corg.us

(video for my previous post about de bereklauw:)

A couple days ago was the one-year anniversary of the start of my trip. Hard to believe i’m still kicking! My birthday was a couple days ago too, where I found myself in Amsterdam celebrating with the rest of holland (or was it just a whole bunch of tourists?) Queen’s Day! Quite a craaazy day to be there, streets filled like isla vista’s halloween, except throughout the entire city. Insane. In the membrane. Canals were floatopia-style bumper to bumper with boats with DJ’s, every square was filled with people selling household items or cakes or bathroom space (only 2 euros!), and every single person was covered in everything orange they owned. So crowded, you could have surfed down the streets in the orange sea.

My friend Kyle, from UCSB, met up with me there, and I felt so American – it was nice hearing a californian accent and having the opportunity to drop the slang filter. Plenty of ‘brah’s and ‘stoked’s to be said (: We camped fairly close to the center, and i made some new friends the morning after he left. Hopefully we’ll meet again soon (:

After an exhausting three days in Amsterdam, i was back on the train, this time towards Oslo and/or Sweden – met up with Livia in Copenhagen luckily, but then we both missed the train because my watch was nine minutes slow. Stuck in Gothenburg for a day, at least its legal to camp anywhere in sweden, gotta love all mans land ! Off to the wilderness for a couple weeks, hiking from laxa to tividen national park, maybe more, so enjoy the next two blogless weeks without me (:

I lucked out again with my next help-exchange host, landing in Leuven, Belgium, at a small community of artists and tinkerers fueled almost entirely by the waste of others. Hold your thoughts – they live like kings here! An over-abundance of donated or slightly expired food feeds the ten of us humans, the pigs, goats, chickens, geese, dogs, cats, ducks, peacock, and a whole bunch of snow-white doves. Ultimate freegan lifestyle. Meals are prepared in giant batches, usually something more delicious than I would make anyways, and daily chores pass without a thought, with so many helping hands. There’s only one full-time resident, sixty-five year old Gosse with his long white beard, but a few have lived there for months. One guy tends to the gardens, two usually handle the cooking, and the rest of us clean and pass the day building things or organizing or painting.

De Bereklauw is the official name of this place, fittingly dubbed ‘The Dream Factory.’ What started as a simple farm house and stables has evolved, over the past forty years, into a dreamer’s paradise and showcase. Freedom to create is fueled with a junkyard full of all shapes and sizes of wood, metal, plastic, appliances, antiques … anything you can imagine finding useful, is a short walk to the side yard. With visitors constantly coming and going, countless ideas have accumulated into a bar, stage, childrens’ play area, studio, giant workshop, additional rooms for additional helpers, more gardens for more fresh produce. And it keeps evolving – free to explore our own creativity, I really feel like a kid in a candy shop. Though, often the candy turns out broken or antique here, its still so sweet :P

My room is a pig sty, literally. Well, it was a few years back, but now its pretty cozy and nice. I’m rooming with Henrick, a Danish artist, on a stack of four mattresses princess-and-the-pea style. We’re preparing for a big art festival throughout Leuven on April 29- May 1, and so far I’ve scrounged together a sweet sound system for the bar, transformed junk heaps into chill spaces, cleared room for the 5m square canvases arriving, and designed and built a sweet deck overlooking the stage pasture and neighboring farmland, that the sun sets behind… a VIP lounge for the festival to come, and the goats’ mountaintop perch in the meantime

Ideas are easily manifested with a stroll around the joyfully cluttered spaces, or through the four workshops, or of course through the extensive scrap yard. And the stroll would likely be accompanied by flying folk ~ doves floating about like miniature angel beasts, peeping chicks surrounding their warm mama hen, waddling ducks curiously critiquing your work, or geese that always seem offended and with somethin to proove, which they do by standing up tall, glaring and hissing like a snake up to your thigh. The goats are free to roam the pasture, and get their exercise by climbing the piles of pallets and head-butting the heck out of each other. And escaping their pen, to be chased back in by the closest human.

Too much to write about in one post, so part two coming soon – I couldn’t seem to fix my camera, or even get any pics off of my phone, so here is felix, the furry inconvenience currently lounging on my lap, arm, and part of the keyboard:

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<='.'=> -meow
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I made it to Munich, staying for a few days at my friend Hannes’s flat. Good time to just relax and enjoy the sun, and lawns. They’re all about lawn games here, most of which I’d never heard of or had completely forgot about. Klop is a Swedish game involving balanced wood blocks that a team tries to knock over with other wood blocks. That must the simplest game ever constructed; all you need is a long stick and a saw. Next time I’m stranded bored in the wilderness I’m definitely making a klop set.

A couple of guys were freestyling, a frisbee. Like hackey-sacking, but with a slightly hovering disk instead of a ball that falls like a soft rock. Pretty impressive actually, and they said it originated from California, I guess i missed the memo.

The strangest was probably 360Ball, this plastic platform that a group had set up in the park and run around hitting a tennis ball onto it. I guess it’s like the tennis you can play on mountain tops, just a little too much plastic to lug around in my opinion.

And the grand finale, an old favorite with a twist, Croquet ! We spent one afternoon BBQing at the river and setting up a ridiculously difficult croquet course, up logs, between gopher holes, over practically concrete-tectured and uneven dirt, and spent the next few hours trying not to get too frustrated. But, heck, it was a good time, great with a beer and some good company. Oh, and one thing you must try: BBQ bananas, sliced open and stuffed with chocolate to melt to perfection, mmmmmm

Which brings me to the beer here – sooooooo good ! Even the 2-dollar bargain six-pack (of pints) was tastier than most big-name American brews I’ve tried. Paulaner is superb wheat beer (my Tutzing host-father’s favorite), as is Franziskaner (my Melk host-father’s favorite). Augustiner bräu is a local favorite – the brewery was founded in 1328 so they’ve had a while to perfect their ‘hell’. My favorite though was Andech’s starkbier, a BRUTAL 6.9% blow with twice the flavor of most anything else I’ve tasted. It’s like the Stone brewery of Germany, except theirs used to be a monastery too, back in the 12th century when it was born. And they’re all from Munich or the surrounding area, which with the annual Oktoberfest (in september) to celebrate, makes this city, in my opinion, the beer capital of the world. And thus begins my collection of bottle caps…

Next stop, France again, just to confuse anyone trying to follow the map I put up recently, here

The past two weeks have been a vacation from my year-long vacation, relaxing in Tutzing, Germany, and recharging my personal battery in preparation for springtime craziness. I’m working at a horse stable, maintaining the thirty horses which means a whole lot of horse poop. But, work is done by lunch time, and afternoons are spent exploring the remarkable countryside of Bavaria. The family here is traditional and kind; the father is a lake fisherman and the mother looks after the stables and stable hands. It’s a wealthy area, and most of the residences in this town are giant mansions, with an architectural range similar to Vienna, from old castles to modern giant clean-cut cube houses.

One afternoon was spent rowing around the lake, a few were spent running through nearby forests and around nearby ponds, a few soaking in the sun with a set of watercolors and a beer. My day off was spent on my host-brother Xavi’s bicycle, zig-zagging randomly and ending up at a beautifully serene small lake whose shore was mottled with reeds and ancient twisted trees, rather than chateaus of the wealthy. Oh, and a naked guy. I guess he came there to get away too. While rolling randomly, I noticed there were a whole lot of signs that said something in German, and ended in an exclamation point. Couldn’t help but wonder what they were trying to yell at me, No bicycling! Caution land mines! Wild lions here! You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat! Who knows – I guess it is fitting that the loudest language I have yet heard writes signs as they would be spoken, with conviction.

This community is quite aged, apparent from trees as thick as doors, lining paths too narrow for cars, used once for horse-drawn carriages. One oak behemoth was smack in the middle of a grassy meadow, and it must have been thicker than I am tall, with at least three birds’ nests nestled on its corners. Quite humbling standing near it – makes me think of Cali’s old growth forests and Castle Rock area.

There are some benefits of living in a place that speaks a foreign tongue. Conversations are easy to avoid and blur into background noise, if you just want some peace and quiet. A good challenge is to see how far into a conversation you can get, before they realize you’ve been completely lost for a few sentences. Its pretty fun to imagine what people are talking about, using the one or two words per sentence you understand, which are usually numbers, colors, or simple adjectives. Building my own mad lib but starting with the words that would be the blanks, kinda like imagining detailed constellation images with only a few stars. I guess it makes trying to understand the gibberish that surrounds me, more like a game, than a chore. Next stop, church! I mean, the hill of fine beer at Kloster Andechs Monestary!