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.

Today some of us took part in a street blockade action, the idea was mainly to fight for the right to study of some persons who had been excluded from universities because of rebelling against Bolonya.

We blocked some of the main streets of Barcelona (e.g. Diagonal, La Rambla) and then went into an administration building of the politicians who are deciding about education/university politics in Catalunya. After a long “asamblea” (meetings) in the corridor they decided to occupy the politicians bureau and to eat there.

We were watching the meetings trying to understand what was happening and also the dialogue the students had with some “functionarios” - we were not understanding a lot though as all was in Catala language (not even Spanish!).

Still  the improvised actions were impressing and the helplessness of the politicians and of the policemen (who were just guarding the traffic and waiting outside of the building, not really knowing how to handle this situation) kind of funny

Later we heard that 600 students of another university had even blocked the main highway of Catalunya, all this just spontaneously organised only with word of mouth propaganda.

Even though the politicians we were talking to just said they cannot do anything against Bolonya decisions (as to follow EU-education standarts is a decision made in Madrid) this day can probably be counted as a big success for the protesting students in Catalunya.

I have to stop writing now as I think asamblea here will start soon…

I’ll keep you update ….

Last 5 posts by anja

• Que pasa? - December 15th, 2009
• project update - July 22nd, 2009
• erste Infoveranstaltung in München / first info event in Munich - June 21st, 2009
• back in the land of rain - June 6th, 2009
• game over ... the last day - May 31st, 2009