We have just arrived at this interesting and tranquillo community and there is much to say about it but we want to write the full article when we leave in about one week. Until then just an update…

Christmas on the beach was great and we were all thankfull for a nice sunny day, specially when the next day was rainy, and at a meeting held with the now 9 of us in the black bus we decided to start the journey waking up at 8 am, which was perfect timing to stumble out of the bus and see a big red ball of fire rising out of the sea and disappearing in the clouds a few minutes later.

it needs long time to leave this big dirty city, barcelona,
like it needs always long time to organize our self to move
we left the big living-blocks behind and drove into the beautiful sunset,
on the way the flow of life let us met with some other caravan-people from czech-repuplic with van and trailer, who wanted to be at nice beach like we, over christmas.
so they joined our tour for a while,

Occupada Universitat Barcelona

When I got back from Art Center with underground scene, you can check on

Myspace: Asaerc, Barcelona

I found some of us in shock. I didn’t know there were demonstrations going on, and I had no clue why the police gathered around university already at five o’clock when demonstration began at nine.
And it really didn’t make sense that around and more that 100 policemans where checking people on the street, any random people and torture some of them. There was smell of a ‘force’ going on in the air and this force didn’t have colourful colours but an angry face.

Once while walking down La Rumbla de Barcelona we noticed the huge amount of animals being sold, and from this were prompted to make a street action to try and raise peoples awareness to what they are doing! were not sure how much we succeeded, and even if there is hope for humanity, or if anyone started thinking about what buying animals really means, but anyway we had a good time in the group making the project and succeeded for a few hours!

After a long time of feeling quite useless - camping and spacing out on beaches and goaparties - I am finally feeling back into our project again…

Since yesterday we are taking part in the occupation of the central university of Barcelona (Metro Universitat). The university -among the 6 universities that were occupied in Barcelona and the many more in Catalunya and rest of Spain - was occupied about a month ago as a sign of resistance against the “Bolonya” (=Bologna, Italy) contract.

The protesting students here fear that (Catalunyan) universities lose their indepence (–> European standarts for education, Bachelor/Master system) and also lots of universities will be privatised. That means that education will be getting more and more expensive/ less affordable for everybody while qualityand freedom of choice (of classes) decreases…
The students welcomed us very friendly and open towards our project. They were very happy that we wanted to stay in the university and support their actions. We will have an information about skillsurfers/travelling school of life here in the next days and -at least some of us- will probably stay here for a while, do some workshops and use the nice infrastructure and contacts.

From Banyoles we followed the directions we found on one goa base site to an after party somewhere in the hills north of barcelona, where we spend a couple days in very nice nature atop a hill where a small old church was the site of a party by day. Not everyone was thrilled about being woken up at 7 am with music but by the time we all got up the sun came out and we had a nice time trying to speak spanish and laying in the sun having a good group bonding time.

Yesterday we were woken up by the Nature Reserve Range which asked us to leave our camp and say goodbye to our sauna. In two hours we sorted all our things into buses and cleaned all around the reserve. We collected around 3 or more of garbage bags that  was lying in the bamboo and on the beach (WE were driving our garbage regulary to the city!, but the french people seem to like washing their hair wih shampoo on the beach and never heard about taking home their beer bottles) and wrote a nice goodbye letter to ranger sticked to our flyer. After suffering the whole previous day, scrubing eachother under small cover because it was raining all the time and the smoke of the fire was most of the day in our lungs we were sad to leave on a sunny day with a potential night sauna time.

We are now camping for a few days near Perpignan on the beach to make holidays from all the stress of the tour and find some time for ourselves (=the group)…

The way coming here was very funny, finding our first french hitchhiker and a lots of old palets, as well as lots of nice food in the dumpsters of several supermarkets.

We are in a totally amazing place now, nearby a river and just at the beach. Lots of bamboo and cactee figues… hmmmm And lots of nice dumpstered food, that we cook on the fire. We had a lot of sun the last days and warm nights, sleeping outside and our place was to stay here til next weekend when we want to go to Spain.

Just last night it was starting to rain and is raining still and so now we are wondering if we should stay or leave to more south…

We -that’s 6 people- arrived in Montpellier after a week of freezing high up in the mountains with totally shitty infrastructure and not really being able to organise anything at all. So most of us were hoping for lots of warm rooms and lots of internet

We thought to have arranged some places to stay via couchsurfing and hoped to have a good and stable basis from where we could organise stuff, like contact/call other projects, update the blog, etc…

Somehow things again didn’t come as they should (- well, propably they came exactly as they should but not as we hoped…;-) )

First of all some couchsurfers who had offered us enouph places for all of us didn’t answer any more. For the first 2 nights we found a nice but small place to stay -and a shower!!!- in the flat of some students on exchange, Andre and Claudi from Germany, Elisa from Italy, and 2 other guys from Brazil and Spain.

Respecting the wishes of the village people, we decided not to mention the village name or other hints to it. This article reflects only my personal opinion about this place and doesn’t represent the general opinion of the skillsurfers group.
Birgit
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Imagine a crazy party… Even if you try really hard, I guess you cannot imagine the kind of crazy party we experienced in the squatted mountain village that we visited. For that reason, I don’t start with boring information about landscape and so on but with a report about this lunatic anarchist punk party we suddenly found ourselves taking part without being informed before.