I got a lazy writer, but not because I am lazy in general, no! Rather the opposite is true and I have no time for blogging because I am going to Romania for example! The PLAI Festival was going down in Timişoara the 6th time if I remember correctly. We – actually footbag-vienna – were invited to do a Footbag Workshop there and of course we utilized the opportunity to visit Romania (for me the first time of my life) and so we threw ourselves into a car riding down the Danube, hitting Budapest and Szeged before turning left to Timişoara.

First thing to tell the astonished audience: The car wasn’t stolen and we came back home with all of our 4 tires plus radio! So much to prejudices…

So this journey once more showed me how awesome and wonderful a country can be. Maybe I am just always visiting the right places – first of it was Timişoara, Main Square, to stop my prelude and get further on with the story. We got there on Thursday night, just parking the car and then hitting the town, guided by
Mara: Is one of the nicest girls in Romania I guess and she was our host for 4 days, supplying us breakfast, a nice room, mattresses and also went out with us almost everyday, without thinking for the consequences, that the next day comes, and that we could sleep, however, she had to get up early as one of the festival organizers. Nevertheless, she just doesn’t stay nice and awesome on its own, because she is a twin and doubled the action with her twin-sister, which – I guess – is the second nicest girl in Romania then. Did I mention she plays Footbag?

So our stay was really comfortable, we had to fight to get out of bed to the festival location, which was located a bit out-of-town in a museum village with millions of volunteers taking care for everything you could wish of. One of these volunteers, Gabi, supported us with extraordinary knowledge of traditional alcoholic beverages and one of the best eastern-english accents ever heard. He introduced us to his house wine which tasted like olives mixed with grape-juice and also explained us the difference between Tuica and Palinka.

On Friday we hold a Footbag show in front of the main stage to promote our workshops on Saturday and Sunday. I really enjoyed this part, because I rocked – seriously, I had a really good feeling on stage and somehow could spread my happiness across to the audience. I don’t want to debase the others, just want to say thanks to the festival for giving me such a good feeling.
Saturday was mainly workshop. So many people tried to hack the sack, incredible. We were amazed and we hope for a growing footbag scene in little vienna (a.k.a Timişoara).

The festival offered a great show for people with an unusual taste for music. There was only one real stage, which was surrounded by the visitors, who had only one desire: The music shouldn’t stop, no matter which kind of music, it should just go on, otherwise silence will break through the night and we would go and drink Gabi’s tasty wine in the more than comfortable chill-out zone, or swing on a wooden beam fixed with a rope to a tree. So to list some of the acts: There was Christoph Pepe Auer, an amazing Indian drummer (whose best instrument was a metal-bucket filled with water) who didn’t really get that beat-boxing can be far better than just singing the “ragadaga”, and an Portuguese singer, whose interpretation of Johnny Cash was killing me!

Sunday was our last day, with a couple of hours workshop, a really nice (obviously) and emotional good-bye and a more than fast return to Vienna.

Vielen Dank Rumänien und hoffentlich geht sich nächstes Jahr das Plai Festival auch wieder aus! – as more like half of the people we met could speak perfect German – incredible…

I am in Europe again and thus I had to compete in the European Footbag Championships in Brussels last weekend. I had nearly no time to prepare and my last year in Canada wasn’t really helping my progress in Footbag, but I seriously wanted to meet all those beautiful people which play Footbag in Europe and beyond again. Discover my impressions and some one-hundred different beer colors!

Brussels is awesome expensive, a meal starts with 10eur, however, I lived quite cheap there, for I used mum-pasta served from the footbag crew and the beer in le supermarché is not too expensive. But it is also aweful nice, with all those old buildings, rich emporer castles and kings houses from the midage and big modern buildings like the European Parliament and Commission from the now and here. This city somehow is loved by the upper-class governmental people for ages. Despite this beauty there is this big discrepancy of the official languages Belgium has – Flemish and French, and nearly separates this tiny country into two tinier ones, with Brussels as a French language-island in the middle of Flemish speaking countryside. Bus-lines and Metros are often signed in 4 different languages, I would go crazy!

After a little social-demographic lesson I focus on the more exciting part: Footbag Euros! It took me two days to (un)prepare myself for this event. The week ago I was out with Emily and showed her Austria, which didn’t allow and motivate me to train, but I couldn’t have gone to Euros and just hanging around with no competition at all, so I took a funny music and after two days hard training I had some routine compiled, not to good though, but at least I’d not blame myself.
The best moments in this Euros were when I was shredding in a circle with Anssi Sundberg and in another circle with David Clavens. Anssi started with Nemesis to Nemesis followed by Genesis to Genesis in the same run and my jaw just dropped to the floor. I thanked him that I could see such a combo life and tried to play as good as I poorly can and once he gave me ‘props’ I was in heaven for a minute. The circle with David was really pushing myself, because he always fevered with you in the run and added a happy “yes” during a run, if he saw you hit something harder. But he was simply outstanding, did tricks from 5 to 6 to 7 and more and more adds and once again my jaw dropped and I rubbed my eyes to believe its the truth and also was super proud to be in this same circle! Shortly after he hit 24 rip-warrior, he stopped shredding and we thought he couldn’t even kick a bag no more, but he still had to play in the finals his 2min routines in 3/4hrs. We were just settling down and resting our feet which were just tardy and then watching his awesome routine he played like the freshest fella ever, after Honza just showed us an amazing dropless routine. I got goosebumps while watching, David won this competition besides Circle Contest and Request Contest.

The Austrian Team was represented by Alex Trenner, Armin Moayad, Dominik Knoll, Bernhard Leiner and Julian. We not only competed on the playground, but also in the city, where we tested at least 15 different beers in a bar called Delirium, which is right next to the pissing lady (Jeanneken Pis). We didn’t find the pissing dog, Tuuka asked for directions though, but took pictures of Manneken Pis and had super expensive waffels. Of course, Alex and me competed, although both of us hadn’t the consistence in routines, dropped a few times and thus didn’t really achieve good results. Alex would have so much potential, but somehow he drops really often in front of audience. He did 204pts in Shred30 on video, but only about 150pts life…

All in all it was a very pleasant stay in Brussels with some awesome footbag impressions. Had some nice talks to Tuuka, Matt Bailey and Paloma, some more nice Shred with Tina Aeberli, Matus Samuel and Michal Biarda. Too bad I can’t go to Worlds, it will be a very exciting finals and awesome to see US and Canadian players again.

Where should I start…? The time passed by so fast in the 2nd term and everything was more important and more acute than writing a blog. Now I am back home and have some time to recap. Read on, if you don’t wanna hear a summary of what happened, but an awesome story full of adventures, achievements and action around February until now. I also want to drop some lines for all those wonderful friends that gave me accompany the last year and should earn a prize or be listed on a big statue of friendship in the main square of one of those big cities rather than being just mentioned here, but that’s, at first, all I can do.

Whaam – my mind warps back in time to February, where this whole blog started to be the least important thing to be in my life. Everything happened fast, you just realized that the 2nd term already started, new subjects and all. The most important thing but wasn’t school, of course, instead I literally got thrown on the train to Arizona with 30 other awesome people to hike the Grand Canyon. Preparation time was short as usual, so your mind got blown away in the train at last, because you are going to have one of the most awesome reading-week holidays in your life: The Grand Canyon! Three days on the train to Arizona, five days in the Canyon and one final day in Las Vegas, what a sweet outline. You just can’t explain the group experience and all of the trip, it’s simply too big. We got a big fat family with aunts and uncles and all, split in 4 close ones with 8 members. I was with Meridith’s group, our leader, mum and outrider, never letting us know how heavy her backpack was and always having a dirty smile on her face, mostly because all the jokes down in the canyon get dirtier the deeper it gets. She is the toughest girl I know, simply impressive. ["you gotta know when to hold 'em"] – this song got burned in my mind on the hike.
I got my camera with me on this trip and finally cut out a video of nearly 2 hours of footage. Watch closely, there is about one million cuts in this clips, you could watch it in slow-motion and still be excited like hell, at least, I could.

It is like hiking a mountain in reverse: Going down with a full backpack, all your food and water filled up to the top of your bag, but you’ll have a light backpack on the hike up from the bottom. If you reach your goal, you are at the deepest spot of the hike and when you look around you’ll see the mountains around you, then you’ll return back up!

We smelled like 5 days canyon after that, but I liked it, had a stopover in Flagstaff, where I bought a CD of The Soft Hands in a bar from the bass-player for a shot and continued to party the last day of our trip in Las Vegas. We crashed a limo ride, had fun in every goddam casino on the strip and after only 20 hours we flew out of town, got smacked by normal life as we arrived in Hamilton.

A week of party followed, some Austrians stopped by in Hamilton, I took some time off to explore Hamilton with Emily and also followed her on a trip to the Algonquin National Park a week later. I kind of was the driver for a bunch of English guys’n'girls, but it turned out to be a really enjoyable weekend, where I got to appreciate the different English accents I barely understood in the beginning. It was impressive to see all the lakes frozen all over the place, which I used to canoe in late October and I still can hear the ice on the lakes crack as the sun hit first their surface when it was rising! Emily was kind of leading this trip and I can’t believe how many things she was responsible for when I got to know her. She is an exchange as I am, but was involved in University like hell, basically friends with everyone, volunteering for the outdoor club, engineers without borders and I don’t know what else, playing intertube water-polo, although she is not the best swimmer, and still managed to accomplish her workload at school, which practically was double of mine. I got to learn how to drink English tea, improved my pronunciation of the word wegetable, still hard though, and started to have my regular chocolate milk at school – very nice improvements of my life!

Still exploring Hamilton (bike-ride in the botanical gardens) and school gets busier in April, but thanks to Jay I took some time off to accompany Jorden Moir and him to the RIT juggling festival, where Jorden did a really great performance on the main stage that evening. He’s simply amazing when playing with balls – “a black hole full of creativity”. We played footbag the next day and I got to see some new faces from the east coast mixed with some friends from the Chicago Jam around Xmas. We hung up at Matt Cross’ apartment and tasted some home-brewed beer, I liked this family mood a lot down there and was so happy to have joined them!

During and after that school got pretty dense and final exams drove me crazy, because I hadn’t planned any time ahead for studying. Also the project turned out to be one of the time killers in my life, it eat up easter and most of the evenings during the week, but in fact, we did a really great job and collected a prize in the end, got mentioned on several TV shows (CHCH and discovery channel) and I could show our project life in the morning show of CTV, which went around whole Ontario at least, if not Canada. I was super-excited (150bpm), but as I proved before during bungy jumping in August, I still can do jokes when excited!
We really got a lot of feedback, got mentioned at McMaster Homepage, appear in a lot of pictures from the poster day and it felt good to get this reward after 8 months of hard work. We even got a certificate for outstanding work and all, maybe I’ll frame it, my parents said so, they are super proud and all. That’s nice.

After all those events my life in Canada commenced to break apart. I had my last exam on the 26th of April, and on the same day I booked my train ride to the west-coast, Vancouver. Until this, I impressively ignored the fact of moving and enjoyed my time in Hamilton, went out, met with people, but also never really had time for anything – it was weird. In the end, of course, it was all to fast, sold all my stuff on the very last day, wrote the French exam in a mood you shouldn’t've done anything, I rushed to say good-by to everyone and hopped on the train. A big thank to Reinhard, who managed to get a bunch of friends to his place right before I left, which made me nearly cry. After a ten minutes improvised free hugging session with all of them I had to go, threw myself on the train to Chicago and had 3 days nothingness in front of me and started to write a letter. Never write a letter on the train!

Back in Vancouver, as the second one of our family I got there. My brother visited the city 5 years ago or so, and he’d told me everything about it, but i never really listened. I always want to find out myself. What I found out: Vancouver is an amazing site, and I don’t want to tell you about that mountain, sea, city combination everyone is telling you. No, I had the best time of my life on a tandem cycling through the city with Renée and just horsing around all the time. I stayed at Caro’s place that time, some footbag girl, if not to say the footbag girl in Vancouver, I really like and met in Berlin, Austria and Prague the years before. She enabled a shred-session with Allan Haggett and I was in heaven!

I transfered to Vancouver Island after 4 awesome days in the city with the ferry, which takes about one thousand trucks and cars and we all met each other in a Hotel for our big hiking adventure around the northern part of the Island. We could spend 5 days in the thickest rain-forest I’ve ever seen hiking into it for three days, hitting awesome coast lines on and off and after the third day returning to the point we’d started.
Hiking is exertive and you are modest yourself, enjoying every sunset and every step you can take without feeling any pain, overwhelmed by wicked trees, thicker, it needs more than 5 people to hug ‘em and your path is printed with footsteps from some cougars, some humans and bears. Unbelievable, if you would find a passage through these forests without a leading path and still all those animals do somehow. Unreal, if you meet one of those creatures that can call these forests truely their own (one native guy and three bears crossed our path) and you’re happy when they, like you, pay you respect and share this little nature! Thanks a lot to that one bear, which started to show interest in us as I was hiking by with 3 others back to the camp. But afterall it wasn’t to proud to leave from its food and to let us pass, as we tried to chase it of, however, we got quite close but we are still alive. Staying in the woods made you think in simple but massively important routines: Walking, stopping, drinking, walking, stopping, setting up your tents, starting the stove, gathering firewood, eating, warming, sleeping, packing, leaving, walking, and so on (compare ppl in the city). Everyday the same, but everyday on some place elsewhere.
After hiking we went for kayaking. 6 days we had to get from Vancouver Island to the Mainland where we got picked up. Jumping from one little island, which you could call your own little kingdom and we used to explore everyday anew, following the same routines we already knew from the hike, where we only replaced walking with paddleing. We dove into a scenery full of salty water, snowy mountains, foresty islands and sunny weather, the following day always beating the last day in some other way. Wandering with the tides and weather in mind, the wind showed us where to pause and the sun told us where to settle down and take a nap and the night finally ordered you when to stop for the day and rest.

In between all these you tried to paddle your way to a nice island to discover and for more nature to sight. I suppose we had some porpoises, seals and walrusses, bear shit on our campsite, a lonely deer showing up and some crabs in our bellies. The lift back with the water-taxi which took only 2 hours made me think about how brutal motorboats and our technology can cut through these scenery and how different you see the same way you take back. Caitlin faced me on the way back sitting right in front of me on the water-taxi, our guide, my good friend and together with Alec leaders of the outdoor team, cutest couple I know and most awesome road-trippers. Hope to see you next year!

Fully relying on the combustion-engine we, Will and I,  hitch-hiked from Vancouver to Calgary in two days – it needed only 3 of those engines to move our asses the whole way of about 1000km. Thanks a lot to Jon Hill, who took us the whole way from Kamloops to Calgary and stopped for everything we would like to see on the way! He was the guy! We could stay at Hannah’s place for two days in Calgary, where we got the best meal I had for two months and I felt kind of guilty eating most of it – habits you just can’t change ‘em so quickly.

We flew back to Europe starting from Calgary via Toronto and for the bored reader who expected the story being done know, I’ll have to disappoint you. There are more things to come:

We stopped in Iceland for three days and ‘we’ involves now to 2 more people: Emily and Richard who did an (I suppose) awesome trip on the east of Canada while we were shit-heading around on the other side. Renting a car and exploring the island was the plan, which we acted out quite well, although the weather was shit, rain and fog. I was the chauffeur, again, and drove the bunch of english-guys around, with Emily as the best co-driver ever. We never took a wrong turn! Three things we discovered: There are a lot of lava-rocks in Iceland, there is a lot of water going down on more waterfalls and the whole time it smells like someone is farting after eating douzens of bad eggs. Some more things we did not discover are trees and wales. The former are just not there and we wondered where Islandics get their wood from and the latter we didn’t see because staying in bed was sweeter than rushing to and back from the boat and in fact missing the bus to the airport. But for me, Iceland was not over, had just begun. Fly, land and you are in Egilsstadir, the east of Iceland, a friend of mine picked me up and I couldn’t even say a word, we were climbing up a hill to see a huge waterfall she’s never been to before, although she’s living around for half a year now. I know her from school, she decided to move to Iceland, which gave me 3 more days exploring the northern part of the island, again, driving a car, her car, sleeping in the same car for two days. Iceland rocks, got to see a lot including vulcanos, craters, boiling grounds, some wales (finally I got on a ship to watch for them) and some fjords that shape the island nicely so every city can call one their own.

Flying back out of Reykjavik with heavy weighting baggages and memories! I’ll try to never forget these days…

Tagged: canada, iceland, McMaster, outdoor ]]> http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/awesomeness-summary/feed/ 2 larndch Sunrise heading west family mer LasVegas Algonquin emsi Hamilton Sunrise CHCH IntoWood Tand'em Tracks the3 pan_kajak HitchHIke Geysir MeIceland MyGuide http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/quebec-city/ http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/quebec-city/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:18:56 +0000 Christoph http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/?p=204 ]]> If you ever get homesick in Canada and you want to cure it, then you should go to Québec City! Enjoy the pretty nice and old buildings, the weather (-20° and wind), the warm pubs and of course the french language. The city offers you a lot, especially in the wintertime, although it seems impossible to live there at these temperatures. People tend to get closer when it is so cold outside!

Québec City is one of the oldest cities in Canada and it proofs this with a lot of historical and beautiful buildings, castles and streets. No rectangular blocks and streets, this is not a city planned on a drawing-board! Small streets with small shops with souvenirs, with food and with art are to discover. I had luck and could visit the city as they held their winter carnival and so there were a lot more touristy offers and the nightlife was maybe better.

Driving from Hamilton to Québec takes you about 12 hours, but its totally worth it and if you are only a passenger you can enjoy the trip by looking outside your window and listening to all the mp3-tracks you normally don’t put on your playlist.

I took so many snap-shot pictures and snap-shot videos – bad in quality but they capture the mood. Here’s a small compilation:

Tagged: canada, outdoor ]]> http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/quebec-city/feed/ 3 larndch Québec http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/les-vacances-commencent/ http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/les-vacances-commencent/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:09:56 +0000 Christoph http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/?p=177 ]]> Tomorrow is my last day in Hamilton before my holidays will start. I will be away for about 3 weeks and spend my time in two different countries: Colombia and the USA. The decision to go there was rather late than early and my plans are very spontaneous and not really fixed yet – let’s see how this will all work out! For Christmas I should be in Santa Marta in Colombia and for New Years I might be near Madison in Wisconsin. I will update this post asap.

South America – Bogotá

I traveled from Hamilton, Canada via Buffalo, New York, Orlando to Bogotá, Colombia within about 18h using buses and airplanes. Total travel costs had been about 550$ including a quick dinner in Orlando.

Before I went to Bogotá I didn’t really know what to expect and as I arrived the first thing that happened was unexpected too: My baggage has not arrived! Being totally not able to speak a word spanish, this was a worst case situation. Fortunately I could stay for the whole time in Bogota at a friend’s place somewhere in the city. The city is so extremely big (8 million citizens), I simply cannot even tell where I stayed. As often discussed with my friend from Bogotá, the city has a kind of bad reputation in the world, like the country Colombia itself. I cannot speak for the whole country, but I got to see quite a bit from the city and I can tell you, it is simply amazing, incomparable to all the pictures you have in mind created from bad Hollywood blockbusters (e.g. Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and outstanding for the density of people on the streets, trying to make business. The city seems to be quite safe, but you should avoid traveling in the night-time by local buses, rather take a cab, which is quite cheap. Cheap is literally everything, but if you really wanna go cheap, Bogotá is the wrong place. You have to go to the landside, or even further to countries like Venezuela, but you pay for cheapness with safety.

I will remember the uncountable amount of different fruits you can buy, eat and drink and their ordinary look, which let you assume you get an ordinary taste too, but compared to everything I can buy in Canada it is an extra-ordinary taste! Some fruits look scary, some look unimpressive, but they all taste!
The crazy and inscrutable traffic is for a Western European citizen like me simply beyond words. The fact, that I have not seen any real accident in the city makes the system even more adorably. I would never overestimate myself to think I could drive there safely on my own, so renting a car in the city should only be considered if you are a really expired driver!
If you have a local around you, getting around by the many small buses servicing in the city is the best opportunity! For only about 1.200$ (Peso – is about 60 cents in American Dollars) you can get on a bus that brings you from one neighborhood of the city to the next far away one. Also the new TransMillenio bus system is a very comfortable way of getting around in the city, but it is limited to the main roads going through the city, but as its buses drive on their own driving lanes, traffic jams are no problem. It is comparable to a Metro System, but working with buses overground – the Colombian low-cost solution!
An amazing point for seeing the city is Mon Serate – a mountain (3200m high) in the north of the city with a small church on the top and a really expensive restaurant. You can either walk by foot or go by a lift up the hill directly from the bottom of the city, which is at 2600m sea level. The view is totally worth this trip, as you see city in every direction you look nearly until the horizon starts.

During my stop in Bogotá, I also attended the South American Footbag Championships 2009, which were held in a big hacienda near Bogotá. I got to know the South American players, which are all very motivated and talented. They had been really happy, that they had some international guests and we got a really warm welcome. Actually I did not too bad and got unexpectedly South American Champion in the routine discipline of footbag – WOW! I could not believe, because a lot of players seemed to be technically so much better than me, however, they are still very young so if they gain experience they will beat me all next year! It was an awesome event, held with nearly perfect weather (15°C, sunny and cloudy, almost no wind). A more detailed review in German can be found here!

South America – Santa Marta

My friend from Bogotá and his parents gave me a ride to and hostage in Santa Marta. We traveled by car for about 19h from Bogotá to Santa Marta, passed hundreds of different small villages, took over and got overtaken by almost as many cars, trucks and buses and rode over thousands of bumps on the street crawling up and down the hills and mountains of Colombia.

Santa Marta is a rather big city (more than one million citizens) on the coast of Colombia facing the Gulf of Mexico (Atlantic Ocean). This city gets spoiled by its beautiful nature around it and the great beach in front of it. Santa Marta is compared to Bogotá a little less developed, but it offers you a lot more sunshine and at least as many people, which are crowding the streets and try to make some money. I only spent about 2 days in this city, so there is not a lot to tell, but I got the opportunity to celebrate Christmas with people there. This was so different as I used to celebrate it and so nice at the same time, that it is hard to explain. The people exaggerate the decoration of their trees with lights in all colors of the rainbow and it looks all a little crazy when the weather is 30°C and there is no snow, but they love it and this captures your mind and you start to like it too! I never dived for fish in the ocean on the 24th of December before and I really loved this!

North America – Chicago

Got there after going from Santa Marta to Bogotá – 8h over night at the airport – and from Bogotá via Orlando to New York. Connecting flight to Chicago got delayed for 5h and additionally I fought with some travelers disease: More than 28h on the road, arrived totally exhausted at the hotel at 4am… Total travel costs: 605$

Chicago, the windy city – absolutely true, and absolutely harsh, if temperatures are subzero (Fahrenheit!!). The city welcomed me at 4am in the morning so gentle, I had to take a cab to not immediately break down, because I could not stand waiting for a bus. Maybe because I had been a little ill, I am a little bit exaggerating now. The city presented itself dressed up with its typical weather, a thin snow layer on everything, you saw the exhausting gases streaming out of cars and trucks and people were bundled, you could not even see their faces!
So I attended the Midwest Regional Footbag Championships in Chicago, which was held as a part of the Sports Festival at McCornick Place, a big hall full of every cool sport you can think of – one thing to claim: A sports fest and the only food supply was trashy, really expensive fast food. No vegetables, no fruits! Come on, guys!? I did not too bad at the competitions and the pills I got from the doc helped to stop thinking of my bad stomach. Competition is strong there, but it was really awesome to play with all these people, trying to learn some tricks from them and collecting tips. Special thanks to Milan, he is the man! And congratulations for Ken to win the circle competition – awesome!
… oh, and of course I ate one of these famous deep-dish pizzas at UNO’s!

North America – Wisconsin

Short trip to Milwaukee and further up north. First stop Westbend, second stop somewhere (Mountain) far north in Wisconsin in the middle of nowhere. Total travel time of about 6h in a Buick! The bus ticket was about 20$.

I will remember Wisconsin as a very cold but nice state of the US, where people line up outside on a drive-in to get some frozen custard on the coldest winter day! Over a friend of a friend I got to be invited at a place far up north in Wisconsin: A small cabin in the woods near to a small lake, with electricity but without water. I could celebrate New Years Eve there and it was awesome. I caught my first fish through an hole in the ice there and ate it the next day. The people are nice and rough there, but all in all very honest and straight forward, I liked it. We had snow, bonfires, alcohol and a bunch of people to entertain ourselves, farther more we had snow-mobiles to ride on the lake and bob-sleds to sled down a hill! I could not expect more, again I was surprised!
After 3 days in the lonesome wild we headed out to Madison, the capital of Wisconsin to spend my last two days of my trip there. The city was even more cold than Chicago, and I did not really see a lot, but what I saw was simply impressive, mostly big: The capitol (one of the biggest domes in the world!), the Campus of the university (it is like half of the city!), a hockey game (where Wisconsin one with 5:4) and two big ice-covered lakes which seem to hug the city center from both sides. I watched a stand-up comedian show and it was great – I got roughly about half of the jokes, which makes me really proud: Evidences, I can nearly speak English now! After this show I had to leave to catch my bus at 2:20am…

Canada – Toronto

I got back to Toronto with Porter Airlines from Chicago Midway Airport after riding 4h with the bus from Madison, which felt like only one hour, because I slept most of the time. I flew for 2h (again felt like 30min because I slept like a stone) with a turbo-propeller machine to the Toronto City Airport, which was nice, because it is relatively near to Union Station. This trip was for about 130$. Got my go-bus back to Hamilton, I slept the whole ride…

Voilà! Although I had a lot to do for my exams this week and still have a bunch of things on my pile I was able to add a new video to my youtube-channel! Enjoy.

Everywhere you can possibly look you see Christmas trees decorated with as many lights as the tree can hold, Advent has commenced. The Advent experience here is way different than in Austria, without mullet wine and Christmas stands but with school work and travel preparations. I won’t really participate in Christmas here, because I am leaving soon to South-America and there is only little time left to get all things organize

Advent Calendars

There are several Advent calendars you can check out, but the most likely I visit the following ones…

• Footbag Video Advent Calendar
• Hubble Space Telescope Calendar

Ottawa Visit

Last weekend I visited Ottawa with a couple of friends which ended up in renting a small cabin for two nights where we stayed in the middle of nowhere (Gatineau Park, near Ottawa) and got a real Canadien experience of living in the wild without water, electricity, time feeling, but a lot of candles, snow and friends. You can checkout most of the pictures on facebook and I can give away that I also shot a nice video there, which will be revealed asap.

Kickmas Jam in Austria

…is another thing to mention. I used to go there yearly, but this year the awesome Christmas footbag crew of Vienna will celebrate without me. What a pity! But nevertheless I wish them a big dynamic shred to go down! Instead I will go to the NYJ in Chicago which takes place from the 27th to the 28th of December.

South American Footbag Championships

This event will be held in Bogota, Colombia during my Christmas break and I will go there to participate and enjoy! I don’t know what it turns out to be, but I like surprises and I got a that warm invitation from them, that I don’t have to worry. I am very excited to celebrate my 24th of December under some palms on the beach during the South American summer!

… all in all I am missing right now the home-made cookies and a lot of other traditions that normally make my Advent to be real, but I have to many awesome other things in my life, so that I don’t have to care for the moment.

It is a never-ending story, the climate changes and nobody cares, however, a lot of people just regret the fact that the weather changes and that glaciers are melting. Anyways it is a fact that we are polluting our world and so many people like to change something, but it is really hard to make something happen. The best way is to start with yourself – so I make my blog CO2 neutral!

I read about it a long time ago, but now I decided to make it happen. The nice guys from this website will plant a tree for my article and while the servers are consuming power for you to read this article the tree is breathing away the CO2 produced by my website. And for all doubters: Yes, I am aware of the fact that as long as my tree does not become some furniture in the future and if it gets burned, it is useless for the CO2 level, but let’s consider this campaign as a symbol! The guys from the website even protect my tree – so come on!

It is a little bit sad and triggered my action, that Austria will not satisfy the goals of the Kyoto Protocol for 2012 and is not even thinking of taking actions – even though energy is the biggest CO2 producing part in Austria and this includes all the European traffic going through it, and at the same time the Austrian railway company is nearly bankrupt? I just see a demand on environmental friendly transportation and a provider that needs money – where is the problem? A lot of countries abandoned their goals for CO2 reduction as THE CRISIS happened. It is a shame that our economy just is so uncreative and even after that crisis some specialists predict a new crisis in the future, because too many speculations are going on exploiting the effect of the last crisis (the rich always can exploit crisis: “Buy When There’s Blood In The Streets” – it is so true!).
But let’s go back to Kyoto: All other European 15 members seem to meet their goals, but it is only an estimation. The meeting in Copenhagen has cut down the goals due to the economic crisis. Economy is important, but unregulated and acting globally it is chaotic too.

I don’t want to start a discussion if CO2 is really the trigger for climate change or if there is a change at all. It is true that we produce a lot of these gases by burning fossil fuels and therefore we change the environment sustainable! Regardless what effect this gas has in the atmosphere, it should be a goal to influence the system planet earth as less as possible. But the gas is not only in the atmosphere, it dissolves in the oceans and influences the underwater live. We simply cannot predict all the effects caused by this. As I mentioned in the title: reducing CO2 is my synonym for reducing my impact on the environment!

One way of effectively reducing CO2 would be binding it in algae in the oceans which sink down to the ground and are not broken down to CO2 again – there was a German research ship seeding the ocean south of Africa with CO2 to utilize this effect. It had not been a success, the system is still too complex… still a creative idea! There should be other ways… The system ocean is still not understood – we cannot even tell where the gulf stream closes its loop!

And as I started talking about streams in the ocean I have to mention the garbage patches. It is horrible how many plastic is floating around in the oceans and all the time when I buy some vegetables I rip off another bag and put them in it – throw most of them away. There is no regulation in plastic and we don’t even know what all this plastic is doing to our environment, animals, body and cells. A lot of plastic products contain hormone disruptors and affect the information exchange between cells and most of the chemicals in the world have never been tested and won’t be tested.

I had a thought today, that it would make sense if companies don’t only have to include the production costs in the price of their product, but also the disposal costs of it! And to clarify, disposal is not throwing something onto a big pile of waste or simply into the ocean, that is polluting!
Why should the whole world pay for products that are hardly and very expensive to dispose and what makes the disposal costs so different from the production costs, only because the company name is different for disposing? Consider it as an outsourced part of the company! If the company has to pay for the disposal of their products, we would make a tiny step away from our throwaway society and a long-lasting product would turn out to increase competitiveness of the company. This thought has not been thought through very well, but let’s throw it in!

The response from the “machs grün”-team:

Hallo Christoph,

super, dass du unsere “Mach deinen Blog CO2-neutral”-Aktion unterstützt! Seit die ersten Bäume gepflanzt wurden hat sich einiges getan. Nachdem im Sommer das Gelände im Oberharz eingezäunt wurde, um den jungen Ahorn vor Wildverbiss zu schützen, werden die Zöglinge seit Herbstanfang regelmäßig gehegt und gepflegt. Hier kannst du dir ein paar Bilder ansehen wie dein Bäumchen die ersten bunten Blätter bekommt und findest ein kleines News Update. Hunderte weitere Blogger haben bisher an der “Mach deinen Blog CO2-neutral”-Aktion teilgenommen und wir sind stolz darauf berichten zu dürfen, dass wir schon einen kleinen Wald pflanzen konnten! Ein paar Bäume suchen aber noch nach einem Paten. Wenn du jemanden kennst, der einen Blog oder eine Webseite besitzt, freuen wir uns darauf auch diese CO2 neutral zu machen.

Beste Grüße aus Berlin

Christin vom “Mach’s grün!”-Team

Tagged: sustainability ]]> http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/sustainable-co2/feed/ 0 larndch CO2-neutral österreich austria_kyoto http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/free-hugs-in-hamilton/ http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/free-hugs-in-hamilton/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:04:35 +0000 Christoph http://krzysiu.wordpress.com/?p=123 ]]> It is a long time ago since I did my last (and first) free hug campaign. It was an awesome experience, because didn’t know any of the other “huggers” and I just knew that they meet at a specific time in Graz (flashmob?) and I decided to pass by: The best decision I could make for this day!

So I did a free hug campaign in Hamilton…

So I plan to organize a free hug campaign in Hamilton. All this midterm stress and school stuff to do, the weather is starting to get bad, the time shift by one hour and thus the sun goes down one hour earlier might all be reasons to get a little depressed and makes you feeling cold inside. A warm hug might help!

Everybody who does not know what “free hug” stands for, should read the “Free Hug Guide” (omfg – freehugsguide.org is offline?) or simply take a look at the official free hugs site! Here you can also find the official free hugs video:

I also want to point out that all about the campaign is that we only provide hugs if someone wants to take it. We don’t act! We are passive sign-holders and when a person wants to act, we simply react. And it is awesome to watch people acting! To make it clear: You don’t only hug nice girls (boys), but everyone who needs it!

Therefore I want this campaign to take place in a more public place than McMaster, because there are only students. We could start at McMaster and then go towards Downtown / Limeridge / Wallmart… I am not that familiar with Hamilton to know good places. I am open for discussion about this!

There is one facebook-group for free hugs in Hamilton, but they are not active for 1 year now…

I will wait for others to join me at IWC (near the sports centre) at McMaster on the 6th of November at 12:30pm! That is really soon, I know, however, all you need is something like a sign (cardboard). Permanent markers are provided!

Please support me, it is more funny with a big group – don’t be shy!

Update

The students here are rather shy, or just fully booked out because of their work for school. Although some people promised to come or showed a lot of interest, nobody was at the IWC on Friday. However, this campaign isn’t really a group event, but it takes you some courage to start it on your own. Me and my sign started to give free hugs at about 1pm and I had fun doing it at McMaster until about 3pm – I gave a lot of hugs and the overall response of the people was very very nice. After losing doubts I wanted to extend this campaign and go out to everyday people, but as Hamilton hasn’t really a public place to offer, full of people, I decided to go to a big shopping centre – LimeRidge Mall. A friend from the outdoor club (Sam) joined me there and after a short hugging session we were asked by the mall security to leave this place, reason: “You are not allowed to sell or give away anything for free in the mall, unless you are not paying rent!” All discussions had been useless – it got dark. We decided to go to the gym at the campus where we gave away loads of free hugs.

Overall, it was a nice experience again and I definitely will do it again in a more public area. Hamilton or Toronto…