Hm, it’s gotten a bit dusty around here, hasn’t it. The whole copying stuff out of my travel diary got to be a bit much like homework, and unfortunately not the fun kind. I’m going to try to do a thing a week for the next few months. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve been creating a lot of stuff, but not much of it has been recorded.

Hopefully I’ll get back to transcribing some of my travel time at some point. Until then, you can see the photos I took at my picasaweb gallery. Come to think of it, I should probably post some photos from the past year. Heck, I should probably start taking pictures again…

Well, that’s the whole point of this exercise. The format of the “thing” I will do each week isn’t set. It could be an essay, a picture, a description of something I’ve made, or something else entirely. Let’s see how it goes.

November 7, 2007

After posting the photos of my visit to Les Machines de l’Ile de Nantes, I managed to forget to actually write a post about the visit… Here’s the post that should have gone between Angers and Berlin.

After passing a wonderful few days hanging around in Nantes, visiting the school I attended, taking the tram, and catching up with the Le Henaffs, I packed up my stuff and got ready to hop on the train back to Germany. Rosine and Bernard had told me that I had to see the elephant, and Rosine offered to take me to see it before my train left. Not quite knowing what to expect, we arrived at the old shipyards to see a four story tall hydraulic elephant carrying a crowd of people and spraying water high into the air.

I was like a kid in a candy store. This is, bar none, the coolest art exhibition I have ever been to. In addition to the elephant, which had blinking eyes, a swishing tail, moving head, and the aforementioned lifelike trunk, there was an indoor exhibition of Jules Verne inspired sea creatures. These creatures danced at the touch of 1-4 riders who could pull an assortment of lever, pump pedals, and throw switches that set chains and cables in motion. The motion was amazingly lifelike and beautiful.

These sculptures are built by a collective of artists with a background in theatre sets and special effects. Part of the exhibition includes a visit to the workshop. Guh. Please please please can I move in? I could have spent days, weeks, even years there. Definitely worth a visit.

Nov 8, 2007

I spent my morning wandering around Berlin, visiting the DDR museum, eating at a crappy American diner (I know, I know, but it was the only place I could find that was open), and finding out that the 2 € all you can surf told of in the lonely planet guide was no longer.

In the afternoon, after checking into the City Stay hostel (quite a nice place) and enjoying a much needed shower, I checked out the tourist flyers spread out in the basement. A magazine immediately caught my eye with headlines “Sustainable IT”, and “Preloaded Open Source PCs”. It’s a magazine put out by the newthinking store. I had to check it out.

I walked for about a 20 minutes north of the Friedrichstrasse S- and U-Bahn station through a universityish part of town to find a modern open space divided into a presentation space and a store. The store sells T-shirts, stickers, various linux distros on cd/dvd (burned on the spot), coding and open source related books, and pcs preloaded with linux. I bought me a new knoppix livedvd and a stylish GPL t-shirt - I so wanted the “I’m a LaTeX fetishist” one, but I knew I’d never wear it.

I talked for a while with Frank, who was manning the desk for the evening, about open source and linux. He told me that I had missed their first girl geek dinner by one day. Gah! Must get on inventing that open source time machine! The dinner was apparently a huge success, with over 70 people in attendance. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to Berlin and make it to one of these.

It was much fun, and I managed not to buy /too/ much stuff… On my walk to supper I passed a really awesome looking comic book store which unfortunately (fortunately for my back) was closed. No more books for me!

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Stadtmitte U-Bahn station reminds me of Blackberry Subway Jam. The ceiling is divided into livingroom sized sections with simple purple and white tinned roof patterns.

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Berlin is definitely NOT the place to go to practise your German unless you’re much more confident &/ skilled than I am. I managed to get train tickets in German, but pretty much all of my other conversations quickly turned into English the moment I looked confused. This frustratingly usually occurred when they quickly asked if I would like anything else - a very predictable question that I should have been ready for. Ah well. Hopefully I’ll do better at the farm.

Nov 8, 2007

Germany again - Berlin this time. I only gave myself one day here before I head to Zum Trebelgrund, farm number three. On the night train here I again had many seats to stretch out on, which was nice. Alongside the tracks as I arrived in Berlin, I noticed many tiny houses the size of camping trailers. Many of them were quite beautiful, and they all had well tended gardens. I initially thought that they were houses built by poor immigrants or something, but it turns out that they are garden houses - part of a tradition that started during the soviet years.

After the second world war, there was a great housing shortage. The soviet government solved this problem by very quickly putting up large numbers of efficient, blocky, prefab concrete apartment blocks. The prefabricated nature of the housing, and the lack of decorating material made many of these spaces feel anonymous and uninviting. People began to look elsewhere to create places that felt like home. At the same time as people were moving to apartment living en masse, many food items became difficult to obtain.

Thus many people set up gardens on unused land. Friends would help each other build and furnish sheds that became weekend getaways from crowded apartments and the drudgery of work. Not that different from here, eh?

The GDR museum explained that these gardens were looked on with suspicion by the government. They represented individual property and expression perhaps a bit too much. However, the gardeners were mostly left alone. The government decided that this outlet was far better than having their citizens escape to the west.

On Claire’s suggestion, I visited the pretty little town of Angers for a day. I don’t really have an interesting story to tell about it, though I did see a neat exhibition of recycled toys in a free museum, but I got some decent photos that you can see in my Picasaweb gallery.