Sam, Berry and me are in Malaga now with the black bus
and staying in a nice okupa with about 12 people, lots of free space and a future permaculture huerto (vegetable garden).

We already spent our second night INDOORS, which we are really not used to anymore after 6 (!) weeks of Beneficio valley nature experience (and 3 weeks Los Molinos de Aguas before!).

Everything suddenly went very quick:
I was still sitting in the Beneficio time bubble, watching the sun jump up and down and spending lots of time wondering what happened with that other day that had just started and was already over again,
I was sitting there wondering how everything should go on with our project and if I ever wanted to leave Beneficio again – with a broken computer, a halfway broken bus and kind of destroyed group dynamics -
when Anna’s decision to leave the white bus in Malaga for a while and join the “revive migrobirdo” - Marokko-travelling-team for some weeks hit me as an inspiring shock, freeing my mind and pumping me up with amazingly big joy and motivation, I was overwhelmed by a new imagination of how we could go on and a new spirit.

Well, yes, this sounds very strange, but it was her happy face that made me feel like this, even though the situation seemed quite fucked and her decision seemed to mean that the tour-project as we lived it the last months is over now. But, hip-hip-hurra, after weeks of looking sad, Anna felt fine again!
So I felt fine!

We kind of forced ourselves into continuing with something -travelling with a big group- that we proved to not really work out as we wanted it in the beginning. But if we don’t listen to our feelings and to what we really want and force ourselves to live something just because we imagined it to be different then we aren’t really better than that robot society that we critisize.

We just have to develop a good way of communication in within the small travelling groups that we have now, to still be able to do ONE project together, consisting of many small ones, still connected by a big common vision.

And then, well, in a month Anna will maybe join us again and also there is Lauras and Jaquelines biketour – quite connected to skillsurfers.

Suddenly all my own fear that it wouldnt work out to continue the project fell of of me and there was no reason to worry any more. Only 3 people left in our travelling community – so what, no problem, but a new chance!

There is no real problem about travelling with big groups, it is fun, it is inspiring, it is great.
But what we (Anna, Sam, me) wanted to do with this tour didn’t really work out so well.

We had quite a lot of skillsharing within the group, but for creating a big network of communities and other places it requires more than a big party-bus-karawane, even though when there is only great people in within it.

Most projects we visited felt quite overrun by our mass of people and as we had so much change in within the group we couldnt really manage to get well-organised enouph so that it would work to create a good exchange with most of the places.

So I see our small group as a big chance now, a chance to evolve and to make skillsurfers 2.0. into what I wished it to be.

With 3 people evrything can be so much easier: we can be much faster, we can easily find out about common goals and have a much better and more efficient communication amongst each other, we can much more easily integrate into communities and projects.

So, what happened after the others left…
Well, we decided to leave Beneficio only 2 days later and started to run up and down the mountains lik crazy, sorting out stuff, packing things in the bus that was spread all over the place and just crashing into bed in the evenings – finally realizing that it IS possible to have a quite long day in Beneficio if you get up early and don’t get stuck all the time talking with this and that people.

I even managed to finally create a skillsharing board for Beneficio, like I had planned for weeks, and I hope that Adri and Alex, Kathey and Kitty and Paz (Ex-skillsurfers and friends), and maybe Bruce and Bambi and Vio (people from Beneficio) will take care of it.
I filled it with all the skillsharing papers that were on the Beneficio communication board before, like “Yukkas camping tips”, etc.

I put down my tent and moved to Bambis Tipi at the cascade, which Kathey and Kitty were babysitting as long as Bambi was at the rawfood-Rainbow-gathering in Nerja, where Peter is probably still hanging out now.

On Tuesday morning, the day of leaving, Sam told me he felt as excited as a little child in the morning of going to summer holidays…

Kathey and Kity decided to come to Malaga for the goaparty that was on that evening where we wanted to go. We had a last Falfel and Te Pakistani all together in La Baraka, I had some really amazing talks with Kathey about migrobirdo, travelling school of life / skillsurfers, her plans to buy a ship and learn sailing (inspired by migrobirdo), which projects we could do and (how to live) life in general.

Then we had to say goodbye to our home the Alpujarras mountains and to Coco who will be going back to France with our friends of “the Genetik mistake” (the WILD psychedelic rockband we met in Barcelona and that we meet every once a while since then ) Hopefully see him in France on our way back.

We then had an amazing ride to Malaga, listening to Daft Punk and the Doors – electro remixes.

We ran around in circles in Malaga city, being city-shocked and lost, searching casa invisibile (that turned out to be closed, searching Carlos (who didn’t answer his phone), running into masses of “Santa Semana” - “Ku-Klux-Klan”- Catholics who were runing round everywhere making some weird scary parades through the city and finally ended up just going straight to that goaparty in the squat “Norman Bhetune centro eko-social” directly on the beach.

The party turned out to be the most bizarre and loco experience ever. After 6 weeks of being surrounded by by shiva-shiva-ommmmm-chanting and stoned ”no alcohol” hippyness, we were deeply cultureshocked by these masses of drunken and druggy crazy punks there who are hanging out in that weird house with the garden and the big tree on top of the roof and the anti-carbon(coal)-destruction-transparent that doesn’t seem to fit there at all.

We found creative ways of dealing with our culture shocks: I felt asleep in the hammok under the tree, Kathey climbed the tree, and the boys got very drunk.
We then slept on the beach and stayed there until we were kicked out from our parking space because of construction workers.

Kathey and Kitty went back to Orgiva and we drove back to the direction of city center, found another parking where the bus is still waiting for us and walked along the street in search of food, planning to call Carlos and go in th internet again to see if he answered our mails.
Suddenly a guy on a bike just stopped and asked us if we are Sam, Anja and Bery – it was Carlos and it turned out we had parked just 10 min walk from this squat where he lives and where we are staying now.

We are now enjoying to be in civilization again, cooking lots of (recycled) food and being happy about having internet and a washing machine.
I am finally talking Spanish again and thinking about making a solar shower for the squat.

Mercedes (a girl here) just told us yesterday the probably best place to make a tsolife workshop: it is in the beach where we slept near the Bathune, where all the alternative people of Malaga use to hang out on Sunday afternoons.

The whole city is totally crazy about this Santa Semana thing, in this moment they are having a procession or something just outside of this internet cafe… with loud drums and tatarataaaa…. arrrrggghhh… and all shops are always closed…

The Catholics are running round in Ku-Klux Klan uniforms carrying big Christian crosses like on a Crucade, the people of Malaga running next to it, and if a witch would show up they’d probably gonna burn her still…

Yesterday we had to cross one of those parades on our way to casa invisibile , I was carrying a big box with recycled stuff, clothes, shoes and sweets (turon, etc, ugly sugar stuff). It is not very nice to run into a mass of Spanish people with a big box. They are crazy the Spanish.

Yesterday night we watched battle of Seattle, a film about the protests against WTO in Seattle 1999. It is a Hollywood movie but quite good though, only the pretty girls with the makeup were kind of disturbing me but the robocops looked kind like the ones I know from demonstrations. I had weird dreams and G8/Heiligendamm - flashbacks and Berry repeated several times that he wants to go and smash something today - but he is a pacisifst and so he didn’t.

Instead today we were locked out of the kitchen of the squat and had to find something else to eat than our comida de recyclaje, so we ended up in a chinese buffet. It was a very crazy experience, my stomach really hurts still and maybe Berry will write an extra article about it…

We’ll probably leave here on Monday or Tuesday then and also head to Marokko for a few days, before leaving to direction Portugal.

Skillsurfers are setting sails again, some fresh wind in the sails waiting for new adventures in our now muy pequeno grupo. One thing we learned from the tragic destiny of migrobirdo: visions never die!

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