Casa Robino

This is a copy-&-paste of a letter that I posted to the website of Casa Robino in Amsterdam.Dear friends. I hope some of you there remember me and my vegan summer pizza. But anyway this is not about me or pizzas, it's serious stuff and please open up your ears.My time in Iceland has come to an end, and not in the best way possible. The only organic coop-café Iceland has ever had closed about 3 weeks ago, due to the current crisis and a criminal landlord. My group of co-workers and friends also got involved in some activism concerning refugees and asylum seekers in Iceland. You should know that although Iceland has a really tiny number of asylum seekers compared to other European countries, nearly all applications in the past 20 years have been rejected. But there is more underneath this fact: asylum seekers, who mostly got stranded in Iceland after having been rejected by Canada, are put in a sort of hostel in Keflavík, close to the international airport and in the middle of nowhere. They are given something like 10€ a week, and food and shelter. It doesn't sound so bad, compared to the filthy prison-like building where they are secluded in countries like Italy, Greece and Spain; but in fact, they are in a prison, and they are only in theory free to move, since with the money they are given they cannot even buy a return ticket to Reykjavík, where they could get someone to talk about their case. Many speak no English and cannot do anything to help themselves. They just sit in there, waiting for the police to deport them to the first Schengen country they arrived to after fleeing from their own countries. In many cases they can wait for years before their case gets processed by the Directorate of Immigration, during which time they are neither allowed to work nor go to school. Nobody knows the criteria according to which the Directorate decides to deport someone.This is the story of Nour, a 19-years old rapper from Baghdad. He got deported to Iceland 14 months ago, and spent most of this time in the "hostel". He and his family fled from Iraq about 3 years ago, and he wandered about in Syria, Turkey and Greece, before trying to get to Canada. His father was killed by some terrorist group, because he was collaborating with the US administration. Finally, thanks to some activists, he managed to spend some time in Reykjavík and get the media talk about him, about the fact that he could have been deported back to Greece any time, without notice. Slowly, I managed to get him a job at the organic café, and eventually he got a temporary permit to work and live in Iceland, lasting 6 months. After the café closed, he was already going to start a new job, and maybe one day he could have taken a language course and finish high school. In spite of all this, a couple of weeks ago the Directorate decided not to grant him refugee status, and that's a decision that no lawyer or humanitarian organization can change. 4 days ago the police broke into his home and told him "time to go". They tricked him by saying that he could pick up his stuff and his last paycheck from the café later, and that he had to go with them first. He could make no phone call and after a few hours was put on a plane to Germany and then to Athens. He spent the night on the floor in a prison cell, and the following day he was set "free", i.e. put on the street, from where he could be pulled off any time and deported to Iraq, where he has no family anymore and he would risk his life. He has no money with him and no hope for the future. The chance that he can get any humanitarian support in Greece are really few, given the high number of asylum seekers and migrants there. The decision of the Icelandic government to deport these people esp. to Greece has been criticized by my group of activists because of the evident basic human rights violations that have occurred in that country recently. The situation is very similar in other places where usually asylum seekers get deported, like Italy and Spain. And I specify that I'm talking about a government that defines itself "leftist", "progressist" and "green", and that put a woman as a ministry of Justice, who goes around giving speeches about human rights and stuff, but then from her office sends people off to die.It is extremely important that, if you know anyone who is in Athens right now and could care for this issue, you tell him about Nour and try to help him. He needs a place to stay, I think he can manage with food, but first of all he needs to regain love for life and hope. This is his e-mail address: smdel_992006 [at] yahoo [dot] comHere you can read more about this issue:http://this.is/nei/?p=4566http://aftaka.org/2009/10/16/bref-fra-noor-al-azzawi/http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_...http://www.grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/News-In-Limbo

See original: Letter: The cruel destiny of refugees in Iceland

During the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) I finally watched Antichrist, Lars Von Trier's last work. I was well prepared for it, and it didn't shock me too much; I knew enough about the plot, the genital mutilation(s), the psychodrama, the talking fox. And of course I knew that Von Trier is fucked up. So, the film didn't surprise me too much, and although I left the cinema with a very weird feeling about my genitals, I wasn't too much disturbed about it. I still don't know whether I liked it or not, though; that's something I'll have to think about over the next days. I really liked the photography and the technical choices of many scenes, but my overall judgement of the film is kind of suspended as to now. I probably expected the plot to be a bit more complex; for instance, I would have expected the murderous instinct of the female protagonist to have developed in a much more complex way, although probably that would have been what I would expect from a book and not from a film.Beside liking it or not, a couple of statements from the film gave me enough to think over. There was something in the film that was just ages far from the way I think. Beside the love/hate/madness relationship shown in the film, Von Trier displayed as background witch hunt and Satanism, and I found that weird, namely because I never believed that witches had anything to do with Satan. But it was the female character in the film that uttered something about the "bad nature of women", almost justifying witch hunt, that highly disturbed me. I guess that was the prelude to her madness and homicidal instinct that followed in the film, but still I believe that Von Trier put it there because he wanted to say something about it. The most disturbing element was that their trip to the summer house in the forest was depicted as too negative an experience for my taste. The forest itself was clearly a beautiful place, that Von Trier and his character distorted into "Satan's Church", as they themselves state.Forests and non-anthropic places have always been the domain of the divine for ancient people. Even to us modern people, they inspire a sort of holy terror, but not a demonic one. Satan is a construct of Christianity, and even in Judaism it was often not related to what we call "evil"; it often referred to foreign gods (such as the Phoenician god Ba'al, or the Philistine Beelzebub), and in many cases, Satan was just one of God's angels whom He would send around to test people's faith, notably Job and later, Jesus. In Judaism there is little notion of any absolute evil or Devil, that was developed at the time when Christianity spread across Europe, gradually turning Christianity into a sort of new Manicheism. It was an easy tool for converting people, and gradually habits, practices, beliefs and places that were connected to the previous religion, became "satanic". This is what happened to the forest, home to forces that humans had to deal with carefully.Lately I've been a lot interested in magic mushrooms and I've read quite many things about them. It seems to me very likely that the mushroom was humanity's first deity, and where the concept itself of divinity and otherworldness came from. In shamanic belief, everything is regulated from beyond the threshold: deseases are caused by presences, that need a trip to the other world to be dealt with. This is not far from a modern Christian exhorcism, i.e. the belief of a demon occupying someone's body has definitely shamanic origins, and it resembles all in all a "bad trip". When you take a mushroom, you feel its presence within you. It's like being a host to a divine presence, that is taking you to another world, can could be either good or bad. And since Christianity came, much of this belief system has been labeled as "devilish". And the relationship between man and nature, and especially the forest, which is home to the mushroom, has radically changed. I believe that the broken link between man and nature caused by the advent of Christianity is in the aftermath responsible for the great damages that people have inflicted to the planet.Something has been saved though, usually in places that have been less heavily affected by Christianity. The whole Christmas symbology is related to Shamanism. Originally a Roman holiday of Sol Invictus, celebrating the sun being newborn after its death in the winter, lately it acquired its modern symbology from Northern European shamanic belief. Santa Claus himself resembles a shaman, and wears the colours of the Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria), the most powerful allucinogenic mushroom. He flies up in the sky like the shaman-god Odin (he was recorded to lead a great hunting party through the sky at Yule), and has reindeers which are extremely symbolic for Northern shamanic tribes. The symbology of the Christmas Tree is not related to Santa Claus (as in many places gifts were put into boots, and even in Italy socks were used until a few years ago), but eventually it spread a bit everywhere, as the tree as the place for gifts recalls the tree as the place at whose bottom mushrooms grow.I don't know how people can still think that witches in the middle ages and later really were "Satanic women". In a way, they were, but since I don't believe in Satan, this doesn't make sense to me. I also think that Satanism is just an act of protest, an anti-Christianity that uses its own symbols turning them upside down and "perverting" them, but it can neither be considered a real religion nor a threat. Most importantly, it forgets about where everything started, i.e. in traditional, pre-Christian religions (what I call "natural religions" as deeply rooted in the culture that practices them and were not "imported"), that had no distinction between good and evil. As I wrote above, Christianity itself as a run off from Judaism had little or no notion of good and evil, and the concept of sin was rather anthropological than religious, i.e. it involved clean and unclean things and practices, like eating pork, marrying relatives, dealing with blood, and so on.

See original: Satan's Temple

Time is up, this time for real. Many times this year it seemed that Hljómalind would have to close, but somehow we always managed to survive, but this time we are closing for real. We already stopped to buy food, because by the end of the month everything will have to be gone. We're going to have a staff party on the 14th, and probably a huge sale at the end of the month, where people will be able to buy anything they want from the café, even the equipment, and bring it home. The place that made my stay in Iceland so special, that allowed me to support myself during my studies, that gave me food, friends and even shelter, will be soon gone forever, and with it a huge part of the feeling that tied me to this country. People are leaving, I cannot get any unemployment benefit after losing my job because I'm a student (students should take a study loan, they tell you, but yeah, only Icelandic students, so for me there is nothing...), and Iceland, just like Italy, will become for me a mere (and cheap) holiday destination.There is a growing rumor that the Icelandic economy will not survive the winter, also. I'm not sure this is one of the many cases of mediatic terrorism that someone will profit from - I remember last November it came in the news that stores were running out of basic goods like noodles and oil, so that some people ran to the stores and bought everything possible. It may well be a false alarm - but it seems clear that, sooner or later, something like that is bound to happen. And there are still people that have the courage to write on newspapers that capitalism is good. A recent counter-article argued that capitalism is long dead, and what we have right now is the pale out-of-control shadow of something that has died out - or rather degenerated, I would say - long ago, basically when the most important currencies went for the first time out of the gold standard (1932 and again as a consequence of the Vietnam war in 1971). Right now there is no government using gold standard, meaning basically that any currency is in fact worth the paper or poor metal it is made of. Maybe I'm being simplicistic and I don't understand much of this, but after all, who said that everyone who has the right to vote needs to be an economist, or rather, the less you think, the better the system fares. And the politicians that are elected by "the people". Never heard of Zeitgeist?I only have one thought in my head: besides that I have decided to leave because of so many other reasons, why should a foreigner in Iceland leave the country just because of the economic crisis? Is it a good reason to leave, i.e. escape from a disaster that in fact anti-capitalists like me have but advocated? I don't really believe that such "disaster" will quite harm people, as a sympathiser of primitivist theories. This can be a good chance to go back to a more traditional, less consumeristic way of living, and reverse a mentality centred on the accumulation of wealth. I do believe in all that, so leaving makes me feel like fleeing a monster that I don't fear at all. But I do feel something scary in the present situation, because things I have been enjoying are over. But let's ask the real reason why they're over: Hljómalind is closing because of a landlord that is at the mercy of some banks; the house will go to back up some of his loans that still (incredibly) support his crazy business. The only thing folks can do right now is hoping that he won't be able to do it for long.Nevertheless, as long as you live in this world and haven't chosen to alienate - that's exactly what I'm hopefully going to do in Slovakia - you need to play by its rules. And the rule is that you need money to do things. Sometimes it's not much, because the system is not as bad as it could possibly be. For instance, I pay very little tuition fee for going to university, but in some way I have to support myself. So I'm happy that in order to study, I don't have to take a loan that it will take 20 years to pay back afterwards (especially because not doing it won't influence the direction of your studies, allowing you to freely pick what you like and not what will make more moneymoneymoney), but if I didn't have to work, I would have probably already handed in my M.A. thesis by now, as I intended to. This is not the only problem, but in a time when I'm desperately thinking about finding a job for the next months that will allow me to go on with my education, this seems terribly relevant. What I'm afraid of, is that this need will push me to situations that won't do any good to me - like, is it really the right thing to do, to spend the winter in a ski resort where I can make a lot of money but where probably I'm not going to feel any good? Is it really worth it? Is running after money what I really want? Or am I too much an idealist if I think that I can make so many nice things without money?That is surely true for some things, but not all of them. Opting for the free things is for sure a nice choice, but there is more in life, or there are things that not everybody can achieve by himself, like it or not. To take an example related to school, not everybody can self-teach the piano, but if you spend most of your time working for paying piano classes, you won't practice so much as you need and you're going to be a bad pianist anyway. That's why you need both working and not working, i.e. the best solution as long as you live in this system is to accept a necessary evil using it for your purposes without becoming slave of it. Making money is necessary and acceptable as long as the purpose of doing it is not making money itself. I dislike many things that I do every day, included using a computer to communicate as I am doing now; it's consoling, though, that I'm aware of it. But no, I don't believe that looking beyond it is idealism, rather inspiring realism.

See original: Closing Time

...is the time I am planning to stay here in Iceland, roughly. Maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more.The Summer Course in Manuscript Studies at the Árni Magnússon Institute here in Reykjavík is finally over, and with it all this row of summer courses I took. Now it's time to start working again and take it really seriously; besides, while Europe melts in a 40°C summer heat, here it's raining, windy and it's clear summer time is gone. Hopefully I'll be able to enjoy a bit of my favourite season in Italy, i.e. autumn with its scents, melancholy for the approaching winter, roasted chestnuts, mushrooms, and the first fire coming up the chimney.The course was really good, the group was awesome, teachers included. We transcribed and edited Bartholomeus Saga Postola and the Old Icelandic translation of a Latin hymn, Personent Hodie, which we eventually even sung at the presentation. I'll most definitely go to Copenhagen next August to take the Master's Level (this year I was in the Advanced), since it's a so-called ping-pong course, alternating between the two Arnamagnæn Institues, on the Continent and in Iceland. On Sunday we went on a trip to Flatey, where the famous Flateyarbók was written; we spent nearly the whole day sitting on the bus and on the ferry, and eventually spent about 2 hours on the island, of which one and a half at the restaurant. The food was excellent though, they even arranged fancy vegan food - but besides that, we didn't do anything special, except eating harðfiskur and drinking brennivín at the arrival, and visiting Iceland's first and tiniest public library with a replica of Flateyarbók, which is now of course in Reykjavík.My friend Sarah from Belgium has just come back to Iceland - and as soon as I met her, she put a really bad bug into my head (which is not very hard...): she went back to Belgium to work for the summer, bought a used caravan for 250€, put it into a monastery's yard, and there you go. I had no idea she had lived in a caravan in Copenhagen for two years, and now I'm seriously thinking of something like that, especially if I don't want to work like a madman for the rest of my youth years instead of learning and living (check out my most recent loan from Hljómalind's library); and especially because it's very easy and cheap to find a piece of land to grow some crops on, but most of the time you're not allowed or it's just too complicated or expensive to build on it. Much better to put a carvan on it, even if it's not completely legal - I heard that in some Italian regions like Trentino, even keeping a caravan unused in your garden requires you a number plate and insurance! have you ever asked yourself who made such laws, clearly laws that no completely sane citizen could possibly agree with? So, that's why people get rid of those. I've also been reading about how to convert a caravan's chemical toilet into a compost one, although it is much more practical to do it outside the caravan, possibly as a treebog (outhouse).But going back to growing your own food. I recently found out about forest gardens - a practice linked to permaculture - what a simple and great idea... I had already read a lot of things about primitiv(ist) egalitarian societies of present and past eras, that leading a hunting-gathering lifestyle with little or no agriculture, have comparably a better and longer life and much more leisure time than agricultural societies, especially those who are founded on monocultures (like grain/extensive animal farming), whose harvest is generally poorer and threatened by fast-spreading diseases and famine. But I always regarded it as a romantic idea, that makes sense ideally but not practically; I could never imagine myself living a hunter-gatherer's life. Forest gardens are on the other hands different, since they try to reproduce a spontaneous (woodland) eco-system, rather than a landscape which is completely modelled according to the needs of a monocoltural farmer - which would not be natural, even if everything is done organically and all that. It's not spontaneous, but it can at least partially be, but it works in a way it normally does when humans are not around, the only difference being that in this case the forest is ideally entirely made up of plants that have yields directly useful to humans. The trick is finding out about so-called companion planting, i.e. planting plants on multiple levels in a way that they interact and most importantly, use the ground's resources and minerals at different levels, thus not exhausting it as a monoculture would do. It is terribly easy and it works, but as widely known, us modern people don't like simple and harmless things.When I go back to Italy in November, I will spend some days (or maybe 2-3 weeks) wwoofing in the mountains, as long as the weather is good (I remember 2 years ago I took a course in natural baking there, and we were having lunch outside on the benches and the sun was shining...), and see if I can find a job for the winter, maybe in Norway where I can make enough money and refresh my Norwegian. On Sunday I'm moving to a new room, where I will stay until the end of September.

See original: Two months

On every CouchSurfing Profile there is a section where you're asked to mention "One amazing thing I've seen or done". I decided to make my own list of "amazing things" that I have seen/done, that I am about to do, and that I will do one day. And link it to my profile. Suggestions and comments are very much welcome.Amazing things I've done:- self-taught my ancestors' forgotten beautiful language- left Italy and forbode by parents to support me financially in 2006- cut it with Italian ham and salami and became a vegetarian- learned Norwegian to the point of understanding most Norwegian dialects- touched the bottom by working at McDonald's for 7 months, moving trash in the middle of snowstorms with only a McDonald's shirt on- found a beautiful German girl who shares my nomadic lifestyle- lived in Iceland during the 2008 great depression and learned Old Norse- Hitch-hiked from Iceland to the Netherlands and climbed up 1000m on a glacier (risking my life without a jacket)- gave up using shampoo and found myself with much healthier and cleaner hair- grew a nice fluffy beardAmazing things I'm about to do:- live as a nomad for over one year- learn how to knit a sweater- live on an organic farm for several months- learn Slovak, Dutch and Welsh- learn macrobiotic cooking- how to make soap, clay pottery, wave baskets, identify wild edible plants- reconstruct Proto-Indoeuropean roots- play the mandolaAmazing things I will do some day:- go to India and Nepal and back without flying, hitch-hiking most of the way and back with the Transiberian train- spin dance with Sufi mystics in Iran- join an ashram in Nepal and learn Sanskrit, tantric yoga and meditation- eat cooked insects- buy a second-hand carvan and put it in the middle of a field where I will grow my own edible forest garden and make it my home- become a father of a better person than myself

See original: Amazing Things

Whoa, my trip has reached its end! Since I arrived in the Netherlands I seldom had the possibility to write a post. These two weeks have been so intensive!Everything started in Germany on July, 25th. Denise and I took a SchönesWochenendeTicket and after 7 and a half hours sitting in a train, we reached Enschede, the last station we could go to with the regional train. we found a Mitfahrer, so we basically went to Holland for 14€ each, which is not bad. There we surfed a couch on the University Campus, that apparently is only populated by computer nerds. The guys who hosted us had a recycled computer in the kitchen with soft keyboard on the fridge door, an intranet to share films and media on their TV, and they even nailed a couch onto the kitchen roof, so that it swang like a hammock, and installed a subwoofer in the couch!After crashing in the laundry room, the next day we started hitch-hiking West at around 1 p.m., although we wanted to start much earlier (usual). We had 4 hours to reach Leiden (160km), because I had to attend the welcome reception in a restaurant at 5. At first it seemed that it would have been a bit hard: we quickly got a couple of rides, first to the motorway and then to a big gas station/restaurant. We got bad luck at the gas station and moved over towards the restaurant's parking lot. I tried to talk to some truck drivers, but all of them were sleeping or didn't want to have hitch-hikers around, like the Polish driver that I greeted with "Autostopowicz", without success, as if I had named a bad infection. The Spaniards were really nice and sociable, but unfortunately they were going to Spain: they would have actually taken us to Madrid, they said, if we had wanted, but had to go the other way...We had a sign, and experience says that with a sign it takes a bit longer, but then you find the right ride. So it was. We waited almost one hour, but eventually two cars pulled over, one bound to Rotterdam and the other to... Leiden. They were a nice old couple who showed us pictures of the royal family from a glamour magazine, and brought us all the way to the restaurant. We got there at 5.15, so I was 15 min late and had missed nothing. Later on we reached our first host, Tommy, the CouchSurfing ambassador of Leiden. He had an insane passion for Norway and an even more insane sense of hospitality: he lived in a one-room apartment and managed to host 6 people at the same time, with 3 mattresses and 2 couches. It was weird but also in a way cozy, and the other people nice, although I had to listen to the adventures of an American girl in Rome, who found funny that taxi drivers there would pinch her butt. The other Surfer we stayed at, Klara, was less fun but finally a civilized place to stay, and a clean kitchen where we could finally make a nice dinner.In the weekend, we packed our stuff once again, wrote a carton sign bearing the title "A'dam", and hiked to a gas station. After 2 seconds we found a ride to the City, and in less than 30min we were there. Amazing. Without knowing it, the guy stopped at a coffee shop on the way to the centre, where I realized that we were 5 min walking from the Casa. We went there and everybody started hugging us. I felt like joining an ashram, and we were offered delicious (but sooo hot) couscous at 10 pm. Then people decided to go out, and got the key of two bicycles. They have a system with bikes: they have a frame on the wall with nails and keys, and the names of the bikes; the bikes are locked in pairs, so the keys are also organized in pairs, and if some keys are missing, you automatically know which ones are available and which key you have to pick. Apparently, the bikes also have a profile on their website.Downtown, everything was full, and we eventually ended up sitting on the pavement, which wasn't bad after all, it just felt so much like Italy. The next day we watched the Gay Pride Parade, which was even grander than I had imagined, especially because afterwards the street likened an immense open-air landfill (apparently you cannot get money for returning beer cans in Holland). In the evening, I cooked vegan pizza with fresh tomatoes, aubergines, capers, garlic & herbs tofu and olives. The kitchen was full of dumpster-dived artichocks, and every evening people make amazing organic bread out of sourdough brought over by the PastaMadre project.The Casa was an amazing place. I found it because I wanted to find it, and I surfed it because I really wanted. It's not a place where people end up by chance, it's not a squat, it's not a commune, it's just magic. It's a magic bunch of people who made me feel more at home than in any other place where I have lived. Depending on when I will finish writing my thesis, I have to go back, do some activism in Amsterdam and learn some Dutch.I think I understand now why people at the Casa don't do CouchSurfing. CouchSurfing is great, but it's limited. The Casa is unlimited, is not for tourists or backpackers, it's a living thing, that calls you for becoming a living part of it.Right now I am in a wonderful apartment in Leiden, hosted by two great hosts with two beautiful huskies. I will stay here until Saturday morning, and then I will hitch-hike to Maastricht, where I will spend the night, and move to Cologne the next day, and in the evening fly back to Reykjavík.The course that I am taking is really challenging. I am basically taking a 3/4-months workload in two weeks. I have even reconsidered my wish to take a master's degree here in Leiden, because the level is so ridiculously high, and the time when you're supposed to complete your studies so tiny, that I would probably die on my books, and I most certainly don't want that. Leiden has a huge team of top scholars, and they do things their own way: I learned Proto-Indoeuropean in Italy with the /a/ and some schwas, but here, even in the Proto-Germanic class, after one day they started putting laryngeals everywhere, not to mention things like Balto-Slavic accentuation, which apparently nobody understands yet...Next post after my comeback to Iceland!

See original: Last days in Holland

Finally the Netherlands! Last Saturday Denise and I bought a SchönesWochenendeTicket and took all possible regional trains to the Dutch border; since we found another guy to share the cost of the group ticket with, we both paid around 14€ for getting to the Netherlands nicely sitting in a train. We thought about hitch-hiking, but after the exhausting experience on the Danish border, I thought I might prefer sitting in a train for 7 hours instead, although our hitch-hiking trip to Berlin (we visited my ex-collegue Marieke) was extremely succesful: we found 2 Spanish girls, who apparently had very little experience at hitch-hiking, but nonetheless found us all rides! When we came, we saw them on the first intersection in Halle towards Berlin, and thought the spot was horrible to hitch a ride. We hadn't said that yet, that a car pulled over and collected them, so we asked the lonely driver if we could join them, and we were brought all the way to Potsdam. Without us, those two girls would have probably never made it, most importantly because they didn't even know where Potsdam was... later, we split at a gas station: they stayed there and asked the drivers, and we stood on the street further on, until they had found a ride and took us with them again. Brilliant!So, on Saturday we went to Enschede with the train, and since we managed not to write our name on the ticket, tried to sell it again at our destination, but found no buyers. So we surfed a couch in the student village on the university campus, and were offered dinner and breakfast with the other students. The next day we packed our stuff and went to the street to Hengelo, where the motorway started. With two rides we were at a big station on the motorway, where we stood with our sign for over an hour. At around 3 I started losing hope that I could be at the welcome reception for arriving summer school participants in Leiden, scheduled for 5 p.m., but then suddenly two cars stopped on the ramp we were waiting at, at the exit of the restaurant. One of the two was a retired couple who were going precisely to Leiden, so they brought us all the way to the reception, about 150km, allowing me to be there only 20min after the start.In Leiden, we are staying in an unbelievable place. The guy is actually the CouchSurfing Ambassador of Leiden, and he's completely crazy. He has a 1-room apartment of a few square meters, and shares bathroom and kitchen with 4 other students living in the house, and yesterday we were 7 sleeping here, with 2 American girls and 2 Russians, sleeping on 3 mattresses and 2 couches. You couldn't see the floor between the mattresses. We spent the night at a nice pub and celebrated the last night of the Eurotrip of the two girls from Atlanta, and we all went to bed like a nice, happy family. Tomorrow I'll probably start uploading some pictures.

See original: In Leiden op de couch

I am totally amazed at people. Even when everything seems to go wrong, someone makes something nice happen. And this time it was nicer than I could ever expect.I left my good company in Århus on Tuesday evening, right after the farewell reception at the summer course (= free food and booze). I had found a very cheap ticket (in Denmark they are called "Orange Tickets") to the border, leaving at 8 p.m., so I took the train and arrived in Padborg at 11 p.m.. Everything was dark and I had no idea where to sleep, but I was confident I'd have found a place. So I started walking in the darkness, until I spotted a sign indicating a forest. I followed it and I arrived close to the woods, probably the same woods that mark the border. After having tried to camp on what was definitely meant to be a grazing pasture for sheep, since when I tried to enter it I got an electric shock (!) from the fence I couldn't see in the darkness, I got to a havekoloni, i.e. a relatively big area of little huts surrounded by heavily cultivated vegetable gardens. I peacefully pitched my tent there, confident that I'd be able to find some water close to the houses the following morning. The plan was to get up very early, so that nobody would report my tent, although very unlikely, and I set my alarm at 6 a.m. Sleeping was hard, and from very hot it got quite cold during the night, and then hot again after sunrise. I almost preferred camping in Iceland, where it is always cold anyway at around bedtime...The following morning I realised the ground where I had pitched my tent was covered with raspberry bushes, so I had a very nice, free breakfast (see pic)! The next thing was to find water, but I could strangely find none around the garden huts. I wondered what those people use to water their plants with. So I started walking back to the village, where I finally found a garden tab and could wash my face and fill in my bottle with precious water. I had checked the map on the internet the day before, so I had a kind of idea where the motorway was, or at leas where Germany was, so I slowly started moving toward it, under the amazed eyes of the local population, who would stare at me as if the had never seen a backpacker before. Well, I guess I really looked like I was going to walk to Germany - but that wasn't too far from what I did.I reached the toll zone, where apparently a lot of trucks had to drive through to declare their cargo. A little beyond it, the road led to the E45 motorway. I reached a good spot where cars could have pulled over, and stuck my thumb up. I waited something like 3 hours and changed spot a couple of times, I shitted in the bushes after I found interesting big leaves suitable as toilet paper, and exhausted, I ate all my food and drank almost all my water. Absolutely nobody had stopped, cars were really few, and truck drivers wouldn't even bother to look at me from their majestic high seats. I started thinking that maybe I should have gone into the toll parking lot and ask the drivers directly, but it was huge there and people would pop up and get very fast into their road monsters, so it was hard to get in touch with them. I hiked back to the village and down into the other ordinary street leading to Flensburg. This hiking took me a long time, but eventually I got there and not long afterwards a nice man with his two young daughters in the back pulled over. We just told each other that we were going to Tyskland, Germany, and that was enough for me. He didn't look Danish, and he told me he was Albanian from Kosovo. We exchanged nice words and meanwhile he kindly brought me to the entrance of the motorway, which was not where he was going. I soon realised that it was impossible to hitch on that spot, and I moved over down on the motorway, reaching what vaguely seemed to be a resting area, but was not. At least there was some room for cars to pull over. Everybody was driving very fast, and I was hoping to be noticed by those who had just entered the motorway and were driving slowlier. Pretty soon a German guy pulled over, and I jumped in. I told him I wanted to go anywhere South, and that I absolutely wanted to get away from that spot. He said he was going to Schleswig, but eventually brought me all the way to Rendsburg. He was an architect driving from one construction site to the other, and on the way he told me the story of his life, his studies, the army, the history of the Bundesland Schleswig-Holstein, and most importantly, his buildings, and eventually his vacation plans. The last site he had to visit was a big bakery, where they were building a new part, which was supposed to turn old unsold bread into animal feed. He talked long to the baker and got out with two sandwitches, cakes and a new water bottle. For me, he said. It was not necessary, I said. Well, free lunch today, I didn't expect it!In Rendsburg I was released at the train station, where I could look at the city map and finally go to a real toilet. I checked the trains, but the train to Hamburg (90km away) cost 20€, and that was a lot. I had little over 20€ with me, and decided to save it for the end of the day, and see what would have happened. I texed Denise that I hoped to be either in Hamburg or in Hannover in the evening, and that she should try to find me an emergency accommodation through CouchSurfing. It was already 2 p.m. and I started walking to the next village, where I could get to the motorway. I walked for almost one hour, under the Channel Tunnel and under heavy rain. Eventually I reached a spot where a fairly laid-back-looking guy in an old car picked me up. He told me he would have brought me 3 km further towards Hamburg, and I accepted, hoping he would have brought me to a better spot. In fact he drove me backwards, 6 km before Rendsburg, but to a spot that was supposed to be very good, he said. There was a big parking lot and the motorway right next to it. The guy told me he ran a milk farm with 1000 cows, and that because of that and his 2 kids and ex-wife, that was what his life would have looked like for quite a long time. Although he was only 10 years older than me, he said he envied me and the years of youth, and that everybody should get going and see the world. I perceived a great emotion flowing in his words. Before dropping me out at the parking lot, he took his wallet out and said he was gonna give me something. At first I thought he wanted to give me a visit card, to let him know how my journey had gone; but then I saw that he was checking his notes, and they were all 50€'s... he shelled out one 50€ note to me, and I said that I couldn't accept it, and seeing that he was damned serious, I said that it was 50€, spinnst du, are you kidding. He yelled nimm es, oder ich steck's dir in den Schuh, take it or I'll stick it into your shoe, so I took it and hugged him. Then he said that he was going to drive to that street later at 6, to see if I had had my luck.I stood on the roundabout for at least two hours, and although the sign pointed at Hamburg, apparently nobody was going anywhere close to there. Two cars bound to Kiel pulled over, that I had to refuse, and nobody else, until at 5 pm a young rollie-smoking kid offered me a ride back to Rendsburg. I asked him to drop me at the station, and there I checked how much the cheapest ticket to Halle/Saale was. 55€. Now I almost had 70€ with me and I thought that that was the best way to spend that money that I had so surprisingly earned, so I bought the ticket and I sat 6 hours in the train, until I arrived in Halle at 0:16, where Denise picked me up and brought home.Well, I didn't expect to find such a few rides in a country with so many hitch-hikers. Although I was in some quite good positions, I didn't talk to any truck driver going long distances, and almost nobody else stopped. But those who stopped were far kinder than I could imagine. These people saved me and showed me a great piece of humanity, and suddenly turned a bad day, where I stood in the burning heat for most of the day and I also got a nice deal of rain poured down on me, into an amazing adventure blessed by luck.Next step: Saturday 25th Denise and I will use the weekend ticket to go as far as the first Dutch town beyond the border, Enschede, will surf a couch there, and the following day we will try our luck on the road to Leiden. It's only 2h by car, and apparently it's very easy to hitch in the Netherlands, so let's see what happens!

See original: Finally Germany, amazing!

Another surprise was awaiting me at my arrival in Denmark! Last Tuesday at around 7:30 am Danish time, the ship Norrøna finally berthed at Hanstholm, a harbour village on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula. It was already very hot, and it was going to be around 30 degrees Celsius. With all my stuff on my shoulders, plus a nice 6-pack selection of Føroya Bjór (the only Faroese beer) for my dear hosts, I walked up on a hill from the harbour onto the main road. There I immediately found a ride to the small town of Thisted, where I got lost, because I wasn't dropped off on the road again, but at the work place of the girl that gave me a ride. It took me almost an hour and a good load of luck to reach a good spot to start hitching again, because the main road to Århus was far and it was hard for cars to pull over on the street I was on. But a nice lady stopped and asked me if I needed help when I wasn't even lifting my thumb up, but rather trying to reach a petrol station. She brought me to the main road, and another lady who told me she was a breeder of weird little fur animals took me a bit further on the road. Two rides more and I was in Århus at around 1 pm, very nice timing for having lost myself and gone further mostly with small rides. Although it is not as easy to hitch-hike as in Iceland or other places I've seen, people are extremely friendly and helpful. I got rides pretty easily, and enjoying the beautiful and idyllic Jutlandish countryside, where you find nice little wagons with potatoes, berries and herbs on the side of the street, with nobody there, and people can just take what they need and chip the money into a box or a bucket. This is really another world to me. The pastor at the parish where I live now with my friends is a nice 27-years-old girl, daughter of the former bishop, and she was even younger when she was appointed that parish. This is really another world!Anyway, when I got dropped off on Århus outer ringroad, I wanted to reach the road south to Skanderborg, where my friends and hosts live. But the area was further into the city than I thought, so it seemed very hard to find a ride there, and started looking at the bus stops, when suddenly... someone drove pass me shouting "Ciao bello!", and it was my pal Colin with my hosts, who hadn't read my message saying that I was coming that day rather than the following, and were thus going on a road trip to some dolmens and megalithic tombs in the region of Djursland. I joined them and finally reached their home in the evening. Once again, great trip, great whether and great people. Finally all shops have (unexpensive) alcohol (unlike Iceland and the Faroes), people are relaxed and sunbathe in public parks almost naked, and there are even associations of women who advocate that swimming topless should be allowed in swimming pools just as it is allowed on all beaches. This is a really beautiful country. Pictures to come.

See original: Summer time in Århus

The end of my stay here on the beautiful Faroes is coming to an end. Tonight I'm taking the ship further to Denmark, check-in starts at around 10 p.m., and I'll have to spend a day and two nights aboard. Arrival is scheduled on Tuesday at 8 a.m., but it's always a lot earlier and they get you out of bed a couple of hours before.I feel sorry for leaving, because I have done so little here, although I was always around. But I am utterly amazed at these people, they are absolutely the most kind, open, gentle and hospitable that I have met so far. I have already mentioned how I have a whole apartment just for myself, and how kind my host has been to me. Now it's time to tell the rest!On Friday night after the pizza me and my host fell asleep together in our clothes while we were trying to watch an old funny Danish comedy show. It took less than 5 minutes, and that night I slept as if I hadn't been sleeping for years. In the morning I decided to go to Suðuroy, the southernmost island, because of a big festival called Jóansøka. The Faroese have kept all saints' celebrations even after the Reformation, while everyone else in the Nordic countries lost memory of them - apparently, everyone seems to have alsways forgotten about the Faroes: they were part of Norway until the Kalmar Union (the period when all Scandinavian Countries were one kingdom under a Danish king), and when Norway became independent again, they just forgot to bring the Faroes with them, so they remained part of Denmark. And after the Reformation, nobody really thought of travelling as far as here to update the Faroese on saints' festivities. So they kept on their own way, as with ship building - they are the only ones, I was told, that still build ships as the Vikings did.So I took the ferry to Suðuroy at 10:00, and since I was late, my host Eyðbjørn ran with me to the docks and told me to run up through the car deck. During the 2 hours of the trip I spent some time chatting with two Norwegian tourists, reminding myself how nice is to talk Norwegian and how much easier it is than Icelandic. There on the island there was supposed to be a big celebration, but apparently the real party was on the ship, because during all the time of the ferry transfer the locals were consuming huge quantities of Føroya Bjór brought along in boxes, and singing and screaming as if their football team had won an important match (it was 10 a.m. as already mentioned). On land, nothing was really going on, except a canoo race and people drinking like crazy and crowding the only two-three places where you could buy food on the island. Although in Denmark there is no such a thing, the Faroese have their own Vínbúð, or Alcohol Monopoly Store, and as far as I understood, there is only one in the capital, and nothing else. The places at the festival that had a licence to sell alcohol were really few, so that is why so many people brought boxes of beer from home. People were mounting some rollercoasters and stuff like that, and two stages, but nothing was really going on. So I decided to go for a hike in the island. I walked for half an hour to reach a spot were I wanted to start hitch-hiking to Fámjin, the only village on the Western coast of the island. In the free guide I got in the tourist information centre I had read there was a lake called Kirkjuvatn ("church lake") close to it, and since that seemed to be the only one on the island, I wanted to go there. After a couple of minutes with my thumb up, two girls who had recently graduated from high school picked me up. They looked at me as if I was doing the coolest thing on earth, which I didn't understand, because they said they had been hitch-hiking every day home after school because they didn't want to wait half an hour for the bus. Even though they weren't going there, they brought me there anyway, since they had basically nothing to do, and were just going around on mom's car. The village was very nice, although nobody was around, and I thought it'd be hard to be back in Tvørsoyri to take the ship back to Tórshavn, or at least to see if the festival had evolved into something more cultural than getting drunk before noon. I hiked up the mountain and I found the lake when it had become so hot, that I really wanted to bathe. There was also a nice pier from where I could have dived, maybe. Nobody was there, except someone fishing on the very other end of the lake, so far away that I could barely see him. So I took off all my clothes (I didn't have a suite), walked to the pier and into the water. I experienced a great sense of freedom, but also a great cold: the water was coming directly from the springs and it was icecold. Apart from a slight dizziness in my stomach that I experienced about an hour later, bathing for those few seconds was good, because I was really sweating a lot. There are over 20C these days, not even a cloud in the sky or the usual fog, and hiking on the mountains can warm you up a lot! So, after bathing, I hiked up the mountain and to the road, that was higher up than the village. I was about 20km from my destination and there were no cars. To reach a spot where I could maybe find more cars, I'd have had to walk for almost 10km. But after a couple of minutes, an old man pulled over and picked me up. I didn't know what language to speak with him, because he wasn't fluent in English although he understood my simple sentences - but eventually we kind of agreed on Danish and he told me of him being shepherd after many years working in different places, first in Denmark, then on the Westman Islands in Iceland, and 4 years in Greenland, all around the Rigsfællesskabet. Then at some point he stopped and came back to his native place to look after sheep. I listened to him with great interest and almost saw myself as an old man. The next guy that pulled over and brought me back to the "festival" in Tvøroyri didn't want to talk to me at all, but he drove fast and in less than half an hour I was back. I was amazed at how early it was, and how easy it was to hitch-hike, although there were such few cars.Today I went downtown to buy stamps for my postcards, and then I took a bus (the red buses in Tórshavn are free, to incourage people to leave their cars at home!) to a point where I could trek over a hill and then down to the small village called Kirkjubøur. Although the sign said that I needed proper gear, a compass, food and blablabla, and 2 hours one way without breaks, I did it in little over one hour and no problem at all. There I was resting at the small harbour, when an old man that apparently had nothing to do came to me and praised the beautiful whether in Faroese. I understood what he said but didn't attempt a reply in my broken Faroese, so I asked "Bor du her?", do you live here in Danish. He asked if I was Danish and I told him my story. He was amazed and even happier to talk about Iceland, and then started telling me in Icelandic of the time he spent in Iceland doing language research: he, Jóan Hendrik, is a retired linguist, who worked for most of his years on dictionary projects on the Faroese lexicon. With his knowledge of Icelandic, he created lots of new Faroese words from Icelandic models, and collaborated with the local administration in many ways, among others inventing new names for streets of the new neighbourhoods of Tórshavn built in these recent years. We also talked about Gianfranco Contri, the Italian that wrote the first and only Italian-Faroese-Italian dictionary , whom I had met years before in Bologna, invited by my Norwegian professor. Then he brought me home, where he fed me tea, raisin bread and butter, showed me all his books, and then ended up talking about hitch-hiking: he said that when he was studying in Copenhagen, he would hitch-hike from there to Germany, Holland, England up to Northern Scotland, where a Faroese fishing boat would bring him home. Other times. Nú eru allir hræddir, he said in his perfect Icelandic, now everyone is afraid - true, but at least in Iceland and in his country it still works so good! At last, he said he would bring me home with his car whenever I wanted to, and eventually did it, saving me two hours walking over the steep hills.Now, I must cut this about feeling lucky. I am not lucky, when awesome things happen to you every day like this, then that's just the way it is: if luck happens every day and to everyone, then it's no longer luck, because it lacks the "unexpectedness factor". Then I thought about those other few tourists in Kirkjubøur, who came by car, took some pictures and drove away. Nobody has time to stop a bit, rest on the grass, talk to the locals after a good hike on the mountains. And misses all this bliss of a forgotten humanity that invites you home for tea after a 2 minutes chat.

See original: Leaving Føroyar