We finally managed to leave la friche and planned to go out in the nature into the mountains after such a long time of citylife -and we were very convinced, that this time we would make it to come to a new place before it would be getting dark !

Well… when it was getting dark we found ourselves under a bridge on a river - somewhere in the nature, yes, but not where we should have arrived actually. How did this happen?

Well, it was when it was still light, having been driving through lots of beautiful nature already, that suddenly the white bus (which was going behind us -driven by the Austrian girls who had been driving strange all day) started to make strange blink-blink signs and then just stopped on the sidewalk. So we stopped to.

A parking place in the front of a huge building with high fences -within other industry buildings in a city- can be very scary or life-threatening even when you are sleeping outside on it next to a high mountain of garbage, freezing, waiting to get in, but nobody opens the doors for you…

You don’t really know it any other way in this society, you expect it to be like that. You are just happy that you are not in the situation to have to get into such buildings.

Think about huge bank buildings with high fences and poor African children sleeping in front of it…

But well, what if you knew, you are not in Afrika, but you are in France. You are not totally fucked up gamblers, but just some young travelling idealists…and inside the building there is no bankiers, but a lot of crazy freaky artist ateliers?

Sometimes humans are such funny, oddity beings…
I’m on the road with these excentric hippies for over one month now. And still I wonder what to think about them.

We just arrived in denk:mal in Bern yesterday, which is a selforganised school run voluntarily by some young people,
that -at the moment- offers mostly language courses (German, Spanish, French, Turkish, Arabian), computer courses and some other stuff like cinema and yoga - for free.

The courses are organised by people, who want to teach something just because they like to and everybody can join the course if he/she likes to. If somebody wants to teach something the rooms are open to use without a rent.

denk:mal exists since several years now and has moved several times.
This - too small- building was squatted once, but now they have a contract with the city who owns the house, which allows them to use it for a symbolic rent.
Anyhow it is strange that cities don’t pay places like this in general… there should be much more, much better, bigger selforganised schools like this, everywhere!

clos du doubs PART 1

So, we just left the ecovillage Clos du Doubs to go to denk:mal , a selforganised school in Bern. I am sitting here in the living room now with my laptop on the couch, trying to remember what happened in the last days in Clos du Doubs before all this new impressions of this beautiful project ran over me.

Our last days in Clos du Doubs were full of amazing experiences and full of trouble also…

Well, first: we met Chaques… one of the guys who founded the first community there and also the foundation “Les Fermes Communautaires Libres” which is the owner of one farm place (where one community was living before) and the “maison orange” in St Ursanne (where one community is living now).

La Lune Nette aux Lunettes -

“Clear moon through Glasses”

WUHAAAA - - - - WE FINALLY MADE IT TO FRANCE - - - - WUHAAAA

La Lune Nette, the first French project we visit… As it happened already before - getting to some place we expected this one to be quite a big community, but again we met here only 3 persons: Silvayn, Valentin und Natascha.

Silvayn lives here since the beginning of the project - 12 years. For quite a long time now he lives in his tepee - really comfortable one, with walls from wood, warm interiour… It’s size is original, adepted from the native indians -
seven meters diameter. In these kind of tepees whole family used to live in a past and it really is pretty spacious shelter.
Natascha lives here with her son Valentin, whom she schools at home.

We had a wonderful stay in Alice Wonderland.
Though it was not like we expected - similar to SomaHaus - we had a really nice time with the guys and their various “pets” in Alice. Finally we had some time just for us to relax and plan our next steps..
Besides relaxation and long hours spent in computer worlds we enjoyed the lovely town of Lausanne in a nice walk around city in Davide’s guidance and had lots of fun. He brought us to this amazingly freaky playground near the lake. Three different platforms with toys not only for children…anyway special tip for Lausanne…as well as the lakeside at night with all the floating lights you see from France…

Finally we were on the road.
With Clos du Doubs being a place where we figured out that we should aspire for more structure, that it might be senseable to find a common rhythm, a sorrounding structure, just to find together as a group, find a common point which we can use as a base;
we (Peter, Sani, Anna) left with some more or less concrete plans in our minds. Plans such as being organised during the ride to Lausanne, arriving there before three o’clock (because if not, there would be noone to let us in) and therefore leave at nine. I myself at least was really convinced we would be able to make it…
Well, almost.

As we arrived in Clos du Doubs, we met Krishan an old and wise clay-oven-builder.
He was there visiting Niccolas and build with him the new oven for the upstairs-rooms.
The oven should be used to heat the upper rooms and for baking food and drying fruits.
We came totally to the right time,
they already build up the fundament for the oven and made some skizzen,
but they already were at the beginning.
Some of us were very interested in learning how to build an oven made of pure nature clay and sand.
so we started to help them to build up the oven brick by brick.
While building up Krishan told us about ovens and we learned in practical way.
In the evenings he gave us lessons in oven-building-theorie and how he started to build up clay-ovens.

Here you can find an instruction for building the oven that we built:

Clos du Doubs

We arrived at ecovillage Clos du Doubs few days ago

Since then, there has been some trouble - and a lot of good learning experiences!

When we first came here we espected a big ecovillage community,
but we found an empty farm with one single person living here, which is Nicolas,
who has inherited some money and from this bought this farm some years ago.
Nicolas is a guy with a lot of travelling and community life experience
and I think this place here is a really good place for learning a lot of different wise stuff:

For instance: why chairs are making our society sick,
how to build a stove of clay
or about the African languages and how they effect the Africans view on the world …

We arrived here most of us quite sick
and not very fit to work