Last year I opened this blog to write about my interesting summer vacation that
involved a day trip in London, 2 weeks of working in my Berlin office, taking local
trains to fun villages in Germany, traveling by train and bike to France, and biking
with a group of anarchists from encampment to encampment. While last year’s trip was
fun, I decide to go on a much more “normal” trip this summer. So I started planning
a bike trip with a friend of mine from home. We are both in a group of commuters who
live in Jerusalem and work in the Tel Aviv area. The group would bike from Jerusalem
to Tel Aviv at least once a week.
This is the first time that I am flying with a bike, so I’m not experienced
packing a bike for a flight. Based on what my more experienced friends said, I
should request a used bike box from a bike store, remove the wheels, pedals,
seat and handlebar and then wrap everything with padding and clothing. So that
is what I did.
a base with clothingbubble wrap on topbike with no wheels, pedals, seat or handlebarwheels seat and pannier rackclothing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
