Warsaw kick off

Ecotopia 2016 has been inaugurated with a hell lot of pizza from a beautiful clay oven courtesy of ROD Warsaw, radical allotments collective. There are 9 of us at the moment. Getting a group visa for Belarus involves a lot of boureaucracy and it has been taking most of our time. There’s a lot to do here so we extended our stay by one day, until Sunday. Tomorrow we’re joining a women’s rights march here in Warsaw and then we’ll have a whole afternoon at Syrena social centre, getting to know about the struggle to save Puszcza Bialowieska and giving…

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Pre-Biketour: Berlin–Poznań–Warszawa

The 5th of June was the official start of the pre-Biketour in Berlin. Only 3 of us met (we expected much more) and joined the Fahrradsternfahrt, the biggest bicycle demonstration in the world, along with 140 000 other people. On 19 routes of around 1000 km in total, starting in different places around Berlin and all joining on the way to go to Brandenburger Tor in the centre, people are cycling in the whole city the whole day, including two of the city motorways.   Outside of Berlin we quickly visited Kesselberg, a piece of forest outside of Berlin some people live…

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Biketour in Helsinki (last year)

The first two of us arrived on the 15th of September in Helsinki like planned, but only at 2 in the morning. In the end the 10 of us that remained arrived in about 6 groups spread over the next 4 days. Some people had decided to stay a bit longer in Tampere, but some wanted to arrive in Helsinki on time, so the group split in two. The first group split up on the last day when it got dark, as some wanted to make it to Helsinki, but some were too tired to cycle in the dark. The…

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Biketour in Tampere (last year)

On the 11th of September, we arrived in Tampere. Our sleeping place was the social and art centre Hirvitalo. Tampere is a city surrounded by lakes, and on one of them, really close to Hirvitalo, some people had built a floating sauna with a glass roof from which you can see across the lake. The highlight was when we saw the northern lights over the lake while having a sauna. There was not much programme in Tampere. On the way to Tampere we slept next to a really freaky sculpture park in the middle of a forest. Some of us…

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