real party was on the ship, because during all the time of the ferry transfer the locals were consuming huge quantities of Føroya Bjór brought along in boxes, and singing and screaming as if their football team had won an important match (it was 10 a.m. as already mentioned). On land, nothing was really going on, except a canoo race and people drinking like crazy and crowding the only two-three places where you could buy food on the island. Although in Denmark there is no such a thing, the Faroese have their own Vínbúð, or Alcohol Monopoly Store, and as far as I understood, there is only one in the capital, and nothing else. The places at the festival that had a licence to sell alcohol were really few, so that is why so many people brought boxes of beer from home. People were mounting some rollercoasters and stuff like that, and two stages, but nothing was really going on. So I decided to go for a hike in the island. I walked for half an hour to reach a spot were I wanted to start hitch-hiking to Fámjin, the only village on the Western coast of the island. In the free guide I got in the tourist information centre I had read there was a lake called Kirkjuvatn ("church lake") close to it, and since that seemed to be the only one on the island, I wanted to go there. After a couple of minutes with my thumb up, two girls who had recently graduated from high school picked me up. They looked at me as if I was doing the coolest thing on earth, which I didn't understand, because they said they had been hitch-hiking every day home after school because they didn't want to wait half an hour for the bus. Even though they weren't going there, they brought me there anyway, since they had basically nothing to do, and were just going around on mom's car. The village was very nice, although nobody was around, and I thought it'd be hard to be back in Tvørsoyri to take the ship back to Tórshavn, or at least to see if the festival had evolved into something more cultural than getting drunk before noon. I hiked up the mountain and I found the lake when it had become so hot, that I really wanted to bathe. There was also a nice pier from where I could have dived, maybe. Nobody was there, except someone fishing on the very other end of the lake, so far away that I could barely see him. So I took off all my clothes (I didn't have a suite), walked to the pier and into the water. I experienced a great sense of freedom, but also a great cold: the water was coming directly from the springs and it was icecold. Apart from a slight dizziness in my stomach that I experienced about an hour later, bathing for those few seconds was good, because I was really sweating a lot. There are over 20C these days, not even a cloud in the sky or the usual fog, and hiking on the mountains can warm you up a lot! So, after bathing, I hiked up the mountain and to the road, that was higher up than the village. I was about 20km from my destination and there were no cars. To reach a spot where I could maybe find more cars, I'd have had to walk for almost 10km. But after a couple of minutes, an old man pulled over and picked me up. I didn't know what language to speak with him, because he wasn't fluent in English although he understood my simple sentences - but eventually we kind of agreed on Danish and he told me of him being shepherd after many years working in different places, first in Denmark, then on the Westman Islands in Iceland, and 4 years in Greenland, all around the Rigsfællesskabet. Then at some point he stopped and came back to his native place to look after sheep. I listened to him with great interest and almost saw myself as an old man. The next guy that pulled over and brought me back to the "festival" in Tvøroyri didn't want to talk to me at all, but he drove fast and in less than half an hour I was back. I was amazed at how early it was, and how easy it was to hitch-hike, although there were such few cars.

Today I went downtown to buy stamps for my postcards, and then I took a bus (the red buses in Tórshavn are free, to incourage people to leave their cars at home!) to a point where I could trek over a hill and then down to the small village called Kirkjubøur. Although the sign said that I needed proper gear, a compass, food and blablabla, and 2 hours one way without breaks, I did it in little over one hour and no problem at all. There I was resting at the small harbour, when an old man that apparently had nothing to do came to me and praised the beautiful whether in Faroese. I understood what he said but didn't attempt a reply in my broken Faroese, so I asked "Bor du her?", do you live here in Danish. He asked if I was Danish and I told him my story. He was amazed and even happier to talk about Iceland, and then started telling me in Icelandic of the time he spent in Iceland doing language research: he, Jóan Hendrik, is a retired linguist, who worked for most of his years on dictionary projects on the Faroese lexicon. With his knowledge of Icelandic, he created lots of new Faroese words from Icelandic models, and collaborated with the local administration in many ways, among others inventing new names for streets of the new neighbourhoods of Tórshavn built in these recent years. We also talked about Gianfranco Contri, the Italian that wrote the first and only Italian-Faroese-Italian dictionary , whom I had met years before in Bologna, invited by my Norwegian professor. Then he brought me home, where he fed me tea, raisin bread and butter, showed me all his books, and then ended up talking about hitch-hiking: he said that when he was studying in Copenhagen, he would hitch-hike from there to Germany, Holland, England up to Northern Scotland, where a Faroese fishing boat would bring him home. Other times. Nú eru allir hræddir, he said in his perfect Icelandic, now everyone is afraid - true, but at least in Iceland and in his country it still works so good! At last, he said he would bring me home with his car whenever I wanted to, and eventually did it, saving me two hours walking over the steep hills.

Now, I must cut this about feeling lucky. I am not lucky, when awesome things happen to you every day like this, then that's just the way it is: if luck happens every day and to everyone, then it's no longer luck, because it lacks the "unexpectedness factor". Then I thought about those other few tourists in Kirkjubøur, who came by car, took some pictures and drove away. Nobody has time to stop a bit, rest on the grass, talk to the locals after a good hike on the mountains. And misses all this bliss of a forgotten humanity that invites you home for tea after a 2 minutes chat.

8 days Reykjavík - Tórshavn

2009-06-26T19:02:00.000+02:00

I had long dreamt about this trip and I knew it was going to be great, but I couldn't imagine that it would've been SO amazing. So many things happened (and it's not over yet!) so I'll try to list them briefly here, waiting to get to Denmark to upload some pics. I'll try to be precise with the costs so that you can see how ridiculously cheap fun can be!

Day 1
Friday 19/6

Brillo and me set off at 7:30 direction Þórsmörk. 3 CouchSurfers (2 Americans and 1 Canadian) gave us a ride to Seljalandsfoss, a waterfall on the road there. We paid 1000kr each for both rental and gas, and there at 11 we took the 4x4 bus that took us to the National Park (3000kr, over 1 hour drive). We ate some of our food there at Húsadalur, bought a map and started hiking. It was an amazing sunny day. We climbed over a mountain (500m) and down to the next stop, Langidalur. We were supposed to cross a river there and reach the mountain pass Fimmvörðuháls in the late evening. There was a broken bridge, and since neither the map nor the guide that we had read mentioned that it was impossible to wade it, we tried to cross in a myriad of different spots until late in the evening. Then eventually, after getting completely soaked in ice-cold water we realized it was impossible, went back to the campsite and asked the warden. He said that indeed it was impossible, and that we could either take a bus or pay 1000kr for getting a ride from him. We said thanks and arranged a meeting for the following morning at 8:30 and went pitch our tents. It was freezing cold during the night, I got wounds in my hands because of washing dishes in far too cold water at the river, and way too tired (and freezing) for being the first day, we went to bed after accidentally waking up a guy at a cabin that told us we had to pay to camp there. We told him that we didn't know and that there weren't any services to pay for there (running water, wc, shower, nothing, oly ground), and he said he didn't care and for this time it was OK.

Day 2
Saturday 20/6

Knowing that it was already starting taking longer time than I had planned, we started the day ignoring the meeting that we had to cross the river, and asking the first guy with the jeep that we found. He drove us across the river for free, and there we went. At around 10 we were at the other stop, Básar, where the warden offered us coffee and asked us where we intended to go. We said we were going up and they got really worried about us: they said we didn't have the proper gear, too bad clothes, and that the weather forecast was just too bad that day. It was supposed to be rainy, maybe even snowy up there, and in case of fog we wouldn't have seen the ladmarks and missed the hut, which would have meant to be completely lost. The weather was more than fine when he was saying that, and although I was scared because of the steepness and all the stuff I was carrying, I really wanted to go before the weather got worse. The guy was so worried that said that he would have given us free camping for one night if we had stayed there that night. But it was 11 am, we were late on our schedule already, and going back to road N1 would have taken too long. So we decided to go, and I must admit that that was the most stupid thing I've done in my life - I was soon extremely tired from carrying all that stuff, I was sweating like a racing horse, it was getting really steep, and later on when the snow started, I was sinking so much into it that every step was like lifting lead with my feet. Eventually we made it though, roughly 6 hours from Básar to the mountain pass: according to the guide, it should have lasted 5 hours from Húsadalur to the hut in the pass (30km). The weather didn't get bad as the guy was saying, but sure it was fairly cold up there, and some paths considerably difficult and dangerous. A couple of times I thought I'd have never made it, but then I tried to relax and sharpen my will. At the hut there was a German guy who became a wardem after many years travelling in the area. There was no water there, no shower, just melted snow for drinking and rain for washing dishes, and some gas and oil to make warm and cook. We paid 2300kr for one night there, and the next day it was fairly warm.

Day 3
Sunday 21/6

The next day we hiked all the way down to Skógar (4h) and reached my friend Piotr from Poland, that works in a restaurant there and we get free food from him. Then we decided to go a pool istead of taking a shower, and we were told that there was an abandoned natural hot pool in the next valley (called Seljavallalaug). We hitch-hiked there (2 Italian guys gave us a ride), spent a couple of hours boiling in the water and then hitch-hike back (curator of the museum in Skógar picked us up, gave us some free tickets but we couldn't go). We got free soup from Piotr and crashed on his two couches.

Day 4
Monday 22/6

We started from Skógar at around 11 and an Icelandic couple gave us a ride after very few minutes to Vík (20min). There we took some pics, ate lunch, spent 2 hours at the pool and bought some groceries (1500kr each). Then we started hitch-hiking at around 3:30 pm at a gas station, but nobody would stop. We waited for 1,5-2 hours until a telephone technician gave us a ride until a place in the middle of nowhere between Vík and Kirkjubæjarklaustur. From there we started getting scared, there were very few cars and nothing else. After 5 minutes though, a nice girl pulled over saying she was going to Skaftafell: I was almost crying for happiness, we were going there too, she was working at an hotel there, and we got there at 7 after more than one hours of Beatles and other nice music and a lot of smokes. There we pitched the tents (750kr at campsite) and went for a walk to Svartifoss and over the glacier.

Day 5
Tuesday 23/6

We were not sure what to do that day because we had no motivation to hike so much after the long hike to Skógar, and guided tours were expensive. But it was raining and the weather was going to be bad. So we packed our stuff and started hitch-hiking in the middle of nowhere at the feet of the Vatnajökull: after 5 minutes an Italian couple stopped, saying that they were going to Höfn (which they could not pronounce, of course). We were also heading there but told them that they should stop at Jökulsárlón first, which we deed. We watched the icebergs floating in the glacial river, and drove over to the probably most boring Icelandic town. There we ate some food and went to the pool to warm up and remove some filth. The swimming pool there is the only real attraction and everything else we saw was pretty much crap. We found a ride back to road N1 and then Brillo and me finally parted. I started hitch-hiking from the middle of nowhere at around 5, and after over an hour I was losing confidence. There was hardly a car and none in my direction. After chatting to some sweet horses from behind a fence, finally a car appeared, and without even asking me where I was going, a guy came out and opened the trunk for accommodating my bag. Instinctively I took it off and put it there, and asked in English "Are you going to Egilstaðir?". He looked at me like I had said something incomprehensible. "With the E...?" he said, and then I thought OK, there is not much else with the E in that direction and anywhere is better than standing there. Then I found out that they were going to camp there before driving to the North, and at 10 p.m. we were at the campsite in Egilstaðir, exactly where I wanted to be and where I could not hope to be that evening. I had a long chat with the guys during and after dinner, we started liking each other and eventually they gave me some very nice beer: "we bought too much and we need to unload it", they said. I thought it was too much good for happening in one day, and went to sleep (campsite 900kr with shower).

Day 6
Wednesday 24/6

One day left until the ferry leaves, and I only had 25km to go to Seyðisfjörður. I had a nice walk around Egilstaðir, the weather was awesome, and then I crashed on the grass close to a bridge. It was too beautiful. I had the whole day for me, no stress and beutiful weather. After a couple of hours of doing nothing I started hiking to the North. After 20 minutes I was at the crossroad to the harbour town. I didn't even have time to put down my stuff and spread my thumb, that a nice lady eating harðfiskur pulled over and drove me to the town in something like 15 minutes. Seyðisfjörður is one of the most pictoresque places in Iceland, really beautiful, especially in that weather. Although it's way smaller than Egilstaðir, the capital of the East, there is much more going on there: there are heaps of concerts, art exibits, and an alternative microcinema (Mini Ciné), that unfortunately was closed that night. Then I went to the ferry terminal to see where it was and get a map of the place. There I met again Adam, an Australian CouchSurfer travelling the world as a self-taught cook since 10 years, that got there hitch-hiking from the North! We had met already in Reykjavík, where he contacted me and asked me to cook something together, and I told him to come to FoodNotBombs. He was with a French-Canadian girl that I had seen in skaftafell before. He proposed to cook that night at the hostel, and also bought a lot of booze. I brought the beer that the Americans gave me, ate like crazy and eventually ended up at a bar at the harbour doing karaoke. I didn't want to sing, but since my glass was somehow always full again for the fist hour, then I started singing, and since I was so good that I was winning more beer, we ended up completely wasted.At the campsite (600kr, chepeast ever) I accidentally met Eyðbjørn, the Faroese CouchSurfer that I had contacted a month before. He soon proved to be an amazingly nice guy, told me he had heaps of Surfers before, which he takes special care of, while refusing a lot more, although his profile was poor and with no references. He was travelling around Iceland with his girlfried on two motorbikes, and also going back home on the ferry.

Day 7
Thursday 25/6

The next day we embarked at around 11, and in the afternoon he took me around on the ferry as if it was his home, bought me coffee, a ticket for the cinema and tons of drinks for himself (G-o-d). the ferry was shaky, but I didn't get seasick. We chatted a lot also with another Norwegian motorbiker, and took several naps in the afternoon waiting for the ferry to arrive.

Day 8
Friday 26/6

After the ferry arrived in Tórshavn he went home to drop his stuff, and then came back with an extra helmet and brought me home. Then we had breakfast together with Danish cheese. Then he brought me to his parent's house, that will be the "couch" that I'll be surfing for these three days, since his parents are away on holiday. Then he showed me around, we took the ferry at 8 to Nólsoy, and hiked around until 1pm. The weather is ultra awesome and I am getting seriously sunburnt: it's so sunny that it's almost annoying to walk on the street, almost like Italy! Tonight I'm baking pizza for my host, and then we'll have some Føroya Øl, the local beer, which can be very nice. Tomorrow I'll probably go to a festival in Suðuroy but right now the priority is getting some rest before embarking again on Sunday night. Wow!

Work and Prohibitionism

2009-06-09T12:18:00.000+02:00

Lately I've been a lot into plants, especially wild edible plants, and also, all plants that have "interesting" effects not only on the human body, but also on the mind, that are completely legal (and there are many). It's a fascinating field and I hope to learn more about that, especially through the visits to organic farms that I am planning for the next years.

After reading quite a lot about plants, I found out so many interesting things, and I was also forced by facts to do some political considerations. I had thought many times that the State "regulations" of many countries banning the use of some plants are highly questionable, but most importantly, they do not have anything to do with the alleged concern about the health of the population. In fact, the feeling that the informed individual gets, is that those guys up there strive to keep the people unaware of many things that should be for example taught at school. It's amazing how many wild and common plants growing nearly everywhere could be used for food, medication or prevention against diseases, and for recreational purposes (that doesn't necessarily mean to "get high"...). If you look at the State monopoly of medical and recreational drugs (think of alcohol and tobacco) under this light, it's easy to understand how the State makes easy money on people's fun or, at the worse, people's crave for (and dependence from) something to "spice up" their empty lives of slaves of the Machine which is Progress.

How many of us will not drink or smoke any more than they do, if the price of this stuff were its real price, and not pumped up by taxes? Is it really only a question of money ("I don't because I have better ways to spend my money than...") or is also a question of time and how we actively conceive our existence ("I don't because I have better things to do than... all the time")? I believe it's the latter case in most cases, but many people just never thought about it. Take alcohol - the pink liquid that you buy in the store has been denatured, that means it's just the same as very expensive drinkable alcohol, but it has been made undrinkable. Why should I pay much more money to buy drinkable alcohol, if that's its real price? Assuming that people living in a country where you don't need to worry too much about money would use nearly the same amount of inebriating substances more or less regardless of their price, it's impossible not to realize that someone is just making easy money on you. Maybe some people will drink much more, true - but why? because of the situation that this process has created, because it has become cool to drink. There hasn't always been a State monopoly on alcohol, tobacco or a ban on other inebriating substances. And yet, nobody would say that people in past centuries used more of them than today (just as much as people didn't do it any less under prohibitionist regimes). For centuries and even millennia, the population of most parts of Europe and middle East have drunk beer instead of water, because it's was safer than water; it was a light beer (the term in English is small beer) but it was much better than any beer on the market today, made of pure ingredients, sugar free and naturally fermented. It was more importantly a good source of nourishment, than being just a drink. And it was even given to small children. Did you know that in most kinds of wine and beer today there is fish? It's a cod jelly called Isinglass and it's used to accelerate the process of clarification, i.e. something that happens anyway but it's made faster. Time is money.
On the contrary, we are more "doped" today than ever before. But what is it, that is really doping us as a society? Is it the "stuff", or is it our model of society, where the governments basically tells you that you can die, but before we want your money?

I'm making it a bit too simple, I know. But let's look deeper into it. Take tobacco. The problem is the nicotine, OK, but what about the other substances? There is a huge number of other - sometimes even more - dangerous additives than (natural) nicotine in commercial cigarettes, that are consciously put there by manufacturers and their are not banned by any state (the only exception being Bhutan that has a total ban on tobacco products...). They make them more addicting (in nearly all brands, tobacco is treated with sugar or maybe even more dangerous sweeteners, and in some there is even cocoa) and the State doesn't do anything. Albeit questionable, George Ohsawa (the formalizer of the Macrobiotic Diet) thought that tobacco smoke was not carcinogenic, and like other plants used in macrobiotics, he explained its usage in terms of a naturally balanced diet and, most importantly, in the cultural context of those native peoples who first made moderate use of organically grown, additive-free tobacco. The legend that he died after a life spent smoking and his lungs were perfectly clean probably goes a bit too far (like the claim that lung cancer is caused by diary products), but his studies of the incidence of lung cancer in countries where the population smoked additive-free tobacco (at his time, mostly middle East, India and Soviet Union) and ate in a more simple, light and traditional way, compared to the rich and "developed" West, should not be forgotten (there is an interesting link between lung cancer and dietary fats that is very little talked about). And by the way, there are many other plants that can be smoked, like horsetail (equisetum arvense), that are extremely easy to find and grow, and that are not only harmless, but even very good for human health (coltsfoot or Tussilago farfara is even a cough suppressant when smoked). Why don't governments force cigarette manufacturers to popularize them and gradually (at least partially) replace tobacco?

But the real point of this post was sugar. Sugar (sucrose), yes sugar the white crystalline thing in every kitchen, is one of the most dangerous and widespread drugs of our time. Everything contains sugar, from bread (when the flour is a bad quality one) to beer, cigarettes, and nearly all soft drinks that we start drinking at a very early age. Sugar rots your teeth, is generally bad for your health, is highly addictive/appealing, and makes children hyperactive (= more stress for the adults that have to look after them). Sugar is good as a quick energy supply, but just as anything containing natural sugar (fructose or other similar substances). Honey presents similar risks as sugar, but it also has so many good qualities, whereas sugar has none. Do you think that the State, that you think cares so much about our health, has regulated the use of sugar in food? Has forced manufacturers not to exceed a certain amount of sugar in the products that most people daily eat?

Not at all. They are more concerned about other things, like heavily taxing wine in Italy - where wine producers are massively switching to kiwis, because the plant is similar to vine and grows in the same way, but forgot that kiwi is a subtropical plant (originating in South-East China) that needs a huge amount of more water than vines do. If Italy's water resources are drying up, it's mainly because Italy has become in recent years the major kiwi producer in the world (and that's why I choose not to buy kiwis unless I am in China of course). Our grandparents used to drink a glass of wine at every meal (extremely healthy habit, proving once again that everything can be good if not abused), and they were as poor as some underdeveloped countries today. Wine was cheap and so much better (no pesticides until the advent of industrial agriculture in the 50's), and people drank it to enjoy it and not to show their hangovers to their friends.

Back to sugar. Have you ever heard of Stevia? Probably not, and the reason why is that it's forbidden in most Western countries. Why? It's not inebriating or allucinogenic. Stevia Rebaudiana is a beautiful plant from Central America that has up to 300 times the sweetening power of sugar, but zero calories. You don't even need to modify it industrially like sugar beets, you just dry up the leaves! It's amazing! And it has been banned, because its use would seriously threaten the industry of sugar and artificial sweeteners. Of course, some pseudo-scientists have been paid to demonstrate some made-up health threat, but the main fact is that very few know about the controversy around this wonder of nature. Where is the information? So, our State will take good care of us and they will continue feeding us aspartame. Why?

Because the show must go on. We must go to work and earn our keep, and shop the things that they tell us to buy, whose manufacture creates job for other fellow citizens. Sometimes we want things cheaper, so the quality sucks, dangerous pesticides or ingredients have been used, and/or we exploit cheap labour force that has come from far away following the glitter of the money that is so sadly produced, and that produces such a great sadness in our modern societies. When you generate more money than you actually need, the risk is that you will start working less, becoming less productive for the system: ergo, you need someone to tell you how to spend your money, and trick you into thinking not only that you need those things, but that you need much more than that. Who is really poor, who has enough wealth to substain himself, or those who swim in money but are victims of a mental slavery comparable to drug and alcohol addiction?

Soap, shampoo and penis envy

2009-05-22T13:56:00.000+02:00

Today I was looking at a British website for camping equipment. I just found a very nice and cheap tent, and I'm going to buy it for my trip (June 20th-August 11th). I still need a bunch of other things though, and as it was to be expected, I decided to waste some time with things that I don't need. I would say that 80% of the catalogue was full of stuff that hardly anyone would need. Take soap, for example. Have you ever thought about how many different kinds of soap there are on the market? They want to sell you shower soap, bathing soap, hand soap, foot soap, make-up removing soap, medical soap, mild soap, hard soap, all-purpose soap, natural soap... "natural soap"?! Oh yeah, it's that soap with just as many chemicals as the other ones, but with some "herb extracts" that make it smell like a blossoming mountain pasture...

Since years I have one olive oil soap that I keep in a recycled glass (here you can't really recycle them, so I try to re-use all glasses for my sauces, grains, pickled roots...), it's one of the best soaps available on the market, and is ridiculously cheap. One day I realized that I did not need anything else, and that's just the way it is. Another thing that you'd need is a piece of Marseille soap to wash your clothes, you can also grate it and put it into the washing machine. The fact is that there are so many different options on the market, that producers always have to find new marketing strategies and always, always end up putting some shit into their products (to save money on that and invest in advertisement!) and boasting its revolutionary, magical properties, that are either lies or due to things that very few consumers would buy. Then you find "all purpose soap" on a website like that I was reading, and think "oh, what a great idea! if I buy this, I won't need all those different soaps!". Great. It's just soap!

Since I cut my hair a couple of months ago, I'm not using a shampoo any longer, so I don't need that either and I don't need to carry one along when I travel (I just use a cheap, thin comb to remove the dandruff and that's it - it's actually much more effective than any anti-dandruff shampoo). I still can't believe I did stop, because I have been suffering from an excessive dandruff production all my life, and my head was constantly itchy, so that I had to wash my hair (with shampoo, of course!) every other day, if not every single day. What is amazing is that I heard several people (ordinary people, not hippies or some weirdos) during my life, who did use shampoo, saying that shampoo is bad for your hair, and that everybody should use as little and rarely as possible. So, this is an idea that is present in our society, but nobody really seems to care. You grow up doing what everybody else does, that means buying what everybody else buys, and so what they want you to buy, and you never think about whether this is good or bad. And we call this system democracy, suggesting that the people are in charge - the people are not in charge of anything at all, but they have the feeling they are (I don't like the term "the people", but there is really no better word).

Before I stopped, I started reading a lot of things about that, and I was really concerned about my head becoming unbearably itchy, less about looking ugly and filthy, but still I was going to do that. Probably I wanted to do it because I was so sick of taking extra care of my hair - I couldn't even go on a hiking trip for longer that 2 days, because I really had to wash my hair with shampoo as soon as possible, especially if I was sweating. It was so annoying that I decided to try something different, and first I found a herbal shampoo that was supposed to be very mild (I don't know if it really helped, but who cares...), and I started using it one-two times a week, and using a nettle, rosemary and lavender decoction for the rest of the days. It was still pretty itchy at the beginning, but with time, it got better, and when I cut my hair I stopped completely. I do think it helps a bit having shorter hair, but I refuse to think that it wouldn't work as weel with long hair; it is easier to take care of if it's shorter anyway. Now my head is not itchy at all, I wash my hair every 3 days with water only, and my hair looks just as good as before, or probably even better, and for sure it's much healthier! And I can't really understand the problems that some people had, when I was reading their websites. Some were experimenting with egg yolk (!!), oils, vinegar, and lots of other things, and they looked really ugly from their pictures. I had one of the worst kinds of hair ever, I didn't do anything special with it, and now I'm more than fine, I won't exaggerate if I said that I feel I freed myself from some slavery. It's a beautiful feeling of freedom. What's wrong with people?

Well, by now you'll be wondering what the heck this thing on your left is. That's what I was wondering too. It's a Urine Director and it's amazing. It was in the camping gadget catalogue and I got struck by it. At first, I thought it was something for extreme weather conditions (when it's so windy, it's easier to direct your pee jet??), or something like a catheter, for those who need it (but on an outdoor equipment website?). I was utterly confused. Then I started reading and I realized the way I look at things is sometimes so androcentric. This, my friends, is for ladies. Who started some years ago wearing trousers, but soon realized that it's not so practical when using mankind's first lavatory, nature. My grandma told me several times that when she was little, the women working outside would urinate from standing, just lifting a tiny bit of their big skirts to prevent them from getting wet. They would do it when they were chatting, and it was completely normal and absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. But times change, and technology produced the right remedy. I am utterly amazed and don't know what to think. I leave the comments to you.

Sumar! Summer!

2009-05-19T13:11:00.000+02:00

Summer has arrived in Reykjavík, and you folks have just no idea how amazing it is. The sun is really shining non stop, people are sunbathing and when I finish work at around 11 p.m. it's as light as at 5 in Europe. It's a beautiful feeling, you feel the need to enjoy every single moment of it, every single sunbeam, especially now that my exams are over since last Friday. Until two weeks ago it was still cold and windy, the grass in the Westfjords yellow, and now life is bursting all over the place. The city is literally invaded by hoards of tourists, the kreppa (economic depression) feeling nearly faded away.

It is also time for reflections. This year in Iceland has been amazing. It had always been my dream to come to Iceland and I must really say that it was far better than I could ever imagine. I have seen a whole country being transformed in just a few months' time. I have met amazing people, and as I often say, I really believe that people here have something special, something different. If you come to this place and, as it happens to many foreigners, get stuck here, you must have something special. And if you're just like anyone else, you will change.

Albeit with confusion, I reckon my time here has almost come to an end. It is no end though, it's the turning of an important page leading to a new chapter of my life, that will bring new experiences and ideas. I take this cuddling sunlight as a beautiful present that this place has wanted to grant me for the love I have given to it. A goodbye present, biding me farewell but at the same time knowing that I will come back, because if you have loved this place as I have done, you either get stuck here, or you simply can't stay away from it. It is an uncomplicated love, it's the amazement at the view over the fjord every time I walk down the street, it's the warmth in hugging a friend, it's the fuzzling in your entrails when you drink a good bottle of Skjálfti, it's the Atlantic breeze blowing on your face, it's the sound of this weird language. A few, simple things, that all together make you happy as you have never been before, whose beauty is renewed every single day. I cherish all this, knowing that all these experiences and thoughts have prepared the way for the next step, that hopefully will be a major turning point in my life.

What have I done till now? Studying and working. When I finished high school I knew really well what I wanted to do. I wanted to become financially independent from my family, I wanted to learn good German and Norwegian, and go to Iceland and learn Old Norse. I've done all this and there is very little left that still has to become true. Meanwhile I realized that I cannot do a thing. I've studied so much and can talk about different things, but I can't make anything with my hands. And since I don't expect other people to make those things for me, I'll have to learn how myself. I don't want to work for 40 years of my life to buy a house like anyone else, ending up working more and more to buy a bigger leather couch or a flatter TV screen. There is another way, a simpler and a more rewarding one. I have waited too long, and now starting next September I will make the first step toward it. Unlike many people may think, I haven't travelled much these latest years. Or at least not as much as I would have wanted, or as so many people I have met on my way did. I've always been committed to something, usually a degree, or a job (last year in Germany), that gave me a lot but also prevented me from being completely free to do whatever I felt like and go wherever I wanted. Unfatiguable dreamer, I have been dreaming all my life and building dreams upon dreams. Dreaming for years is a long time. Once time again, it's time to stop dreaming, grab your life into your own hands and give it the shape you decided.

It is time for Wwofing. And finally for seeing something I have never seen and I know to be amazing, i.e. Eastern Europe. My plan starting next September is to go to Slovakia to the coolest ecovillage ever in the Tatra mountains, and from there explore the whole region, and probably in the winter travel down across the whole Balkans and be in Greece for harvesting olives. I want to learn skills that you don't learn in books, it's so sad realizing that I have no idea how to build even a simple house, repair my trousers, recognize mushrooms, for example. I am longing for knowledge and for alternative, sustainable solutions for living my life. And that's not going to end there. This path will continue, although in a different scenario, because I'm slowly realizing that sometimes, what you're looking for is not so far away. But sometimes you have to go a long way, materially but also spiritually, in order to realize it.

Skólaferð til Vestfjarða

2009-05-05T01:28:00.000+02:00

Vestfirðir 05/09

Tökum málið í okkar hendur...

2009-04-10T17:38:00.000+02:00

... means "let's take the X in our hands" and it's the slogan of the growing anarchist movement in Reykjavík. I didn't translate the word mál because it can mean hundreds different things in Icelandic. It's one of those all-rounders that every language has, one of those wee words that you can just put there without even thinking what it could mean in that context, because it can mean just anything. Its chief meaning is 'speech', linked to the obsolete verb mæla 'to talk', and 'language' (especially in the compound tungumál, literally 'tongue-speech'), it can mean 'case', 'problem' (especially in the compound vandamál, literally 'trouble'), meaning that can be extended to 'thing', I mean, 'whatever'. It also means 'measure' and a certain kind of drinking cup. So, let's take *whatever* in our hands. It's a nice slogan, pointing at activism as the lifeblood of human society - everybody should be an activist and take active stand for his ideas, or else, if it's about ideas that are not worth fighting, what kind of ideas are they supposed to be?

Active stand should be taken in the first place against this kind of 'democracy' that wants us to cast our ballot and then switch off the brain while someone else takes all important decisions, as if what they are doing should no longer concern us. Of course, we can follow up on the (mostly manipulated) media, but the people have no say at all. Not to mention all those people that have no say anyway (immigrants, refugees, who are often the objects of merciless legislations). Last year over 600 refugees applied for political asylum in Iceland, and only one has been accepted. Iceland hosts one of the lowest percentages of refugees in the world, most of whom are being refused asylum for no reason. Currently there are 5 refugees in Reykjavík who are trying to gain the media's attention and make people talk about what's going on. The government of one of the most 'civilized' countries in the world is ready to get these people with two hours notice and ship them back to the first Schengen country they have reached on their way to Europe - Greece, that is notoriously violating international asylum law and is stuffed with wannabe refugees -, or to their home countries, where they could meet certain death or imprisonment.

The nicest thing about being in Iceland is that everything is so small, and I love it. Getting to know the refugees and listen to them was pretty easy, as it is to get people involved, in spite of the attempts of the government to make them invisible (by placing them all in a hostel near the airport, far away from the city). It's so easy to get to know people, and people are not afraid of each other as I have often seen in Italy. People don't look bad at you because you don't look like them. Once - I was 16 and I had long hair - I was in Bologna city centre and I wanted to ask an old lady where a street was, but I couldn't even formulate my question as the lady, probably terrified by the fact that I wasn't wearing Gucci sunglasses and Dolce&Gabbana underwear protruding from my Levis' and I wasn't visibly going to the hairstyler at least once a week, implored me not to touch her and to let her go with all her belongings unspoiled. Or all those times I tried to ask information on the street and people didn't even look at me, as if I were transparent, probably because I had a beard. Not to mention all the rest - especially my boss at the Italian restaurant in Oslo where I was working as a dish washer who told me to shave my armpits so that I would have smelled less from sweating. Now, you should try to work for 6 hours in front of a steam-spewing machine in a small kitchen that was already hot like hell; you should rather employ a robot to wash your greasy dishes, they don't smell and don't complain. Because the fact is that we are human beings, and humans can stink when they sweat. Of course, I could have had a perfume bath before coming to work, but I didn't think it was the case. No, "respect for your co-workers, who are to smell your sweat", as I have been told, doesn't have anything to do with it: respect is respecting how other people are, and not trying to change them for any reason. I don't tell other people what they should do to please me, why should I tolerate it from others? Nobody would ever give me a job in a restaurant in Italy with a beard like I have now, not to mention people with tattoos or piercing. And even people who don't have anything to do with my career, would feel free to advise me on my appearance and body care.

The squatters' movement in Iceland is small and until now gained very little success. As in any othe city, in Reykjavík there are houses that nobody uses and nobody cares about. Sometimes the owners even live in foreign countries. Now a very big and nice house has been occupied in Vatnsstígur, in the heart of Reykjavík, and we're all waiting with impatience to see what will become of it. The project is turning it into a social centre, that would be the first in a country where very few people know about issues like non-profit, consensus-based decision making, and activism is dormant - except when two weeks of protests succeeded in making the previous government resign last January. People were actually very surprised that everything turned out to be so successful in such a short time, because in the country there is no tradition of going down the street (not in a big SUV 4x4 off road!) and protesting for people's rights. The only protest that people carried out in modern times were that against the US military base in Keflavík (on the site of the new international airport), and in many years did not produce any result, until the Americans left because the base lost its strategic significance after the end of the Cold War. I'm very eager to see what will become of this house. Technically, the police cannot break in and get the occupants until the owner himself calls them. And this hasn't happened yet, but could happen any time now.

Once I used to think, like many, that squatting houses is stupid and not fair. That is an understandable feeling, but if we look at where it comes from, it is clearly due to the way people who pay taxes and rent (and maybe are on a waiting list for a house from the social services) regard those who don't. They feel an injustice has been done to them, but in fact, it is only about envy. I am also envious of those that are on unemployment benefits right now, that are earning more than me and have lots of spare time that I don't have. But in fact, this doesn't concern me at all. Right now I have two jobs that I like, like I have never had before, and I should cherish that in the first place. Perhaps people's resentment is due to the fact that they don't like their job in the first place, and should rather think about how they could improve their lives by investing their time in something worthier than working to accumulate money. Leading a much simpler life, without luxury, and use their time to do something that spiritually rewards them. This, I think, is the best way to tackle envy.

There are lots of people that don't pay rent, because for example they have inherited a house from someone that has been working a whole life to buy it, and sometimes these relatives have never even met their heirs. Do these people have more rights to getting a house for free, than people who have nothing and are using a house that is not being used by anybody else? And what about former politicians getting pensions from the State only because they have been sitting in the parliament for a handful of years? The point is that many squat end up being places that are open to everyone, where constructive activities are organized. They are laboratories where a new model of society is being created. They are places where people who sometimes are outcasts are working to create a better society. And people who criticize this, have never looked inside to see what this is really about.

I heard that a couple of weeks ago an Italian engineer or something (I couldn't find the article again) committed suicide because he couldn't find a job and could not bear the fact of living on unemployment benefit. In Sardinia and elsewhere people are protesting against factories that are closing or are being "delocalized" to countries where labour force is much cheaper. Of course these are serious problems that have to be tackled by the administration. But I can't really understand those redundant workers (It. cassintegrati) who can't bear getting money for not being working. Berlusconi told them and many others "datevi da fare" (do something, find yourself something to do, another job, or whatever) and it was doubtless a stupid careless statement; but on the other hand, how many other people in their situation would do something else than complaining about having lost their job in a huge factory that was spoiling Sardinia's pristine beauty? The factory (Euralummina) was providing entire villages with jobs, true, but people have been living there for millennia without factories, and they have always survived, even under the Turkish pirate raids. They were living in a much simpler way, without television and cars, taking advantage of the beautiful weather by growing vegetables and shepherding. Maybe I'm an idealist, but there are thousands of people that are trying to start projects about alternative lifestyles in places where the climate doesn't allow to do much agriculture. Doing that and accommodating paying lovers of the Sardinian natural beauty would be a wonderful, sustainable way of leading a decent and dignified life. There are hundreds of villages there and in so many other places in Italy that have been completely abandoned after the 50's, when the economic boom pushed huge part of the population to the major cities, to pursue a new model of life that for sure has left many unsatisfied and has produced huge social problems in the big cities' suburbia, not to mention the way industries such as alluminium have spoiled an environment that would be so easy to exploit in a sustainable way. Saving these villages and houses from modernity's oblivion would be relatively easy and cheap. Much cheaper and easier than working a whole life to buy a minuscule apartment in the filthy outskirts of a big city. Here too, in the village, a new model of society can be experimented, a society where people take care of their own economy, health, and education in an autonomous and communitarian way. I'm not saying it's easy. It needs culture, the culture to realize that what they tell us on TV isn't the full picture, and curiosity for alternatives to our modern and corruptive lifestyle. It needs a lot of work, but in the end it's certainly rewarding. It needs the courage to go off the beaten track and taka málið í okkar hendur, take the problem, our lives, our future and what we want to build and leave to our children, in our hands and not let anybody else decide about what is our right.

A couple of links:

Fist barter-based B&B in Sardinia
Abandoned villages in Italy, 1
Abandoned villages in Italy, 2
Abandoned villages in Italy, 3
Abandoned villages in Italy, 4

Una tiepida sera di febbraio...

2009-02-16T23:20:00.000+01:00

... il vostro blogger preferito (che però non si faceva sentire da un pezzo), è finalmente riemerso dall'inverno artico (era ora). Qui la neve e il ghiaccio si sono sciolti completamente col caldo di questi ultimi due giorni, e io ultimamente ho rischiato l'esaurimento nervoso e l'insorgere della demenza per mancanza di sonno (ho letto recentemente che il non dormire può avere questi e altri effetti collaterali e mi sono messo un po' paura). In realtà lo sanno anche i muri che "non dormire" per me equivale a qualcosa come 6-7 ore (che per la maggior parte delle persone sarebbe normale), a differenza delle 10-11 a cui mi ero abituato, specialmente nel periodo prenatalizio. Ma già dal mio ritorno a metà gennaio le cose erano molto diverse: il sole alle 9 era già bello alto e non tramontava prima delle 17. Quasi normale, insomma, e man mano che i giorni passano il ritmo della giornata che si allunga e della primavera che incombe si fa sentire sempre di più. Ma che dico, in Islanda non c'è la primavera: secondo il calendario ufficiale, il 23 aprile è Sumardagurinn fyrsti, il primo giorno d'estate (festa nazionale), cioè si passa direttamente dall'inverno all'estate. Ma insomma, ci siamo capiti.

Mi sembra quasi di riaffiorare in superficie dopo un una lunga apnea. La scorsa settimana ho lavorato e studiato talmente tanto che mi sono quasi dimenticato di avere una vita: addirittura sabato sera, tornato dal lavoro alle 23:30, mi sono messo a scrivere un tema in danese che mi ha preso due ore buone, cioè fino alle 2. E il consiglio dello study group di cui faccio parte ha deciso di aumentare a tre gli incontri settimanali (meglio così, dato che i miei compagni mi esortano a fare i compiti, cosa che risulterebbe ardua se lasciata a me stesso). L'argomento della tesi è fissato: il titolo è The development of the common Germanic reduplicating præteritum into Old Norse from a historic-comparative perspective. No, sul serio. Non sto scherzando. Non voglio tediare la maggior parte di voi con i dettagli. Ma i primi problemi si sono già fatti sentire: dal primo abbozzo di bibliografia, è già emerso che buona parte degli articoli che mi servono non c'è in nessuna biblioteca in Islanda. Chissà se riuscirò a scriverla lo stesso, questa tesi! In ogni caso un soggiorno estivo in Danimarca pare necessario. Questo è il sito del corso a cui parteciperò, cercando allo stesso tempo di procurarmi il materiale che mi serve per la tesi.

I miei compagni di corso mi stupiscono sempre di più. Gente che ne doveva sapere a pacchi, ora pare che al di fuori dello study group non siano capaci di tradurre una riga. Una ragazza sta già preparando le carte per fare un esame per studiare legge dopo (diventerà un avvocato esperto di antico islandese, pare, che invidia). E io mi stupisco anche da solo: ieri, traducendo miracoli di santi islandesi, mi sono imbattuto in frasi latine con traduzione in antico nordico a fianco, al che mi sono accorto che capivo molto meglio l'antico nordico che il latino. E non era neanche chissaché, insomma qualcosa tipo Reflecti Domine pane coelesti ad vitam quesumus nutriamur aeternam (che in antico nordico suona Heyrðu Dróttin, vér saddir himnesku brauði biðjum at sú næring snúisk oss til eilífs lífs ok fagnaðar). Allora ho pensato che c'era qualcosa che non andava (dopo quasi 7 anni di latino...). Soluzione: dopo gli esami di maggio, il nostro reading group (composto per la cronaca da me, Lisbeth dalla Danimarca, Stefan dalla Germania e Colin dagli USA) si trasformerà in un corso di latino base officiato dal sottoscritto. Ce la faremo? Il libro Latin for dummies esiste già, speriamo di non averne bisogno. Voglio usare un metodo innovativo sviluppato da un danese, che prevede l'insegnamento del latino direttamente in latino, senza mediazioni né traduzioni.

Anche perché i miei progetti per il futuro vanno ben oltre il latino. In realtà il mio obiettivo segreto è quello di diventare un indoeuropeista specializzato in germanico e celtico. L'anno prossimo però, prima di andarmene un estate in Irlanda per perfezionare il celtico, voglio completare un anno del corso di laurea Icelandic for foreign students. Poi sono a posto con l'Islanda. Speriamo che non mi accada quel che non faccio altro che osservare intorno a me (pare una maledizione): gente che tenta di andarsene, per una, due, tre o più volte, e alla fine va sempre a finire che in un modo o nell'altro torna. Moa, una mia collega svedese, è già la seconda volta che tenta di andarsene dall'Islanda ma - anche senza soldi! - poi è tornata. La mia coinquilina Chrissi doveva andarsene in marzo, ma dato che è venuto fuori che non la prendono più all'università in Germania, anche lei ha deciso (o è stata costretta) a restare. Io progettavo di andarmene già in giugno, invece ho già procrastinato di un anno. Oltretutto, io sono venuto anche e soprattutto per imparare la lingua, e finché tra tutte le varie tribolazioni non l'ho fatto a sufficienza, non me ne posso andare (per una questione di principio). Quando ero in Norvegia ho fatto l'errore di non aver continuato a studiare la lingua nel secondo semestre (perché avevo troppo da fare), e me ne sono pentito. Questa volta non voglio pentirmi. E sono anche stufo di avere troppo da fare - speriamo quindi che mi concedano la borsa di studio. Non temete, però, prima o poi mi prenderò una pausa, e quando lo farò, sarà bella lunga, e nessuno avrà notizie di me per un po'. Promesso.

Alla fine pare che non andrò più a posare nudo (qualche tempo fa mi avevano offerto questo lavoro per due settimane). Non è più necessario per questa settimana, forse la prossima. Un po' mi dispiace, anche se mi eviterà una levataccia alle 6 e mi lascerà tutto il tempo di andare alla lezione delle 11. Però era interessante: insomma, nella vita bisogna poter fare anche questo, cioè vincere le proprie paure e mettersi in discussione. Certo, ci sono molti altri modi per mettersi in discussione e provare qualcosa di nuovo, ma questo è quel che ho trovato al momento...

Finisco questo noiosissimo post (che non ha altra funzione che riallacciare i contatti con chi da tempo si è già rotto le palle di aspettare mie notizie) con l'annunciare a malincuore che sarà molto difficile tornare in Italia quest'estate. A dire la verità è già un peccato che mi perderò il mese più bello per fare delle escursioni in Islanda (luglio), e spero di aver abbastanza tempo per farle in giugno e agosto. Ma entro il 17 agosto devo essere di nuovo qui per questo corso estivo, e la settimana dopo inziano già tutte le lezioni. Insomma un programmone. Per questo mi aspetto che siate voi a venire da me! Prendete esempio da mia madre, che era da vent'anni che non andava da nessuna parte e improvvisamente ha messo su una comitiva famigliare di ben 6 persone, che approderanno in visita ufficiale in aprile.

Rivolgo un ultimo abbraccio collettivo a tutti - specialmente a Francesca "Mac", che da quel che mi risulta dovrebbe aver già partorito (non vedo l'ora di leggere il suo primo post post-parto, e scusate il bisticcio), e Ledia e Mau, che mi hanno scritto un bellissimo commento. Alla prossima!

Reykjavík Winter Promenade

2008-12-22T11:12:00.000+01:00

Dumpsters and Working-Class Myths

2008-12-12T12:29:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday an old man came to Lækjartorg, while we were serving free, freshly dumpstered food for the hungry masses as usual. As many do, he inquired how much the food cost. Hann er ókeypis, it's free, we stated proudly. But instead of thanking and banqueting as it had been proper, he ventured into a potentially endless oration on the social outcomes of working - or rather on how people avoiding work, such as we are, damage society. "I have been working my whole life" he said, "I have paid taxes", and so on, "and you guys, by eating for free somehow, avoid what you are rightly called upon to by society, destroying an in fact good and well-working welfare system". Well, a part from the fact that I and many others are working, and that the welfare state is mostly a myth even here in the North (the fact that it is much preferable to those found in other countries does not mean that it is good), our silent, toothsome protest had little to do with that. But we knew that kind of horseshit, and were by it utterly disgusted. This was the primacy of the "working class", which has nowadays also become a myth, just like welfare state.

In fact, "welfare state" is a contradiction in terms: for as long as welfare is administrated by a central government, which is increasingly liable to be manipulated by private interests of few, market, corporative powers, etc., there can be no welfare. Even if a country's health system is perfectly working and striving not to leave anyone outside its protective wing, the capitalist model of our society will continue to allow mass manipulation and corporative interference: that means, people are not in charge of their own health, but are a constant target for marketing campaigns of pharmaceutical companies, which promote mass medical ignorance, and fill it in with their products.

But in a post-cold-war world, we should also accept that the working class myth is over. With the fall of communism, which had made an extensive use of working-class rhetoric, it has become clear how this model of society has used this idea to divide people and to massively exploit their labour force, once again for the interests of a few. That guy has most likely sold all the best time of his life to a system that doesn't really care for him, but needs his money to produce brain-washing schooling, social exclusion, to allow massive goods waste, promote consumerism, and in the worst cases uses the money for corruption, wars, patroning the Church, or for rescueing state-owned airlines and banks from bankrupcy (it happened recently both in Iceland and Italy). When working means to sell one's time for this, then working is not worth a thing. There is nothing good in working and, in fact, nobody really works for society, but for him/herself in the first place, and his/her family.

This has been indeed a hot argument between right and left in Italy for quite a long time. I remember how politicians from one side (left) would stress the fact that the retirement benefits' system is collapsing, and that we need new labour force (from abroad) to pay the pensions to those people who are done with working. The other side (right) would reply by saying that this is a myth, and that in reality everyone pays for his own retirement during his lifetime, hence we don't need any immigrants (so they can "stay at home" or be kicked out of the country, or be put under inhuman conditions in structures resembling concentration camps). They are both right but ultimately wrong. The first are right in saying that the system is collapsing - it's collapsing because it has been badly administrated, especially with all those benefits paid to 35-years-old nurses, who in the 70s could retire this young - but are wrong in everything else, and the latter are right in saying that the system should work in that way, but in fact doesn't. And besides, should foreigners only be allowed to come to Italy because we need them?

In reality there is no real working class, but the great dicotomy is between the workers - who contribute to the system and keep it alive - and those who have refused to prostitute their lives for a system that manipulates us, robs us, tells us lies, exploits us. Those who have chosen not to work, or to work as little as possible, just as much as they need to lead a simple life, are criminalised. As if everyone should make as much money as possible, not for him/herself and his family, but for society in the first place! No matters if this means that I won't have time for my beloved - I will pay someone to take care of them, and I will also have someone buy me groceries in expensive shops, rather than use my precious time to try to grow food myself, and buying stuff in the raw (such as flour to make good bread) and use it to make food as humanity has always been doing for millennia.

By dumpstering I realised that there are much better ways to use your time than working. Before I would use an afternoon to make good bread, for instance. Now I dive once a week into the trash and I get everything I need for the whole week. People who sympathised with the idea but didn't dear to try, after the first time got so excited about all the things that you can find in there, that dropped all constraints and became fanatics (I've seen them). But there is one thing that amazes me all the time, and it's language. We call trash/junk/rubbish/garbage all that we chock into the dumpster. But if we could see those very thing elsewhere, most of us would probably use them. I always keep old bread and recycle it in all possible ways, as my mother and granny do (you can grate it and make a number of dishes, you can fry/bake it with oil and toss it in the soup...), and most people would think good of it; but if I get from the dumpster a loaf of yesterday's bread, which is still fresh, good and definitely much better than the old bread that I keep in my kitchen, people would call it trash. Therefore not good, and disgraceful to dive into it. Do you know how the bread from the dumpster looks like? Have you ever tasted it? Did you know that it's almost always in a big, black plastic bag and therefore clean? Most people would eat a yoghurt that expired yesterday and that you forgot in the fridge, but few would eat one from the dumpster expiring on the same day (sometimes they're not even expired yet... have you ever seen food expiring on the same day on the shelf?).

All the good food that we throw away makes me sick. It is a difficult thought to bear: think that we pay for it, everyone buying a loaf also pays for all those being chocked into the trash, because the baker won't lose money on those. Someone will always have to pay. If distribution chains took better care of the food and all the rest, as people used to do before consumerism, we would pay a much fairer price, and society would be more democratic, because everyone would afford better food, and we would have real surplus cash for a number of cultural things. We need to go back to our past, to a spontaneous, quasi-primitive model of society, where people take care for each other without over-structures.

There could be, actually, a contradiction between anarchism and fair market. A fair market does need structures controlling it from above, that guarantee the fairness. That implies that the concept of a self-regulating free market á la Adam Smith and economic anarchy are basically the same... if I think about it I'd shiver: the idea of the "invisible hand" has always scared me to death. Of course this cannot be true. But it is a remarkable paradox. One thing is sure: that today's economy is not free, because of intertwining powers, lobbies and private interests ruling the world from above. In fact, solidarity and non-profit mentality applies at its best - or it applies at all - in small, locally organised societies, such as the village. Many modern examples of alternative economy - ecovillages, travellers, traditional rural communities, rebel tribes in Chiapas and autonomous social experiments in Argentina - are organised according to this pattern. It seems to be the most effective one, the nucleus from which humanity could be one day renovated. And it is free market, but with the difference that that is real freedom, because it's free first of all from one thing: profit. In a small community people lead a substistence life, and as soon as somene takes advantage of someone else, the system collapses, because it's tiny. In a globalised world, a non-sustainable system like ours would take longer to collapse, and its effects will usually be less noticeable (thrown stuff = higher prices & massive waste & pollution = nobody sees the trash = nobody knows). But we are in the middle of a global catastrophe. Not only because of global warming, but firstly from a human point of view: we're not human any longer. We lost nearly all possibilities of inter-human relationship and have become machines. People who live with machines, work with machines, communicate through machines - we don't see humans as such around us, and become self-secluded monsters. We desperately need to free ourselves from all this.

I don't miss Italy (the Spectator)

2008-11-28T16:15:00.000+01:00

I don’t miss Italy. The dolce vita is a myth

Lisa Hilton
The Spectator

Wednesday, 5th November 2008

Lisa Hilton looks back on three years exile in Milan and rejoices in the bounty of Waitrose and a postal service that is at least halfway efficient. Italy at its best is a hologram

Mention to most people that you have recently quit Italy for London and you become an instant object of sympathy. ‘Oh, poor you,’ they coo, ‘don’t you mind?’ Cue effusions about that darling trattoria in Lucca, those hidden della Francescas in Arezzo and enthusiastic reiterations of the word ‘bella’ as last seen in Gregory’s Girl. Anyone I speak to is anxious to impress with the authenticity of their Italy, their cognoscento’s rejection of Chiantishire for that enchanting, mythical country where the logge are eternally dappled in sunshine and dusky peasant girls roll out exquisite ravioli on mediaeval doorsteps. I can hardly bear to disabuse them, but after three years in Milan I feel obliged to inform that the dolce vita is looking about as convincing these days as Signor Berlusconi’s comb-over. Whenever I see another droolingly aspirational magazine spread about the latest perfect little corner of the bel paese I have an overpowering urge to shove it where the Tuscan sun doesn’t shine.

I’m not mourning my exile from the land of blossoming mercati and natty little espadrilles. I rejoice in the bounty of Waitrose, the fact that I can go to the bank at lunchtime and the thrill of buying a stamp in a post office. Italy at its best is a hologram, best saved for the annual fortnight in the Umbrian villa, because actually living there is rubbish. Even if you’re not in Naples.

For example, we received our Christmas cards in March. Apparently I was the only person who minded living without a postal service, as my attempts to complain to the concierge, my in-laws, anyone who would listen, were met with a resigned shrug and ‘E così’ (That’s how it is). Ditto politics, corrupt to the point where absolutely no one understands them, public services, or the casually appalling racism which frequently had me choking on my cappuccino. Italian television is unwatchable; either gameshows crammed with vacant showgirls in g-strings who subsequently turn up in the government or someone shouting at Alessandra Mussolini, while Italian journalism is so blind, pompous and witless as to render it unreadable. Apart from political commentaries on how there’s nothing to be done about corruption, the newspapers contain only badly translated and outdated articles lifted from the Anglo press.

And the food? I like a nice risotto as much as the next Italophile, but the only spice available at my local grocery was a violent yellow powder labelled ‘Il curry’. Elizabeth David may have brought Mediterranean cooking to the British, but as far as ethnic food goes, in Italy it’s still 1953. The Milanese, who consider themselves the arbiters of elegance to the rest of the world, still get painfully worked up about sushi. Anyway, most Italians only dine al fresco twice a year because they’re afraid of the weather. In this healthiest of nations, the national malaise is hypochondria. Joining a gym required two doctor’s certificates (i.e. a week of queuing) and my daughter’s nursery almost reported me to social services when I confessed to not owning an electric thermometer.

What makes it all the more painful is that the Italians themselves seem so determined to ignore all that is wonderful about their country. This is the nation that invented nearly everything civilised, from the sonnet to Nutella, yet Giacomo the Stripper rampages through the countryside tearing off baroque stucco to reveal banal brick, as the tourists expect it, and no one can go to La Scala because some of the finest musicians in the world are still being paid in panini. Why acknowledge the most glorious cultural heritage on the planet when you can be a slavering drone lapping up the dregs of an Americana that even the benighted Brits despise? Sitting in Cova, the exquisite 18th-century coffeehouse once patronised by Verdi, my friend stirred her macchiato wistfully and confessed that she was dying to try Starbucks.

If you want to get a look at l’Italia autentica, read Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, which captures a brutal, primitive southern culture that still pertains today, as documented by Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah. Or Aldo Cazzullo’s Outlet Italia, which reveals how the piazza, the once-proud meeting place of nascent democracy, has been emptied because the obese, telefonino-obsessed inhabitants of the graceful provinces are spending their Sundays in industrial sheds buying knock-off Abercrombie & Fitch. The car-choked north wheezes through the worst smog in Europe, while the south is literally toxic. And no one cares. E così.

Metto delle foto

2008-11-16T17:56:00.001+01:00

Cossiga: "picchiarli a sangue..."

2008-11-10T17:04:00.000+01:00

da http://www.informa-azione.info/

Segue un'interessante intervista a Cossiga apparsa sul QN (Quotidiano Nazionale).

Presidente Cossiga, pensa che minacciando l'uso della forza pubblica contro gli studenti Berlusconi abbia esagerato?
«Dipende, se ritiene d'essere il presidente del Consiglio di uno Stato forte, no, ha fatto benissimo. Ma poiché è l'Italia è uno Stato debole, e all'opposizione non c'è il granitito Pci ma l'evanescente Pd, temo che alle parole non seguiranno i fatti e che quindi Berlusconi farà quantomeno una figuraccia».

Quali fatti dovrebbero seguire?
«A questo punto, Maroni dovrebbe fare quel che feci io quand'ero ministro dell'Interno».

Ossia?
«In primo luogo, lasciare perdere gli studenti dei licei, perché pensi a cosa succederebbe se un ragazzino di dodici anni rimanesse ucciso o gravemente ferito...».

Gli universitari, invece?
«Lasciarli fare. Ritirare le forze di polizia dalle strade e dalle università, infiltrare il movimento con agenti provocatori pronti a tutto, e lasciare che per una decina di giorni i manifestanti devastino i negozi, diano fuoco alle macchine e mettano a ferro e fuoco le città».

Dopo di che?
«Dopo di che, forti del consenso popolare, il suono delle sirene delle ambulanze dovrà sovrastare quello delle auto di polizia e carabinieri».

Nel senso che...
«Nel senso che le forze dell'ordine dovrebbero massacrare i manifestanti senza pietà e mandarli tutti in ospedale. Non arrestarli, che tanto poi i magistrati li rimetterebbero subito in libertà, ma picchiarli a sangue e picchiare a sangue anche quei docenti che li fomentano».

Anche i docenti?
«Soprattutto i docenti. Non quelli anziani, certo, ma le maestre ragazzine sì. Si rende conto della gravità di quello che sta succedendo? Ci sono insegnanti che indottrinano i bambini e li portano in piazza: un atteggiamento criminale!».

E lei si rende conto di quel che direbbero in Europa dopo una cura del genere? «In Italia torna il fascismo», direbbero.
«Balle, questa è la ricetta democratica: spegnere la fiamma prima che divampi l'incendio».

Quale incendio?
«Non esagero, credo davvero che il terrorismo tornerà ad insanguinare le strade di questo Paese. E non vorrei che ci si dimenticasse che le Brigate Rosse non sono nate nelle fabbriche ma nelle università. E che gli slogan che usavano li avevano usati prima di loro il Movimento studentesco e la sinistra sindacale».

E' dunque possibile che la storia si ripeta?
«Non è possibile, è probabile. Per questo dico: non dimentichiamo che le Br nacquero perché il fuoco non fu spento per tempo».

Il Pd di Veltroni è dalla parte dei manifestanti.
«Mah, guardi, francamente io Veltroni che va in piazza col rischio di prendersi le botte non ce lo vedo. Lo vedo meglio in un club esclusivo di Chicago ad applaudire Obama...».

Non andrà in piazza con un bastone, certo, ma politicamente...
«Politicamente, sta facendo lo stesso errore che fece il Pci all'inizio della contestazione: fece da sponda al movimento illudendosi di controllarlo, ma quando, com'era logico, nel mirino finirono anche loro cambiarono radicalmente registro. La cosiddetta linea della fermezza applicata da Andreotti, da Zaccagnini e da me, era stato Berlinguer a volerla... Ma oggi c'è il Pd, un ectoplasma guidato da un ectoplasma. Ed è anche per questo che Berlusconi farebbe bene ad essere più prudente».

Intermezzo

2008-11-10T14:14:00.000+01:00

Hey gente, se ci siete battete un colpo. È da un pezzo che non leggo vostri commenti e comincio a sentirmi uno di quegli sfigati che scrivono per sé stessi per narcisismo...
Mentre aspettate il prossimo post, vi invito a leggere questo articolo, che brevemente spiega tutto il casino che è successo qui in Islanda:
Cliccate qui (articolo da altrenotizie.org)
Articolo scritto da Haukur Már Helgason per Il Manifesto (da savingiceland.puscii.nl)

p.s. I'm sorry for my non-Italian speaking readers, I'll be coming up soon with new stories in English!
Meanwhile you can read an article written by Haukur Már Helgason for the Italian daily Il Manifesto:
Click here

Grembiuli e anarchia

2008-11-06T18:42:00.000+01:00

Nel giorno in cui la nazione più potente del mondo ha eletto il suo primo presidente afroamericano, io ho finalmente maturato alcune conclusioni sulle questioni che da qualche settimana occupano le colonne e le menti dei (con)cittadini italici. Anche quando stavo in Italia, mi è sempre piaciuto di più leggere i giornali stranieri, non tanto perché pensassi che fossero scritti meglio dei nostri (all'epoca non lo sapevo, oggi ne ho la certezza), ma perché mi interessava sapere che cosa gli altri pensano di noi. Perché chi vive in un paese per una vita intera è in fondo paragonabile, sul piano politico, a chi non esce mai di casa e non ha mai la fortuna (sì, perché per me è una fortuna) di incontrare persone che la pensano diversamente e di confrontarsi con le loro idee.

Una cosa che trovo sconvolgente della nostra società (non parlo qui solo dell'Italia) è che nessuno ci insegna a leggere i giornali. Ho cominciato a leggere i giornali all'università, e durante la scuola leggevo poco e niente, e - ancora peggio - gli unici giornali con cui venivo in contatto erano quelli che trovavo in casa, comprati dal nonno o dallo zio. Da un certo punto di vista, è un bene che in casa mia non ci siano mai stati troppi giornali. Troppo spesso le opinioni sono tramandate meccanicamente dai genitori ai figli, con le abitudini elettorali, dando origine a volte a "paradossi di opinione", dove l'elettorato si comporta (spesso a livello locale) in maniera diametralmente opposta ai valori rappresentati dalla propria fede politica. Un esempio da non sottovalutare è come i vari comizi in cui la popolazione bolognese si è opposta alla costruzione della nuova moschea si siano svolti nei vari circoli/sedi locali dei DS - o del neonato PD. In altre zone si sarebbero sentite le stesse parole ed espressioni nelle sedi della Lega Nord, ma data la morfologia elettorale della regione, la popolazione - che una volta era "comunista" e partigiana - si è riunita nei luoghi messi a disposizione dai partiti ivi più rappresentati per discutere del "problema islamico". Insomma, ho molto più rispetto per chi la pensa radicalmente diversamente da me ma pensa e vota di conseguenza, rispetto a chi vota per abitudine o per tradizione, e poi nel suo piccolo si comporta diversamente, "tradendo" la propria fede politica. Perché la gran parte dei risultati elettorali deve essere decisa da persone che non votano secondo le proprie idee? È ovvio che questo è un grosso problema democratico, anche se difficilmente quantificabile con esattezza. I partiti hanno anche loro le loro responsabilità, poiché spesso modificano la loro ideologia e tradiscono i propri ideali per guadagnarsi il proprio spazio in coalizioni di governo e/o guadagnare il consenso di fasce della popolazione.

Ormai molti hanno dimenticato che, circa quindici anni fa, la Lega Nord era un movimento (non ancora un partito) capace di ispirare moltitudini di persone, che si riconoscevano nella necessità di rinnovare la società, la politica (adottando un linguaggio quasi antipolitico e presentando homines novi con nessuna esperienza politica), criticare la presunta unità di una storia e una cultura italiana e il ruolo delle lingue e culture cosiddette minoritarie, e, cosa massimamente importante, l'assetto dello stato, la cui centralità e istituzioni derivano in gran parti da classi politiche antiche, e portano con sé l'impronta della monarchia prima e del fascismo poi. Poco e niente è cambiato nel dopoguerra: basti pensare alla figura del presidente della repubblica, che ha praticamente ereditato tali e quali le "funzioni" del re. Per la prima volta nella storia italiana si è sentita la necessità di apportare cambiamenti radicali a questo modello di stato e di società. Un rinnovato interesse per le minoranze, soprattutto "non italofone", ha spinto più persone a discutere dell'italianizzazione forzata di popoli e paesi dentro e fuori i confini odierni, scoperchiando alcuni dei crimini di guerra fascisti che sono stati da sempre taciuti e mai apparsi sui libri di scuola. Era un momento tanto grandioso quanto fugace, poiché da un movimento è stato creato un partito, che invece di rinnovare la politica ne è stato fagocitato e corrotto, i suoi intellettuali ed esponenti più autorevoli zittiti, allontanati e in certi casi esiliati (!), mentre gli individui più inetti venivano promossi alle più alte cariche. La linea politica, stravolta più di una volta a seconda dei governi di cui il partito ha fatto parte, è stata infine data in pasto ai desideri perversi di un elettorato razzista e piccolo-borghese, bisognoso di populismo deluso dalle nuove trasformazioni dei partiti post-fascisti. Da quel grande momento storico, siamo finiti ai ministri che portano i maiali a pascolare sui terreni destinati alle moschee, mentre a pochi chilometri di distanza i consigli comunali di sinistra gli danno ragione.

L'anno scorso sono apparsi sulla scena politica fenomeni che avrebbero potuto avere una portata sconvolgente per la società italiana. In primo luogo il movimento antipolitico di Grillo, che sembrava potesse veramente costruire un'alternativa convincente per il futuro, e in secondo luogo la nascita del Partito Democratico, che sembrava avrebbe potuto essere un'alternativa convincente e giovane al polo Berlusconiano. Entrambi i progetti hanno miseramente fallito: il primo si è dissolto e non ha prodotto nulla in vista delle elezioni (insomma, si potrebbe quasi dire che si è esaurito in un "vaffanculo"...), mentre il secondo si è rivelato solo una manovra elettorale, di facciata, per guadagnare più consenso e governare più efficacemente. Niente volti nuovi, niente idee nuove, niente giovani. Incredibilmente, il terzo contendente è riuscito vincitore, e sempre con la stessa minestra: anche lui senza volti nuovi, né idee, e questa volta persino senza promesse eclatanti (a parte quella dell'ICI) né fantacontratto con gli italiani. I giornali stranieri erano allibiti. Dopo le gaffes internazionali del premier e l'evidente bisogno di cambiamento avvertito anche dall'estero, nessuno dubitava della sua sconfitta. A dire il vero sono rimasto allibito anch'io.

È dopo l'ennesima elucubrazione su questi fatti che ho cominciato ad avvicinarmi per la prima volta seriamente ad ambienti anarchici. Ai tempi del liceo tutti erano anarchici (o meglio, anarco-comunisti, alle riunioni del pomeriggio ci si chiamava addirittura "compagni"), mentre non ce n'era uno che avesse un'idea di cosa significasse veramente. Il concetto di anarchia è in fondo un po' come quello di Dio: è usato e abusato un po' da tutti, senza che nessuno se ne occupi seriamente o lo conosca davvero. C'è anche il tabù dell'anarchismo, date le sue implicazioni col terrorismo (mentre in realtà numerosissimi altri gruppi hanno fatto uso del terrorismo a loro volta: fascisti e nazionalisti, comunisti, estremisti religiosi). Io non avevo mai letto letteratura anarchica, per poi accorgermi che gran parte di quella che stavo leggendo, e gran parte delle esperienze che avevo vissuto e che progettavo, in realtà lo era.

Il primo passo verso l'anarchia è il rifiuto di qualsiasi nazionalismo, in qualunque forma, e la consapevolezza dell'uguaglianza di tutto il genere umano. Io ho sempre detestato ogni tipo di nazionalismo, soprattutto perché da noi ne sono intrisi i libri di storia, e il lascito del fascismo è ancora lì, dato che l'Italia non solo non ha avuto nessuna Entnazifizierung ("denazificazione" nel dopoguerra tedesco), nessun criminale di guerra ha mai pagato per le sue azioni, ma addirittura i fascisti hanno avuto cariche di governo grazie all'appoggio degli americani e alla loro paura dell'avanzata del comunismo. Il solo pensiero che un "popolo" o un paese siano migliori di altri è nazionalismo, e il nazionalismo avvelena le menti delle persone e le allontana le une dalle altre.
Il secondo passo è la consapevolezza che le istituzioni governative sono inadatte a rappresentare le persone e a governarle. In altre parole, si tratta del rifiuto della democrazia come la conosciamo oggi. Insomma né totalitarismo né democrazia, niente di niente.

Dopo la pars destruens deve però venire qualcosa di costruttivo. Ovviamente la gente ha bisogno di una qualche forma di amministrazione delle cose comuni. Ma come? È qui che la fiducia, il terzo passo, entra in azione. Credo che fidarsi del prossimo sia il massimo valore umano, perché è esso stesso la base della società: senza fiducia la società fallisce, e ognuno pensa al proprio interesse e a fregare gli altri. Ed è proprio questo quello che sta succedendo oggi: la fiducia è ai minimi storici, tutti si vogliono approfittare di noi, in primo luogo le istituzioni - facendoci comprare cose che non ci servono e votare gente che non ci rappresenta e anzi distrugge tutto ciò che abbiamo, a partire dalla scuola! - e noi non ci fidiamo più di nessuno, ci chiudiamo in casa e abbiamo paura dei vucumprà e degli zingari rapitori di bambini. Per questo è necessario ricostruire e promuovere questa fiducia dal basso, perché le persone non hanno bisogno di uno stato che si occupi di loro, ma in primo luogo di individui in carne ed ossa.

Ma che c'entrano i grembiuli? Ah sì, all'inizio volevo parlare dei grembiuli. Ma vi pare che tra tutti i simboli possibili per connotare negativamente questo decreto criminale che distrugge la scuola a beneficio delle banche, bisogni prendere il grembiule? Io stesso, la maggioranza della popolazione italiana ha portato il grembiule almeno alle elementari, e non ha mai creato nessun problema, a parte alle mamme che volevano vestire le proprie bimbe con supercompletini costosissimi che stonavano col grembiule o non si vedevano affatto. Il grembiule (che esiste nella maggior parte delle scuole del mondo) è simbolo di uguaglianza, e anzi può diventare il simbolo dell'integrazione di minoranze e immigrati (giorni fa leggevo un articolo su una mamma rom, che si vergognava a mandare i propri figli a scuola perché malvestiti e visibilmente "zingari"). E il voto in condotta c'è l'ho sempre avuto, anche alle superiori, senza drammi. I problemi sono ben altri, sono il maestro unico, l'orario ridotto e le sue implicazioni per le mamme lavoratrici, le classi-ghetto separate per i figli di immigrati, la persistenza dell'ora di religione, la riduzione dei docenti nelle università e la scomparsa di materie "poco redditizie" nelle università... ma in Italia si parla di grembiuli!

Shock to the System

2008-11-03T18:02:00.000+01:00

Shock to the system

Budget cuts and reforms in Italian education have unleashed a wave of protests. John Hooper reports

John Hooper
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 21 2008

'This is a very strange protest," mused Teresa Bencetti in a cafe round the corner from the Victor Hugo Girolami state elementary school in Rome. Nobody was proposing to take away her job teaching maths and English, she said. Nobody was proposing to cut her pay which, after tax, left her with around €14,400 (£11,200) a year. But Silvio Berlusconi's rightwing government is proposing to deliver a shock to Italy's troubled education system, and Bencetti and many of her colleagues fear it will do it much more harm than good.

Last week university students and lecturers joined for the first time in a growing wave of protests against cuts and reforms imposed by Berlusconi's young education minister, Mariastella Gelmini. Critics argue they will set back the clock 30 years or more in schools. Following sit-ins and marches, the main trade union federations have called for a one-day general education strike on October 30.

A lot is at stake. Economists agree that a key reason why Italy has become the EU's laggard in the past 10 years or so is that its educational system has failed to adapt sufficiently to the demands of a knowledge-based society. "We're not doing this for ourselves, but because we care about the future of our pupils," said Letizia Baldoni, who teaches humanities.

The Victor Hugo Girolami is in the Monteverdi Nuovo district, which Paola Pandolfi, another of the teachers, describes as "upper middle-class". Yet the school has no broadband and a dozen computers between 500 children. Money ought not to be a problem. The homeland of Maria Montessori spends more on its six- to 11-year-olds than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development average. Cash gets a bit tighter in secondary education. But even there the average spending per student is £4,420, only fractionally below the OECD average.

The nub of the issue is that the available resources are spent badly - or, rather, unproductively. About 97% of Italy's education budget is gobbled up by pay. Yet the teachers are not particularly well rewarded. In primary education, they get 78% of the OECD average (though they also work shorter hours: a basic 24 per week). The problem is that there are so many of them. Italy is a country of short teaching weeks, long school days and small classes, often in tiny schools.

International comparisons

Its primary education, nevertheless, does well in international comparisons. An OECD report published last month put Italy between fifth and eighth on various criteria in a ranking of 30 of the world's richest nations. The trouble begins at the secondary level. The performance of Italian teenagers in successive Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests has been dismal. In the last one, in 2006, they performed worse than their counterparts in Spain, France, Germany, the UK and the US (though with vast differences in achievement between Italy's richer north and the poorer south).

Recent years have also seen hideous incidents of bullying, and of violence against and molestation of teachers by pupils. These, as much as anything, have led to talk of an "educational emergency".

Gelmini, the daughter of a primary school teacher, came into office in April with a remit to tackle it. But, at a time when Italy is struggling to stay within the budget limits imposed by its membership of the euro, she is also under instructions to stay within a tighter budget. The challenge she faces is thus unusually stiff - to improve quality and discipline while slashing costs. Nobody can accuse her of complacency. Scarcely a day has gone past since she became minister on which education has not been in the headlines. The 35-year-old Gelmini's first move was to order budget cuts of €7.8bn.

In stark contrast to what is happening in Britain, the bulk of the cuts were aimed at the elementary schools that make up the one part of the system that is successful (universities are even more of a headache than schools). A lot of small schools are to be closed - 260 just in Lazio, the region around Rome. About 87,000 teaching posts and 45,000 support jobs are to be axed.

The government stresses that no one will be thrown out of work. The savings are to be made over the next three academic years by not filling vacancies. That is scant consolation, though, to tens of thousands of precari - young freelance teachers whose hopes of a career in education have been put off until 2012 and, in most cases, dashed forever. Among criticisms of the government's policy is that it has cut off the flow of new blood into teaching.

At present, parents of primary school pupils have a choice. They can enrol their children for five mornings and two afternoons a week, in which case the children will be expected to do more homework. Or they can put them down for 40 hours. "Full time", as it is known, is popular with parents who both work. The Gelmini reform sweeps away both systems and replaces them with a 24-hour week.

But the change that has excited most controversy - though not most debate because it was rammed through parliament with the Italian equivalent of a "guillotine" motion - is the reintroduction of a system of "one class, one teacher" in elementary schools like the Victor Hugo Girolami. Even some of Berlusconi's allies, led by the Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, balked at this when it was unveiled.

Pandolfi, who has been giving art classes and Italian lessons, now faces the daunting prospect of teaching a whole class the entire range of subjects, including some of which she has no real grasp. "This was a system that existed 30 years ago," she said. "Nowadays, the subjects we teach are more complex. They're weightier. It will take an immense range of knowledge to impart them all properly."

The return of the single teacher is just one element in what the shadow education minister, Maria Pia Garavaglia, scathingly calls "Operation Nostalgia". Just as many Italians look back fondly at the 1950s and 60s, as a golden age of economic growth and political stability, so they have a tendency to see the schools of the past as a solution to the troubles of the present.

Marks for conduct

Gelmini clearly shares that view. She has reintroduced marks for conduct, which were abolished 10 years ago. She is considering the reintroduction of uniforms. And she has urged headteachers to promote the wearing of smocks, which had seemed doomed to disappear, as they have from other west European nations, except for use in art classes. Pandolfi is concerned that whatever benefits these measures bring will be offset by the abolition of full-time teaching in the primary schools. "In the borgate [poor suburbs], 'full time' serves to take kids off the streets," she said.

The sophisticated interpretation is that Gelmini is building a bedrock of support from which she can demand greater resources for the more challenging task of reforming secondary education. A poll last month found she was the most popular member of the cabinet, with an approval rating of 66%. But the risk is that, with Italy once again heading back into a recession that will strain its public finances, the treasury will slam shut the coffers once the cuts have taken effect.

Giacomo Vaciago, professor of political economy at the Catholic University of Milan and one of Italy's leading authorities on education, is a stringent critic of the current system. But he fears the government's approach is "naive and conservative". "The idea seems to be that if we go back to the old ways we will get the old quality - an assumption that is ingenuous. Quality is something you don't easily get with just smocks and discipline."

Gente di Reykjavík (continua...)

2008-11-02T21:29:00.000+01:00

Jæja, krakkar mínir (allora, ragazzi miei), esordisce la nonna islandese prontamente convenuta per il corso di delicatezze artiche nella cucina di Kaffi Hljómalind. Skilurðu íslensku (capisci l'islandese), mi chiede dopo le solite formalità. Bara smá, è la mia laconica risposta. Un pochino. Nonostante la doccia geotermica mattutina e la sveglia a mezzogiorno, sono ancora un po' addormentato, e non ho la minima voglia di mettermi a sciogliere panetti da 1kg di grasso di palma in cui friggere i tipici kleinur, del tutto simili alle sfrappole, ma senza zucchero a velo. La pasta consiste di farina, lievito, zucchero, latte e burro. Il tutto si stende con il mattarello, e si tagliano strisce a loro volta suddivise in rombetti, che poi vengono incisi in mezzo e "rivoltati" a mo' di fiocchetti, e infine gettati nel grasso bollente. Flash di vita agreste pre-moderna invadono la mia mente, e non voglio nemmeno pensare all'odore che il grasso bovino che sicuramente utilizzavano prima dell'avvento del grasso di palma doveva emanare. Cerco di ricompormi e di non pensare troppo alla mia povera torta di riso vegan, amalgamata con le banane e dolcificata con il malto di mais, e alla mia torta Sacher vegana, ripiena di marmellata di arance e glorificata con una glassa di cioccolato fuso mischiato al latte di soia e al succo di limone. Per non parlare poi della torta al cocco e tofu della mia collega Marie-Louise (da svenimento, garantisco). Mi tocca, mi tocca imparare una volta per tutte come i regular customers vogliono queste benedette torte. Pare che nemmeno Hiruko, la cuoca macrobiotica giapponese a cui io sono subentrato, non fosse capace di fare le torte assecondando i palati islandesi, poiché, data la sua avversione allo zucchero e a prodotti quali latte, panna, burro e compagnia, non assaggiava proprio i frutti del suo lavoro. Io sì che li ho assaggiati, i miei, ma già dopo il primo boccone sento le vene invase da una quantità spropositata di burro e zucchero, al che mi devo fermare, pena lo sbocco. E gli islandesi, non contenti, affogano qualsiasi prodotto da forno con una slavina di panna montata. Ég vil ekki sjá kökuna (non voglio vederla nemmeno, la torta), sanciscono felici già pregustandosi la propria ordinazione. Eppure le mie torte (quella di riso e la Sacher) vanno alla grande, nonostante siano entrambe vegan e una senza zucchero. L'occhio vuole la sua parte, è vero: sicuramente la gente compra la torta di riso perché sono riuscito a escogitare una glassa invitante - kuzu fuso con succo d'arancia e malto d'orzo, il tutto ricoperto da mandorle sminuzzate. Per quanto riguarda la Sacher, poi, il segreto è sempre lo stesso: quando c'è di mezzo il cioccolato, da una parte la gente non capisce più niente e se ne frega del resto, dall'altra è quasi sempre vero che la torta al cioccolato, vegan o no, sempre di cioccolato sa. Quindi tanto vale usare il latte di soia e un cucchiaio di aceto di mele, invece di dar mano a yoghurt e panna. Eppure il nostro responsabile del personale - che poi le torte manco le mangia, dato che segue una dieta ayurvedica particolarissima per favorire la meditazione - ha una fissazione eterna per queste torte grasse, e insiste perché le facciamo spesso e secondo la più "genuina" tradizione islandese. Un po' di ragione ce l'avrà anche, ma io, che sono l'unico che lavora sia in cucina che al bar, so anche che la gente non viene per le torte, ma perché il locale in sé ha un fascino unico, che in origine ha conquistato anche me, e mi ha permesso di entrare a far parte della ciurma.

A proposito di diete. Questo fine settimana sono stato benedetto dall'arrivo di ben due CouchSurfers. Dico sempre che uno è abbastanza, ma alla fine ci ritroviamo sempre in tre in camera. Ma questa volta è diverso. Anthony, un giovine di vicino a Washington D.C., inspiegabilmente finito a raccogliere patate in una fattoria nell'est dell'isola, aveva un profilo particolare, quasi poetico, e nonostante non avesse la benché minima esperienza su CouchSurfing né uno straccio di foto, ho deciso di prenderlo. Di origine sicula, a 21 anni ha già un passato (superato) alcolistico, ed è approdato in Islanda perché negli States convive con la sua ex-ragazza mentre studia scrittura creativa al college. Quando scpre che la fanciulla è già di nuovo attiva sessualmente, Anthony preferisce una escapade rurale nei campi di patate artici alla bottiglia di brandy. Ma dopo 7 settimane a raccogliere patate in mezzo al nulla, le serate trascorse in stanze buie con il fattore e la tipica Reykja Vodka (fatta appunto con le patate), non c'è altra soluzione che fuggire di nuovo, questa volta verso la grande migrapoli dell'Artico. Anthony si mette in strada e arriva in autostop fino all'areoporto di Egilstaðir, da cui però non può partire perché il volo giornaliero è al completo. Dopo una notte trascorsa per terra, si imbarca, approda e mentre mi fo un panino con l'affettato vegetale, suona il campanello di Njálsgata 85. Poco dopo arriva anche Max, il surfer svedese ma con residenza in Norvegia, a cui non potuto dire di no, proprio mentre Anthony mi spiegava perché è vegetariano. Ne ho sentite tanti, di motivi, ma questo mai: la dieta vegetariana (con un consumo molto limitato di latticini) è uno dei requisiti per poter partecipare ad un rito iniziatico della Midewiwin, la religione tradizionale degli indiani d'america. Dopo una preparazione spirituale di diversi mesi, unita all'astinenza dalla carne e da diversi altre cose, l'iniziando va nella foresta e digiuna per diversi giorni aspettando una visione che deciderà la direzione spirituale della sua vita.
E il sabato, dunque, mi porto entrambi a cucinare a FoodNotBombs, con la differenza, questa volta, che sono loro a svegliare me per andarci e non viceversa come di solito. Alle 13:30 siamo già in piazza col cibo, proprio nel mezzo di una manifestazione contro un politico che dovrebbe essere gravemente implicato nella crisi (video in basso). C'è la televisione, centinaia di persone, che si interessano al nostro cibo e, come al solito, ci chiedono perché cuciniamo gratis per chiunque, cioè non avete niente di meglio da fare di sabato. I CouchSurfers, invece, capiscono subito, non c'è quasi bisogno di parlarne: se si apre la propria casa a chiunque, inaugurando un circolo virtuoso di fiducia tra esseri umani, la protesta silenziosa contro lo spreco indiscriminato di risorse alimentari ha già senso. E c'è una ragione in più per credere che oggi abbiamo migliorato il mondo, anche se di poco. Perché ci sono due persone in più sulla terra che hanno capito, e che quando torneranno nei loro paesi guarderanno il proprio divano - o un materasso di riserva - e penseranno: "forse là fuori c'è qualcuno che dormirebbe volentieri qua sopra"; e sapranno che ogni fornaio butta nel rusco quintali di pane ogni giorno, pane buonissimo, spesso fatto in giornata. Che i containers dietro i supermercati sono pieni di casse di roba, ancora impacchettata, che magari è scaduta da pochi giorni ed è perfettamente commestibile. E che quando compri una pagnotta, paghi anche per per tutte quelle che il fornaio butta via, perché lui non ci può rimettere. E sapranno che nella loro città è esattamente uguale. Non è molto, ma è qualcosa, qualcosa che per certi significa speranza.

Gente di Reykjavík

2008-10-31T11:52:00.000+01:00

Pare che il mondo sia pieno di individui strambi, ma pochi hanno idea di come ciò sia particolarmente vero per l'Isola di Ghiaccio. A volte mi sembra di essere in uno di quei porti franchi tipici del tardo medioevo, dove confluivano esuli, rinnegati e convertiti, rifugiati, disadattati, disillusi - magari di ritorno da qualche santa crociata -, e semplicemente gente in fuga da qualcosa o qualcuno. Va da sé che anch'io appartengo chiaramente a una di queste categorie, anche se alla mia avventura islandese, come le altre passate e future, l'appellativo "fuga" poco si addice. Glenn, il mio padrone di casa, un biondo-rasta neozelandese che ha fatto di Reykjavík il suo campo base per le sue scorribande tra il Nuovo e il Vecchio mondo, è sicuramente un caso esemplare. Il fatto che poi sia stato lui, in uno dei nostri primi pomeriggi passati insieme alla ricerca di una lavatrice di seconda mano che funziona o no a seconda delle condizioni atmosferiche, a delucidarmi la situazione, probabilmente tradisce il suo coinvolgimento in questa storia incredibile che è questa città. "This place is wicked, man, it's fucking full of people who - God knows how - in a way or another just ended up here, and not even they know how and why exactly... they are running away from something or someone, and got shipwrecked on this island... it's funny to listen to their stories, you'll see", fu forse la descrizione più precisa di Reykjavík in cui mi sono imbattuto finora.
La mia categoria, dicevo, è sicuramente quella di chi è approdato qui ala ricerca di sé stesso. Non siamo in molti, tuttavia, ma il nostro numero non sfigura. I più numerosi sono coloro che sono arrivati per fare soldi, ma adesso stanno più o meno lentamente andandosene (o cercando di andarsene) a causa della crisi economica. Questi sono anche quelli che si fanno sentire di più - quando la corona ha cominciato la sua caduta libera, mi rompevano l'anima ogni mattina raccontandomi quanti punti in percentuale aveva perso contro la corona svedese, il dollaro americano, canadese o chennesoio. Ora che il suo valore si è stabilizzato in un punto indecente, contro cui però per il momento non c'è niente da fare né da sperare in termini di settimane, si sono messi l'anima in pace - probabilmente l'occasione ideale per cominciare a godersi questo posto in termini di capitale umano, perché di quello ce n'è più che abbastanza.
Comincerei dai ragazzi di Grandi, la comune in cui decine di persone vivevano in condizioni simili a quelle di un campo profughi, che ora purtroppo è stata chiusa,i suoi abitanti dispersi tra Danimarca, Inghilterra, la strada (in Islanda!), case occupate dall'indirizzo top secret, e le poltrone di Hljómalind, il caffè dove lavoro, trasformati in giacigli wireless dopo la chiusura alle 22. La mia coinquilina tedesca è diretta verso un qualche kibbutz hippy in mezzo al deserto della Giudea. Vendendo collane di pietra lavica per strada con la mia ospite ad inizio settembre, mi sono imbattuto nel québeqois Patrick, un "artista" (di non si sa cosa) che va in giro esclusivamente in gonna e bandana, che ha richiesto la mia consulenza per scrivere un libro su Yggdrasill, l'albero del mondo della mitologia nordica, fatto con improbabili disegni dei bambini dell'asilo ma corredato da informazioni accuratissime su significati esoterici e intriganti rimandi all'albero sefirotico della cabala.
I miei CouchSurfers poi, quelli sì che sono dei personaggi. Circa 2-3 settimane fa aspettavo T., un CouchSurfer di Colonia che stando alla mia contorta immaginazione doveva diventare una sorta di mio migliore amico con cui condividere questi mesi artici. Esperto autostoppista, a soli 24 anni ha girato mezzo mondo alzando il pollice nei posti più impensati, e nel frattempo è anche riuscito a incassare un diploma universitario in pedagogia (= maestro d'asilo). Ora approda in Islanda per "qualche mese", realizzando il suo grande sogno, per poi passare l'estate per concerti in Russia. Stando a queste informazioni che avevo su di lui, non stavo più nella pelle nell'attesa di conoscerlo e di ospitarlo in quell'albergo in cui ho trasformato camera mia. Giunto al bus terminal, con il tono incerto di chi non sa che lingua parlare mi chiama dicendomi che non sa come arrivare. Ovviamente io gli ho mandato per e-mail informazioni dettagliatissime su come raggiungere l'appartamento, corredate addirittura da cartina stradale telematica e da auguri di buon viaggio. Al mio arrivo in Islanda mi sono ritrovato anch'io in una situazione simile prima di raggiungere la mia prima couch nel quartiere popolare di Breiðholt (non trovavo la descrizione del tragitto che avevo stampato e messo da qualche parte), e dato che non sono un grande fan della Lonely Planet non ne ho una con me, per cui non penso male della sua capacità di orientarsi, e sfoggiando il mio tedesco dalla cadenza ex-sovietica mi offro di andarlo a prendere, nonostante fosse l'una e mezza di notte e le mie coinquiline con un gran seguito di fanciulle baltiche si apprestassero ad uscire. Vado, e al mio arrivo al bus terminal mi rendo effettivamente conto che ovviamente la stazione brulica di cartine della città in tutte le forme e salse, tutte rigorosamente gratis. "Ma è scemo?" penso, dubbio corroborato dal suo sguardo tra l'infantile e il gallinaceo, mi presento, mi offro di aiutarlo con le borse e gli faccio notare l'esaustiva presenza di supporti cartacei per l'orientamento della spece Homo turisticus, per nulla in estinzione nell'isola nonostante il freddo incombente. "Ah, non mi è venuto nemmeno in mente di mettermi a cercare delle cartine", ovviamente. Vabbè. Poi parliamo del più e del meno, dell'Islanda, della crisi, del lavoro, dei concerti. Non andare a Airwaves (un grande festival musicale della durata di una settimana), gli avevo detto, costa un botto di soldi e tu hai a malapena mille euro, mi hai detto, che ti basteranno a malapena per la cauzione, e poi devi pensare a registrarti e a trovare casa e lavoro per prima cosa. Beh, il nostro eroe ha intenzione di mangiare riso e acqua fino a natale, pur di andare ai concerti... questa dichiarazione lascia scettico persino me, di solito molto propenso ad apprezzare questo tipo di slanci romantici corredati da una totale mancanza di ragionevolezza, se non di uno straccio di progetto. Il teutone aveva poi già contattato un altro tizio su CouchSurfing, che gli avrebbe lasciato molto volentieri camera sua, poichè aveva perso il lavoro a causa della crisi e doveva andarsene il prima possibile ma non voleva perdere i soldi dell'affitto che aveva già pagato. Non prendere quella camera, gli dico, costa troppo ed è troppo fuori dal centro, e capisco che l'amico ne ha bisogno ma tu manco lo conosci e va bene aiutare il prossimo ma tu mica sei qui per fare beneficienza, non c'hai manco i soldi per mangiare, cacchio, gli dico con paterna compassione. Niente da fare. All'inizio non riesco più a scollarmelo di dosso non solo perché non riesce a fare una mossa in questa città senza che io gli dica come e perché, e quando finalmente è pronto per trasferire armi e bagagli, non si sa perché ma non ci può andare in autobus, ma si mette d'accordo col coinquilino perché lo venga a prendere in macchina. Bagagli pronti, il coinquilino dorme della grossa e dato che aspetto un altro CouchSurfer quella sera, voglio sbarazzarmi di lui in fretta e devo chiamare io il tipo non una ma diverse volte, perché lui non si decide, farfuglia qualcosa come "è troppo caro chiamare", "per me non sarebbe un problema aspettare fino a domani", e via dicendo. Finalmente il tipo arriva, io e tutta la ciurma tiriamo un sospiro di sollievo. Mi sento come una santa madre che di colpo ha smesso di imboccare il figlio e di cambiargli i pannolini. Il mio nuovo CouchSurfer, un australiano che sta facendo il giro del mondo, di carattere completamente l'opposto del suo predecessore, arriva e vado a letto sollevato. Un paio di giorni dopo T. si ripresenta, per poco i miei occhi diretti verso il cielo non mi tradiscono. Ovviamente la camera che ha preso nonostante il mio consiglio è troppo lontana, e dato che non ha i soldi per l'autobus (!) e quando i concerti finiscono non ci sono comunque trasporti, mi chiede se quel sabato sera può dormire di nuovo da me. Ho una nuova carinissima CouchSurfer svedese, la risposta è no, le conquiline stanno anche loro ospitando a manetta e non abbiamo materassi liberi; gli consiglio di uscire dal concerto non più tardi di mezzanotte e di prendere gli ultimi trasporti pubblici, o di fare affidamento sulle sue collaudate doti di autostoppista. Dopo vari blateramenti conclude che cercherà di fare del "CouchSurfing spontaneo", ossia chiedere a sconosciuti all'uscita dal concerto se hanno un posto dove può dormire. Tutto va bene, anche per terra, sentenzia. A quel punto gli offro il mio lettino rigorosamente raccattato per strada, che uso come divanetto, sul quale di solito non faccio dormire nessuno perché troppo piccolo e troppo duro, insomma è indecente. Ma sempre meglio che dormire per terra. Lui ci dorme benissimo, pare, e il giorno dopo scopro che lui mi aveva chiesto di restare per tutta la durata dei concerti e non solo quella notte, richiesta che non avevo ben afferrato. Ottimo! A distanza di più di due settimane non ha ancora trovato lavoro, i tizi del kennitala hanno annunciato che ci vorranno ben 4 settimane per dargliene uno (a me ci vollero 4 giorni), e ho paura che per lui si metterà male alquanto presto, anche perché non sembra aspirare ad altro lavoro che insegnante d'asilo, ma gli asili che prendono gente che non parla islandese sono rari. Nell'attesa non demorde, saccheggia i negozi di vestiti usati che gli ho indicato, e finalmente ha seguito almeno uno dei miei consigli, cioè quello di prendere la camera in centro che gli ho trovato. Mi chiedo come finirà... non escludo che dopo un mese o due tornerà indietro senza soldi, cosa che ovviamente non gli auguro ma che è probabile perché successa ad altri.
Nel frattempo ho imparato qualcosa di molto utile da quest'esperienza, a parte il fatto, ovvio, che nella vita si può essere totalmente sfigati e che l'apparenza inganna (soprattutto sotto forma di profilo su internet). Ho imparato che quando mi lancerò in autostop verso l'est dell'Islanda e poi dal nord della Danimarca giù fino a Berlino e Halle, non mi occorrà essere un genio per farcela...

E non si pensi...

2008-10-27T16:03:00.000+01:00

...che io abbia di già il nuovo cavo! Sarebbe troppo bello. Sono già le 3 nella baia fumosa (traduzione italica del toponimo "Reykjavík", se ve lo siete mai chiesti), e i tizi del "kannski á morgun" (forse domani, sta arrivando, abbi fede!) non si sono ancora fatti vivi. Beh, dopotutto sempre meglio della settimana scorsa, quando mi chiamarono durante un esame per dirmi che il cavo... non c'era ancora. Grazie tante!
E non si pensi che mi sia successo qualcosa di strano oggi, ho solo voglia di scrivere un post in italiano, e che soprattutto non sia la solita lista della spesa che ho scritto per il primo periodo nell'isola di ghiaccio e di fuoco. Spero che quest'oggi "voi là fuori" siate molti di più, spero di indovinare qualche vecchio volto di fronte a quelle cornici fluorescenti, uno di quelli che non vedo da un pezzo, che chissà cosa diavolo starà facendo e dove sarà, e chissà come ha saputo di questo diario elettronico.
Oggi è uno di quei rari giorni in cui mi prende un qualche sentimento assimilabile alla nostalgia. Oggi è uno di quei rari giorni in cui mi metto - chissà perché, probabilmente perché lo sento come una specie di dovere, di legge scritta nel sangue o chissà dove - a leggere di notizie italiche. Cercando di carpire qualcosa sullo stato dell'università italiana (la più antica d'Europa!), comincio a rendermi conto che, se mai "andrò fino in fondo" - ovvero, se andrò avanti a studiare finché le meningi me lo permetteranno, ovvero se troverò il modo di farmi pagare da qualcuno per leggere libri, cosa che, come si dice, non mi farebbe schifo - beh, difficilmente sarà in patria. Forse la nostalgia che provo in questo momento è solamente pietà per un paese (forse?) allo sfacelo, nonché, come sopra menzionato, il bisogno di esprimere tutto ciò utilizzando una parte del cervello che non visito da tempo, quella in cui è stata (malamente) riposta la cosiddetta lingua di Dante, se così si vuol chiamarla (perché poi si traduce Dante in classe poi, e la si chiama parafrasi...?). Che ne so poi io, se lo stato dell'istruzione in Italia è veramente allo sfacelo, diranno alcuni. Boh. Non mi sono mai piaciute le proteste, a me, a parte in determinate occasioni. Non credo né alla democrazia (quel che abbiamo è troppo imperfetta per meritare questo nome), né alla protesta. Il sistema politico italiano è abbastanza "democratico" da farmi pensare che quel c'è ora in Italia, i cari italiani se lo siano ampiamente meritati. E altrettanto per quanto riguarda la protesta. Protestare in piazza contro qualcosa che la maggioranza della popolazione ha regolarmente eletto e voluto è in fondo una protesta contro la democrazia. La mia protesta la conoscete: è stata l'emigrazione. Credo profondamente che il modo migliore per protestare contro tutto ciò sia levare le tende e andare in cerca di qualcosa di meglio, perché qualcosa di meglio esiste eccome. E colgo ancora una volta l'occasione per ribadire le ragioni della mia scelta, che ad alcuni possono sembrare quantomeno strambe.
L'Università dell'Islanda esige una tassa d'immatricolazione di 45.000 corone, che all'epoca (quando le pagai io) erano 390€. Con il cambio attuale (27.10) post-crisi, la stessa cifra corrisponde a 160€ (sì, avete capito benissimo, centosessanta), se venite da Eurolandia (l'Islanda ha un altro cambio semi-ufficiale che nessuno riconosce, per questo nessuno vuol più commerciare con "noi"). Per il resto, non ci sono altre tasse. Il mio master è superorganizzato, siamo in circa 16 studenti, abbiamo un gruppo di studio affiatato, ognuno di noi ha un tutor personale per tutta la durata del master, i professori sono gentilissimi e disponibilissimi, rispondono alle e-mail in giornata, hanno sempre tempo per gli studenti. Gli esami sono scritti e alcuni sono paper da scrivere a casa, in modo tale che possiamo usare tutte le fonti a disposizione, perché ciò che ci viene chiesto è di rielaborare criticamente questo materiale, non di imparare a memoria qualcosa da sputare meccanicamente di fronte a un prof strafatto di caffé o sul punto di addormentarsi ad un esame orale.
Adesso qualcuno mi spieghi perché io avrei dovuto iscrivermi ad una laurea specialistica, per esempio a Bologna. Le tasse per la specialistica ammontano a 1800€ all'anno, i corsi a volte esistono solo sui volantini fichissimi e policromici, i professori spesso non ci sono, non hanno tempo, o al ricevimento bisogna fare la fila per ore prima di poterci parlare (o ancora peggio, prima di fare un esame). La maggior parte dei "master" italiani durano un solo anno, e il termine è stato inventato, pare, per designare qualcosa di simile ad una laurea, diversa dalla specialistica (che all'estero si chiama master) ma di durata limitata e dal prezzo spropositato, in modo tale da rimpinguare per bene e in fretta le casse di università dimenticate dal governo. I prezzi partono dai 5000€ e possono anche arrivare ai 12000€ o oltre. Ma le università private, come fanno loro a tenere i prezzi più bassi, mi chiedo io? Mistero. Forse il vero obiettivo delle università, come dicono alcuni, è di spedire gli studenti più ambiziosi all'estero o verso le università private, forse a causa di fumose combutte, o forse perché i professori/rettori stessi sanno che là si studia molto meglio. Ditemelo, che avrei dovuto starmene in Italia, se ne avete il coraggio.
Un'altra possibilità è quella di provvedere da sé alla propria istruzione. Chi ci riesce fino in fondo merita il mio più grande rispetto e ammirazione. Ciò può risultare arduo per le persone come me, che devono ogni giorno escogitare nuovi stratagemmi per convincere sé stessi della necessità delle proprie incombenze. Ed è proprio per questo che l'unico modo per costringere il mio cervello a compiere qualunque tipo di attività è sempre stato quello di tirare fuori il meglio dalle cose e di scoprirsi appassionati. Senza passione non funziona niente, non si va da nessuna parte.
Quando si vive a lungo lontano da ciò che una volta si chiamava "casa", a volte succedono cose strane. I due rischi più comuni sono quello dell'idealizzazione (specialmente in casi di shock culturale negativo), e della sindrome della macchina del tempo, come mi viene voglia di chiamarla: l'effetto è un po' quello di chi, venendo da una città del futuro in cui tutto è superorganizzato, i treni superpuntuali e superveloci, eccetera eccetera, finisce catapultato nella giungla tropicale tra furiosi selvaggi con le ossa al naso, vogliosi di sacrifici umani, o tra un duello tra pistoleri nel Far West, sotto il sole cocente e tra zaffate di terra battuta, aliti al wiskey e merda di cavallo. Ovviamente mi sono successe entrambe le cose, e ormai non ci faccio più caso (soprattutto ai treni, dato che in Islanda i treni non esistono e gli autobus o non li prendo o arrivano comunque in ritardo, ma tanto nella scatola del conducente ci infilo qualunque moneta, volentieri quelle lituane lasciatemi da uno dei miei ultimi CouchSurfers, un australiano che faceva il giro del mondo).
Forse in questo momento sono preso dalla sindrome autunnale. In Islanda l'autunno non esiste, e sabato scorso era ufficialmente il primo giorno d'inverno. Io adoro l'autunno, adoro i funghi, le pere, le noci, il castagnaccio coi pinoli, la vendemmia. Quell'aria che non sa né di inverno né di estate, quell'odore di foglie calpestate, il sole che tramonta sempre piú presto, il primo fuoco nel camino. La quasi-morte della natura che incombe, ha per me una portata emotiva sconvolgente. Lavorando in giardino, portando la legna per il fuoco, mi pare di sentire le voci dei nostri antenati, intenti a celebrare la morte della natura sotto il manto innevato con riti antichi come il mondo. Mi pare di sentire il misto ancestrale tra la paura dell'inverno e la scomparsa del sole, e la certezza, o meglio la speranza, che a questa morte seguirà una nuova rinascita, nell'eterno rincorrersi delle stagioni e dei cicli cosmici, la consapevolezza della piccolezza e insignificanza del genere umano di fronte a questa immensità primordiale che periodicamente si rinnova.
Ma quando la mattina esco dalla porticina semimarcia e cigolante di Njálsgata 85, e imbocco Barónstigur che dalla stazione degli autobus finisce fino al mare, vedo il sole luccicare sul mare artico, e le montagne laviche modellate per millenni dal vento polare, allora l'Islanda mi strappa il consueto sorriso quotidiano, ricordandomi che ogni giorno passato qui è speciale.

Technical problems

2008-09-28T21:06:00.000+02:00

Hi all,
I am not posting right now because my AC adaptor of my laptop is fucked up. I'll probably get it fixed or I'll buy a new one on next Tuesday. We have a lot of couch surfers, it's so crowded here!

See you soon!

Það er bara svo hvasst! / It's just so windy!

2008-09-20T19:36:00.001+02:00

I know you folks out there have been waiting for ages to read this post! I'm so sorry, I had some very busy days. Last week I started cooking in Hljómalind, and this week was my first week alone in the kitchen. It's going so good, I'm enjoying it a lot, because I love cooking and I love the place and the people. What is most remarkable of Iceland is how people trust you. This is the first time ever that I have such a great responsibility at work. In other countries (especially in Italy) you have to show diplomas and a row of references to get a job like this. Nobody is really interested in what you can and your motivation to work, and it's so hard to find the simplest and shittiest job. Here there are so many jobs (some people even knock at your door asking you if you want to work, I've been told), and you don't need any special qualifications to apply. In some respect it is not far from the reality I experienced in Norway, where a 25-years-old friend of mine, Maria, was working as a French teacher in a high school, occupying a place that you would get in Italy only after years of study (to be a teacher you need to study something like 7 years at university and then take several internships and non-paid periods, and then you can maybe apply for a long-term place, if you're lucky and you pass a sort of state contest). A lot of Italian tourists in Northern Europe are amazed at seeing that a lot of young people with no or little experience are given real and well-paid jobs, and that people are very keen to hire young people in shops, that makes the atmosphere younger, more informal and of course attracts young customers. This is so far away from Italian reality and that's one of the reasons why I like so much being here. When I was in Norway I made a fatal error though, besides working at McDonald's: well, working there was of course not great, but I didn't care and probably I'd do it again if I were again in that situation. Now I know what it is like and I know precisely what I don't like. It doesn't make any sense to badmouth something, if you don't know it well. I know it and I know what I'm talking about, and I am so glad to be able to do it. It's life experience. But what I really did wrong in Norway was to work with other Italians. That was the real mistake. Of course they had been living abroad for almost 20 years then, but their mentality and the way they were administrating the restaurant was exactly the same bad one that you find in Italy. I learned a lot though, although not everything I would have liked to learn, and I owe all of this to the cook, not to the employers. A lot more things about cooking and this kind of stuff I just learned myself and from other people. Now I am doing a great experience and I am sure it'll turn useful to me in the time to come. The best place ever where I had food was an organic vegetarian restaurant in Christiania, Copenhagen, where volunteers from all around the world are working in change of food and shelter. After my master I'd love to travel through ecovillages in Scandinavia and elsewhere, and I'm sure I'll be able to use a lot of the skills I am perfecting now.
Today I got by chance a bar shift and I was making coffee and stuff... It went so good, everybody was so happy at seeing that I already could some things and that I was learning the other ones so fast. My speciality is cooking though, and yesterday I made a kind of pizza-focaccia (by someone called "pizza-pie") that everyone loved. The boss, who is having financial problems in running the non-profit (!) café, saw with pleasure that a lot of people bought it (they put one slice for 580ISK - about 5€!), and I would be so proud of myself and happy, if this will turn out to be the key element in bringing the finances of the café back to health again, after the end of the tourists' season.
I am even learning Icelandic! Although I have such a few classes at uni. I really need to hang out with Icelanders and got to talk to them. Working is a good way to do it.
This week I had such a little time to study, though. Denise was visiting me and I've been working several hours. Last Sunday we wanted to hitch-hike to Þingvellir, the ancient site of the Viking Alþing, the legislative assembly (probably the first European parliament of the modern Era, i.e. the first European modern democracy, established after the settlement in the 9th century). We were standing on one of the largest street in Reykjavík, but it was Sunday morning and nobody came (in half an hour we probably saw 3 cars). Then it started raining and were getting soaked, so we decided to go to the pool. The pool is so cool. You bathe in hot water (there are several pots, the hottest one being 42°C) when above you're head it's raining or in the winter even snowing. We made some nice pictures with an underwater camera, she'll probably send them to me later next week. Next Friday a friend and ex-colleague of mine, Rui, is coming from Berlin for 2-3 nights, and at the same time an Italian CouchSurfer who also lives in Berlin, like Rui. It'll be nice, and we're going to have our first two CouchSurfers in Iceland!
So it eventually happened that we ended up in Þingvellir with Sabrina's car on Thursday night. My classmate Stefan, a housemate of him from Czech Republic, Alix, and my flatmate Ana also came with us. The weather was exceptionally fine (about 13°C, quite windy though) and we made great pics. These are some of them, enjoy... and stay tuned! Now I have more time and I'll publish more stuff soon. Take care!

Nýa heimilið / New Home

2008-09-06T14:48:00.000+02:00

I just love Iceland! Yesterday I had planned to go to buy some furniture and food for our new flat. We needed a car and we managed to borrow Sabrina's caravan (picture). It was the crappiest thing I've ever driven. It would not go faster than 45km/h and it got stuck on the street when the way was just a bit uphill... but when Chrissi was done with working, she got a call by a friend of hers living in a commune at the harbour. They were all moving and giving all the furniture away.We got matresses, pillows, posters, a small table, and loads of food, that they had got for free for the FoodNoBombs but they had to store it because they couldn't cook it all. Since they're leaving, I'll take over the FoodNoBombs from next week. And we're gonna get the leftovers!
In the picture at the bottom (it's our kitchen... now it's nicer, isn't it?) you can see all we got from that place: a microwave, up in the storage case rice milk, yogi tea, onion soup, lemon juice, walnut oil, organic pasta, bread, muesli, crackers, honey, jam, marmelade, biscuits, and quinoa, rye grains, several kinds of beans, amaranth, salad oil, salt, clay for hair washing, and much more... and everything free and organic! and people throw this things away, because of stupid laws...
Today, as some of you know, I should have gone gardening, but I didn't, because I already started working in Hljómalind! Yesterday I had an interview, where they explained everything to me, and they wanted me to start the training straight away. The job is great. I've been working with Marie Luise, a Danish girl who has just started last week. It's amazing how they trust people. And the boss doesn't earn anything from it (because she's doing other things, and if she were working there she would earn as much as everyone else, because it's a cooperative or rather a kind of collective), and the prices are just the same as in any other place in Reykjavík (otherwise none would come). They really use everything organic. And everyone writes down how long he has worked, and none checks, and we're all young people, there's no boss there. Today I made vegan sandwiches with pesto rosso and hummus, burritos filled with rice and beans, and an almond cake. Everything looks quite easy, but I still have a lot to learn. Next time (on Thursday) I'll learn how to make dattes cake, vegan muffins, vegan lasagne, and I'll have a look at some easy stuff (pasta and couscous salad). After one week I'll already have to be independent and take care alone of the kitchen! And then I can start experimenting. For example, I'm certainly gonna bake some bread/focaccia, maybe I'll try to make some vegan pizza, and I'll make salad with sprouts. The soup of the day will be a traditional minestrone with chickbeans, and miso. I'll try a miso soup sometimes as well. Any suggestions?

Ágætis Byrjun

2008-09-02T17:57:00.000+02:00

Another extremely gorgeous day. The suns shines and when it does, it can get very hot here. There are currently about 25°C and it's just amazing if you think that last week I was freezing and wearing jacket and winter clothes. Now it's T-shirt time again!
University classes have started, and today I took a test to access the Icelandic language courses for the B.A. students. The results will be published later on this week, and I definitely think I'm in, because the test was very easy. So I'm probably gonna take one general language course, a conversation course and an advanced grammar course. That's all, and I hope I'll have some time for working too... it'll be hard.
Nobody of my fellow students has this kind of problems, that's why I feel a bit unease having to talk to them. They all have funding, and some aren't even thinking of taking Icelandic classes. A lot of people are spending a lot of time in the library "looking at the sources" and revising grammar stuff. Grammar is not a problem for me now. I just need money and time. And our new home (pics of my room aside) needs attention too: yesterday I got a lot of stuff from Sabrina, my previous CouchSurfing host: loads of cutlery, a pot, a pan, some cups... I even got a mixer, but I don't think it's working. The fridge has come yesterday, but I wasn't there and they didn't bring the other bookcase back. The Lithuanian guy that was living there before is just crazy. He told my landlord that he could keep the deposit (!!), he brought 2 bottles of wine because he didn't have time to clean the fridge, and he even gave me a guitar! The world is weird. And I love this place!
Now I have to print my CV and hopefully from tomorrow start looking for a job. I hope I will get a job that won't interfere with all the plans that I have for this year. I am most probably getting soon into the FoodNoBombs group here in Reykjavík, and it would be nice if I had time on Fridays evening to go with the other guys to get gone-off stuff from supermarkets and cook it on Saturdays. It'd be so nice!

Actually I have just talked to the "boss" in Hljómalind (there is in fact no boss, the café works like a cooperative) and I'm probably attending a meeting on Thursday. They need someone from October but probably I need to be trained before I can start. Everything seems so easy here, there are extremely nice people everywhere, and I just love this place more and more!
So I'll probably start Icelandic courses next week and then maybe switch to the evening courses when I'll start working. Tonight I'll be baking black currant cakes at a Danish girl's place, together with her husband, her two-months old child and my German friend Stefan! News to come...

Búinn að flytja! / Finally moved!

2008-09-01T13:52:00.000+02:00

Short post today, folks... the weather is just so gorgeous, I can't stay here writing! Yesterday night we finally moved in, and now I have loads of things to do. The flat is empty, we have to get everything. We only had two bookcases in two rooms, and of course the kitchen. The guys who where living there before took one bookcase and the fridge, which they weren't supposed to take because it belongs to the flat. Our landlord Glenn said "oh, maybe they just forgot that it wasn't theirs, I'll call them tomorrow"! How can people forget that the fridge isn't theirs?! And a bookcase! Weird world.
So unfortunately I'm missing a lot of stuff at uni, because I have to get loads of things for the house. In one hour I'll go with my landlord to an electronics market to get a washing machine, and later I'll try to get some pots and pans that my previous CouchSurfing host doesn't need any longer. Probably tomorrow I'll go to my other hosts, to Breiðholt, to get some cutlery and maybe some glasses. I'll post a message on CouchSurfing soon and maybe other people will give us some stuff. Yesterday I collected a bed from the street, and I brought it to my new flat; it's a nice bed, it works and it's not damaged. It was only a bit wet and dirty, I'll try to wash it a bit and put something on it to make it nicer. When Sabrina will get back her car, on the 5th, I'll probably rent it (or borrow it) to go to the Góði Hirðirinn (the "good shepherd", where people bring furniture they don't use anymore and the profits goes to charity) to get some cheap stuff, and probably soon to Ikea too (Chrissi loves Ikea, I'd avoid it though). Now I have to run!
Wanna see some pics? http://picasaweb.google.com/ek.hlewagastir/NjLsgata85

Frábært! / Awesome!

2008-08-31T19:28:00.000+02:00

Great. We're moving in tonight!!! I can't believe it. Glenn, our landlord, has just called me, we'll meet up at 9 tonight and we'll get the keys and a couple of mattresses from him. Tonight I'm gonna shoot some pictures already, so you folks are gonna see everything tomorrow (especially you, Ana!).
Tonight there is actually the last part of the Reykjavík Shorts & Docs Festival, featuring a bunch of Scottish 10-minutes long films. I got a free pass from the father of Sabrina's first daughter, but unfortunately I can't go. I just gave the entry card to a Norwegian girl in Hljómalind.
So, next week there will be loads of things to do. Things to buy for the new home, university courses starting, meeting for new students, meeting for that and for this, a job... I think I'll take an Icelandic grammar course for second-year B.A. students, and a conversation course from the first year of the programme. But I'll definitely have to change something as soon as I'll have a job.
Check my blog tomorrow! new pics coming! And the sun is shining over Reykjavík!

Orientation Meeting

2008-08-29T19:31:00.000+02:00

Today I had an orientation meeting for all participants to my master programme. The weather is terrible (the wind is blowing very strong right now), but I made it to university. We're 14 (or maybe 15) master students, I'm of course the only Italian, then there are at least a couple of people from Britain, 2 Canadians, a guy from Colombia, a Finnish girl, two exchange from Germany and Denmark, and loads of Americans. The Americans talk so much, and the British girl looks so scared (she doesn't know any Icelandic, she's afraid about her grammar knowledge), and I see most people know very little Icelandic, even though they had the summer language course (that I couln't take because I was working and it was too expensive as well). The teachers are totally nice (I had no doubt about that, I love Nordic teachers, so informal), especially the Old Norse teacher and the Danish lecturer, Annette Larsen. We'll have a lot of mid-term examinations and each professor will tutor up to 3 students. So everyone of use will be followed and taken care of during the whole programme. We're not left alone with teachers who don't know us, like it happens in Italy or other countries. I love it. So we'll spend at least the first month doing some Old Norse grammar and trying to level up our reading competence in Old Norse. Since I already have some experience, it won't be too hard, I think. Some Americans are already eager to make up a Latin reading group. I don't understand why (they should be rather more concerned about Old Norse), but they seem to be quite worried about that. Americans...
I suppose all of those who got a scholarship for the course have already a master - which I don't understand, maybe people who are taking their first master need some funding more than others... but the university didn't want to know how much money we have on our bank accounts, so I think it's irrelevant. Actually our coordinator told us that the the other applicants (there were 22 people admitted, but 14 actually decided to come) couldn't come to Iceland because they couldn't cover the expenses. That's weird. Shouldn't they try to provide some funding for those who can't make it? Actually I am also poor, but decided to grab the challenge, come here anyway and try to make a living somehow. I really don't understand. But I'm happy to be here.
I talked a lot with Stefan, a crazy German Nordic philology exchange student from Kiel. He's also going to take our courses. He's so typical, but in the good way... he cycled from Kiel to Northern Denmark, where he took the ferry to Iceland. It took 4 days, and he spent 2 days cycling in the Faroe Islands. Then he came to Seyðisfjörður, in Eastern Iceland, and cycled all the way to Reykjavík. Impressive. And all this only eating vegetarian canned food. Respect. His problem is that he's got only a few things with him (he doesn't even have a mobile phone), and he's waiting for all his things being airmailed from Germany. He didn't have any idea of the customs fees, so I'm afraid he'll have to pay a lot of bucks for his own things. Moreover, he paid over 300€ for the ferry, and more money for the bike trip as well. But it's amazing. I think I'll plan something like this for next summer. I'd like to spend some time in Denmark and/or Germany next summer, so I'll definitely want to try something of this kind. But my buttocks are not so fit for the bicycle, so I think I'll try to hitch-hike. Let's see, I've got time...
Yesterday night I was selling lava on the Laugarvegur, when a German girl came and asked for a necklace. Sabrina had to adjust it and we spent some time chatting all together. Sabrina is so amazingly generous, we all ended up together at her place cooking, eating and taking care of her kids. I love this place... you meet people on the street, everyone is so friendly and open-minded. At Sabrina's place the door is always open and people come and go when they feel like, myself included. I suppose most Icelandic homes are like this, there are almost no thefts and people never lock their doors. Tomorrow I'm meeting my collegues at university, we're going to a viking expo or something, and probably later I'm going to the Reykjavík Shorts and Docs Festival, beacuse I got a free pass from the father of Sabrina's first child. There is always something going on here (even with this weather)! And now Chrissi has double shifts, so I'm always at Hljómalind and I get loads of free stuff (today: my usual herbal tea with an organic yoghurt). Loads of cool books in there. Folks, book a flight and come check out this amazing place! What are you waiting for? I'm waiting for you!

Votur Fimmtudagur / Wet Thursday

2008-08-28T12:25:00.000+02:00

Today I have basically nothing to do. It's a bit boring, actually, especially because it's raining. It's not cold (we're always around 15°C), but the weather is quite unpleasant. Yesterday I brought the last papers to the National Registry, so that now they actually know how much money I have in my bank account. This would definitely allow me to stay and to get the precious kennitala (ID number), but I'm wondering whether they actually are aware of the fact that in a couple of weeks' time, when I'll have moved into my new flat and bought books for my courses, that money would basically have disappeared!
In the morning I asked Glenn, my future landlord, to give me his surname (I couldn't remember it) and his kennitala, so that I could register with my actual address and I didn't need to borrow one. It did work out and I'm so happy about that. In probably less than a week's time I'll get it sent to my new home. Now I just have to wait until Sunday. I am so excited! I really hope that Glenn will get our money before that time. We will first get the keys when he'll have the money, and I hope payments from abroad do not take more than one day (I paid yesterday and Ana, our Spanish flatmate, who's coming on the 10th, is gonna pay today).
As I said, I am staying on a budget. Today, for example, I had 2 nearly-rotten bananas at my host's, and a cup of mate tea with orange (I have some tea supplies, so that I don't have to steal everything...). For lunch I'll probably have a cheap hot soup at 10/11 for 250 ISK (= 2€), and tonight I'm going to use anything I can find at my host's to make something to eat for her, her kids and their weird father Tóti. Tóti is shorter for Þórarinn. Every Icelander has a sort of nick-name, sometimes more than one - i.e. an "official" version and a "simplified" version given usually by small kids who cannot pronounce some sounds (most kids cannot say Þ /th/ for instance). Icelanders don't like surnames, and when foreigners use them, they reply that they have nothing to do with their father. Only a few people have real surnames (probably a Danish legacy), indeed, most people have a patronymic, i.e. the first name of the father (in the genitive form) + -son / -dóttir.
So, yesterday I wanted to make a risotto but I soon realised it'd have been too complicated. I could not find a vegetable store (I'm wondering whether they really exist here) so I went to the Heilsuhúsið (a sort of healthy-food store) and bought falafel powder. I cooked rice with some rotting cabbage, to which I added some curry, and put the fried falafel balls on it. I wasn't very happy with that, you couldn't quite call it mouth-watering. But it was edible. I was rather happier to have found my way through the kitchen (see pic... impossible!!), and most importantly, I cooked while all of the 3 kids where shouting, crying, destroying things and trying to kill each other.
My host Sabrina ate when we came back from the street, at 10 p.m. or so (I really can't imagine how she manages to stay alive eating nearly nothing) and said it was delicious. Weird. I told her that when I'll have a home I'll invite her to dinner and then she will try something delicious. I hope I can do better tonight.
I really love her kids, although yesterday I couldn't keep my eyes open while Sabrina and Tóti were watching a DVD. I fell asleep and I didn't even realise it. I slept under a filthy blanket on the couch where Bjartur, one of the kids, had spouted off the half of his meal. The couch (see pic) was far too small (Tóti slept on the other one, but that was filthy too), but I didn't care a thing and I slept like a child.
I really love Kaffi Hljómalind (see linkothéque)! It's a great place, with great (organic and vegetarian) food and beverages (unfortunately no beer...), great people, great atmosphere, and a lot of cool books that people can borrow. Of course sometimes the atmosphere gets spoiled by little Che Guevara-teenagers, who think to be alternative. But it's great. Of course I am always there when Chrissi is working: I get my free herbal tea and yesterday I even got a vegetable soup. I spent there 4 hours writing my yesterday's blog post, and I am just sorry for Chrissi, who works all the time while I do nothing. I wanted to offer her a beer yesterday night but she was just too tired. Maybe tonight!
I hoped I could sell lava jewellery on the street with Sabrina today, but I don't think she's going because of the rain. I would really like her to teach me some things. She waits on a chair knitting woollen caps and making jewellery out of lava rock is also cool. Reykjavík is so tiny that everyone knows everyone, and sitting on the street may get you to talk and to know a lot of people, that you are quite likely to meet short after anywhere else. Now the stress of the first days is gone, and I start appreciating this city. I really love it, it's a great place to stay with great, generous people. Tinna Gígja, my previous host, told me that it's a pity that I'm not gonna stay with Andrea and Unnar, the two guys who offered me a couch in Keflavík from today, because they are really great people. I have no doubt about that! But when I wrote them, they said that it's better for them too that I'm staying somewhere else, since they are actually moving. So everything is fine. On Saturday I'm gonna pick my stuff in Breiðholt and hopefully I can move into Njálsgata on Sunday. Until that time, my nest will be that couch in the picture!

Images from Reykjavík

2008-08-27T16:57:00.000+02:00

Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland)

Háskólatorg (The University Square) and Háma, the University Cafeteria with Bóksala Stúdenta, the Students' Bookstore.

Landsbókasafn og Háskólabókasafn,
The National and University Library

Tjörnin (The Pond) and the Ráðhús (City Hall)

A wierd concert in the Lækjartorg to celebrate Iceland's handball team in the Olympics...

Austurstræti (on the left is the bookstore-café Eymundsson, where I usually check my mail every morning)

Húsnæði og kennitala - Accommodation and Personal ID Number

2008-08-26T18:27:00.001+02:00

Awesome day today (it's Tuesday). Yesterday I've been at University to make sure that they knew something about the payment of the registration fee. I was probably the very first one to pay it in may, because I asked for the banking number per e-mail and I paid it straight away, before I got it officially. Of course nobody knew a thing. One of the last persons I spoke to was a woman, in charge for the exchange programmes, who asked me why I was worrying so much: I had my declaration of acceptance and my courses are starting next week. What should I worry about? Well, I said, I won't worry, but you have to show me that you got my payment, it's all I ask. She told me to follow her and she brought me to a lady who was supposed to know everything. She had all applications of all master students in a file. My application form and letter of acceptance were there, but not the notification of my payment, of course. I said to the lady, you see, that's what I'm here for, there is something missing, and that's because you guys don't read your mail, that means, you're not doing your goddamn job. I gave them the receipt I got from my parents when I was in Italy in July, and they told me that now it should be fine. They would have matriculated me straight away, but I didn't have my ID number, and I said that I couldn't apply for it because I was homeless, I don't have a legal domicile in Iceland yet. The problem is that it can take up to a week to get it, and I need to register for courses within the 10th of September. If that doesn't work out, I can't study (and probably I won't get the 400€-fee back). So I needed an address. I thought about "borrowing" the address of my current CouchSurfing hosts, but they are living in a social house and apparently they cannot do that. So today I moved to my next CS host and I asked her to give me her data in order to be able to apply for an ID number. She did and I went straight away to the Þjóðskrá, the National Registry, with all my wee papers. There I realised that I needed to bring a sort of declaration from my bank (Poste Italiane!!) that I can support myself while living in Iceland. I'm gonna print it out tonight in the café where Chrissi is working, and hand it in tomorrow. Hopefully this would be the last practicality to be done before registering at uni.
So this morning I left my hosts, Tinna Gígja, a sort of post-punk fond of freaky books (particularly interesting are the toilet literature and the porno comic stripes), and her post-hippy mum Ástis, and luckily I could leave some of my stuff at their place. They have been totally nice to me, and I really love them; Ástís is so sweet, and Tinna is an amazing person to talk to, she really can entertain people (for example I learnt yesterday night that Iceland is the biggest producers of bananas in Europe...). The only problem about living with them is that they live in a ever-lasting cloud of smoke. You can almost smoke by putting your nose on the pillows. And they never open the window. I slept for 2 nights beside an open window and still I couldn't get asleep because of the smell. I wonder how their three cats are still alive...
Another problem is that I haven't had any fruit since Sunday morning. Fruit is very expensive here. But I managed to stay on a budget, though, although I already spent all the money that I got on Sunday when I came, i.e. 10.000 ISK (about 80€). That's not bad, considered that I've been travelling with the bus like a madman (one bus ticket: 280 ISK = 2,30€), of course I took the bus from the airport, and then got an Icelandic phone card (for 3000 ISK with 2000 ISK of credit inside). I bought a really few things to eat, and I have already found out where the cheapest ones are (you can buy soups for 250 ISK at the 10/11, a 24h-shop, and the university cafeteria has very low prices (yesterday I ate a wholesome vegan full-corn sandwich with hummus and a skýr, a local low-fat protein-rich creamy yoghurt, similar to German quark, for about 500 ISK). Yesterday I had a "dinner" consisting of 4 bread slices with tuna salad, and a beer, generously offered by Tinna. I'm looking forward to meet them again, also beacuse I left a big part of my stuff at their place. Actually I wanted to accept the kind offer of their neighbour, who told me I could stay with her instead of going to Keflavík on Thursday, but when I came back from her flat, they told me she is indeed very nice, but she actually has mental problems and gets even dangerous - or at least she bothers people - when she gets drunk, and she does that quite often. Since she had a very crammed apartment, I told her that maybe it'd been better to leave the stuff by Tinna and Ástis, and I hope they have talked to her. I When I left, they hugged me, wished me good luck and told me I was always welcome at their place. I was really touched. Great people, great CouchSurfing community. I love it.
So then I went to my next host. Usually I try to avoid Italians while travelling, but this time she was among the only 3 people who gave me a positive answer. Sabrina is living in the heart of the city, in a wonderful spot - I'm so glad I left the Breiðholt ghetto! -, she looks like a former hippy or something - she told me she used to cook macrobiotic - and her occupation consists of being a full-time mum. She takes care of her 2-months-old son Bjartur (the Icelandic father is somewhere, I heard) and makes jewellery with lava rock, that she sells on the Laugarvegur, the main tourist street. Today I went with her and helped her to carry all the stuff to the street and had a nice talk to some people passing by. I promised her I'd pay her back for her hospitality by cooking a nice dinner for her... so I'll probably have to reach her soon and talk about that before the shops close.
But, dulcis in fundo, the housing search! The Australian cook and backpacker who showed us an awesome flat in downtown Reykjavík (Njálsgata, see pic) yesterday called us today, and... we'll get it next Monday!! I couldn't believe it. He's totally nice and cool. He works as a cook in Reykjavík for 9 months a year, and spends at least 3 months each winter backpacking the world through. He's gonna help us with loads of things (we may get for instance a washing machine from him soon to put in the laundry room in the cellar), and even though we're supposed to move in on Monday, I'll be able to sleep there on Sunday night already, so that I can go on time to my first classes the next morning (they're starting at 8:20 a.m., to come all the way from Keflavík would have been a problem, it takes at least one hour by bus), and he's even gonna lend me a mattress to crash on that night. Chrissi signed the contract today, and as soon as I'll get an ID number and a bank account I'll sign it too (I am staying longer than her in Iceland). The house costs 145.000 ISK a month, i.e. 1190€ to divide between 3 people, so a bit less than 400€ per month, great price for downtown Reykjavík - and if I get a part-time job, I'll make up 1000€ every month. Not bad. So the next step would be to get some furniture (I'm not gonna buy any bed, just smash a mattress on the wooden floor and recycle anything for a table) and maybe a bike. I still don't know whether the city council is gonna give a free bus card for every student, I'll have to find out soon. And on the 13th of September... Denise is coming to Reykjavík!
Things couldn't be better. The past days' stress is now gone. I'm sitting in Kaffi Hljómalind, where Chrissi works, and the pic you see now it's what I see in this moment.

Fyrsti dagurinn á Íslandi / First day in Iceland

2008-08-25T17:28:00.001+02:00

Yesterday was probably the most intense day of my life. I spent the hole day running. But it was worth the effort: I am in Iceland!
The day started at 7 a.m. in my former apartment in Wittenberg. I had spent the hole previous day collecting my stuff and cleaning the place, so that there shouldn't be anything to do the next morning. Nevertheless it took so long before Denise and I got ready. Probably because I was so stressed (like I have been the whole month, to be honest) that I spent the half of the time in the bathroom. Anyway. We got going at 9, and our train was due at 9:26. It was kind of obvious that we could not make it: running for 2km with about 60kg luggage was not possible. Denise decided to call a taxi, but she didn't remember the number, so she had to call one of those numbers that you call to find the number you need (this while we were already on the way to the station). The number woman probably gave her the wrong number, because nobody picked up the phone. Meanwhile we were already trying to make our way to the station... and then, suddenly, we saw IT. A wonderful couple of shopping carts. Denise - whose humour, like mine, manages to be active in such a situation - suggested to steal one of those carts (that had already been stolen from the near supermarket and parked by the locals in front of their houses) and put our stuff in it. She wasn't serious. But I was. We spent a couple of minutes trying to find the suitable coin (actually the thing accepted 1€ and 2€ coins as well, but I was NOT going to spend that much for that) to liberate one cart from the other. We found it, and we put almost everything we had on it. We went on and realised that it actually was a great idea, I could walk a lot faster now! We were approaching the station and Denise tried to call a taxi for the second time. This time a taxi driver answered. He needed to know where he should pick us up, and Denise said "at the hospital close to the station". She actually knew at least one part of the name of the hospital - that by the way was the only real one in town, the others being just too small to be called so - but the taxi man didn't apparently know where it was and decided that if we couldn't be more precise, he couldn't pick us up. But we were already there. Denise sprinted to the ticket machine, while I had to pull the cart down to the train door. We had less than two minutes. After one minute she came back and yelled that the machine was not working. Shit, I said. We ran to the train woman who fortunately told us we could buy the tickets from her on board. Uh, I forgot: it was raining, and we were soaked.
We finally arrived at the airport Berlin-Schönefeld. I got even more stressed because of my luggage. Denise had a lot of stuff too, because I left a lot of things to her, but she left it in a locker in the Südkreuz station. Then we had to undergo a meaningless security check before going to the ticket counter. I knew my suitcase was too heavy, and my backpack, that should have been my hand luggage, was far too big. In addition to that, I had my camera and a bag with books and my laptop. But I had no idea of what it all together would weigh. Probably between 50 and 60 kg, I thought (allowed weigh: 30kg). So I gave my suitcase in. 23,99 kg. Oh my goodness, I thought. Now I have to pay 44€ (11€ for each kg overweight). But no, the guy didn't say anything, and suddenly about 80% of my stress faded away. I was so happy! The check-in was also OK. I had a lot of stuff, but the olny thing that those guys seemed to be interested in were my shoes. I had dangerous shoes. The metal detector decided after 10min that they were the problem. I had to take them off (they were mountain shoes and you need 5min to take ONE off), give my feet in to be detected, the shoes too, and later... I could finally get all my belongings again and move on to the gate. Yuppie!
At the international airport in Keflavík I realised that I had no money to buy the cigarettes my second host asked for. My euros were not enough, and I still had to Icelandic krónur because I hadn't found any ATM yet. I am meeting her on Tuesday, I hope she won't be angry with me! From there I took the bus to Reykjavík and at about 4:30 p.m. I was at the BSÍ, the city bus terminal. There I met Chrissi, the German couchsurfer that is already looking for a flat on my behalf as well. She brought me on foot to the café where she works, the Caffi Hljómalind, where I could drop most of my stuff. Then she wanted me to go with her to a check out a flat 30min by bus away from the city centre. I was skeptical because of my meeting with my first CouchSurfing host in Breiðholt (I told her that I'd be there at 7 p.m.), but I went with her. The flat was really nice but expensive (1700€ to divide between 3, maybe 4 tenants). The area was really nice though, it was up on a hill and you could get a breathless view over the city. Today we're gonna visit another one and most probably we'll decide between the two.
When we came back I realised I hadn't saved the phone number of my first host in my mobile phone. It was damn late (7:30 p.m., 9:30 in Italy and Germany) and I had to find a way to contact her. I had the direction to her home, but I didn't have her number and I didn't want to travel for 30min for nothing. Finally we stood in front of a café, where we got a wireless network, and I could find the number in my mail: it was 8:25. At 8:30 I was on the bus to Breiðholt, and at 9:15 I was there. She picked me up and finally I got a hot tea, a piece of garlic bread, a hot shower (I nearly burnt my foot because of the water coming directly from the volcano underneath the house, of course) and, most importantly, a bed. And my first Icelandic day was over...