Ecotopia Summery

I expected Ecotopians to be hippies, but they weren’t. They seemed to be people who had certain ideology, and in order to show how well it works, they live according to that ideology (some for just the summer, others all the time). The more hard-core Ecotopians had interesting stories of how they lived according to their ideals. One person lived in a camper and would go to the nearby forest to find places to go to the bathroom. He gave a nice explanation about places to go to the bathroom in the Brandenburg/Berlin area.

Food Gathering Team

I volunteered to be part of the food gathering team. My job was to find food for dinner and lunch for the next day. At Ecotopia they cook on an industrial-sized pot enough food for dinner for 25 people with leftovers to be stored for lunch the next day. Since Ecotopia is vegan, we had to make sure that all of the food was vegan. For fruits and vegetables that is not an issue, but more processed food like jams may include animal products. In Israel and Germany many vegan products have a noticeable stamp advertising that they are vegan. In France however there is no such stamp. Presumably because French people don’t care enough about that.

The Bike Ride Over

On Saturday Ecotopia biked to a mid-point, and then on Sunday they biked to Tournon-sur-Rhône. Since I did not bike on Saturday, I completed the 90 km route on Sunday.

Via Rhôna

The route the I took was one of the EU bike routes. https://en.viarhona.com/ . The organisation that maintains that route has a lot of information about the history of the places that the route goes through and fun stuff to do eat and sleep along the way. The Tour de France is always in France, but the route varies each time. So some of the year include the route that I biked. The route followed the Rona river south. We took a short break at Vienna, France but other than that we biked all the way to Tournon-sur-Rhône.

Arrival at Ecotopia

After having worked for a week in Germany, visited interesting cities near Berlin for another week, and travelled to Lyon for another week, I finally reached the original purpose of my trip, to go bike camping with Ecotopia.

I arrived in the morning when people were starting to get up, and our campground looked somewhat like what I expected it to look like, a bunch of tents and bikes with bags attached to them.

I was in Berlin from August 3rd until the 22nd. This wasn’t enough time to say that I “lived” in Berlin, but for a brief moment I had a daily routine. I would get up in the morning, do my standard morning routine, go to work, and in the evening go to some Berlin activity. Since Berlin is a new city to me, there were always new things to see and do. Since I would work throughout the day, this didn’t even count as a work vacation day. My company has offices in a few other places, so when I feel the need for another vacation, I have an idea of what I will do.

Tag der offenen Tür

In Germany, once a year, governmental buildings are opened to the public. This was historically done in order to proudly display that Germany has an open government. You don’t get to rifle through the papers of the ministers, so I’m not sure exactly how the open house helps, but it is fun to see the offices anyway.

The date for Berlin (and the federal government) was August 20 and 21. The 20th was on Shabbat, but since I was staying close enough to many of the offices, I was able to walk to the ones and visit them. I went with my host in Germany, and we visited the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. Everything was in German, since it wasn’t an event were they expected many foreigners to be interested in attending. Although, my German was good enough to understand a lot of what was being shown.

The €9 Ticket

Since Corona, Germany noticed that many people were afraid to use public transportation and preferred to use their car. This caused a lot of traffic congestion and pollution-wise, is not what they want to encourage. In order to promote public transportation, they offered for €9 a month, for the months of June, July and August, access to all of the public transportation, with the exception of the fast intercity train.

Arrival

After landing in the Berlin airport, I didn’t feel like I was in Germany until I got the stamp on my passport. Unfortunately, that took a few hours. mostly because there wasn’t a passport agent for a long time. So the entire flight was simply waiting in front of an empty passport control booth. However, once I finally got out, I bought the 9 EUR ticket, which lets me travel in almost any public transportation within Germany for 1 month. I got on the train and reached my friends place. I’ll be staying with him until I go to Ecotopia.

Back at Home

As the first leg of my trip approached I tried to properly back everything I needed with as little redundancy as possible. Since I am flying low cost I will need to pack everything into a mid-sized backpack and carry everything else in my pockets. While the airline limits the size of the backpack, they do not limit the amount of pockets (mostly).

So, I am travelling with cargo pants and a traveller’s vest. I was considering also carrying a fanny pack, but I’m worried that my sister may call the fashion police (or as called in Europe, the fashion Interpol).

After planning my trip for over a year, today is the week that I will start my flight.

Ecotopia

I volunteer in a bike transportation advocacy organisation called Bikes for Jerusalem. A member of that organisation likes to travel every year to a summer bike tour called Ecotopia. Based on his explanation, it is a group of politically active anarchists who bike for the entire summer in different places of Europe. I’m not sure exactly what anarchist groups believe in (from what I understand, it is basically socialism) nor am I sure exactly how Ecotopia will go, but I will find out. Worst case scenario, I will treat this as a LARP.