oh well, so I am back once more, and the internet still is there. Actually I have been for a couple fo days, but I hadn’t really managed to settle in, and I was waiting for an article in the German Die Zeit on the Solid camp as the reporter spend a considerable amount of time trying to get into the details of my background. Now I wanted to link to it as Die Zeit comes out every Thursday. Well I haven’t found it yet online, and I don’t think the paper issue has arrived in Oslo yet, so I really don’t know how it went. It’s one of the first times that Solid has made it into Federal West German news, so I sure hope we’re doing good. The Norwegian Dagbladet also had a small interview with a couple of us on doing extra-curricular activities in an extra section on education, and that went ok. But then again, the Norwegian press tends to be quite a bit better than the Central European press.
Now summer is definetely over, and the Solid camp once again proved to be quite an experience.

On my way down there, I was to pick on a Dane from SUF in Copenhagen. Just before crossing the bridge to Denmark, in Malmö, Sweden, our bus suddenly crashed with a car. Nothing really happened to the bus, but we had to wait for quite a while anyway, so I wasn’t wure whether I’d make it. Fortunately the bus in Copenhagen waited for us, so the SUF guy didn’t have to switch to the train in Hamburg by himself.
And then there was the camp. It was four times as big compared to last years camp, and the largest Solid camp so far. Spirits were high all week, despite the weather (rain, rain, rain). Partially that had to do with the very egalitarian way the camp was managed (quite a lot of people participating a little bit in the planning – way less centralistic than correspondign Norwegian youth groups), but also with the opinion polls. Now that I thought was fascinating: for the first time since WWII is there actually a pro-socialist movement in Western Germany – and you can feel it just by talking to people at a bus station or in a train or in some similar place where Central Europeans generally meet in public. The persistent cuts by Schröder and the social democrats really seem to have radicalized quite a bit of the population. At one point of time a few of us were talking to a police man in uniform in a full packed train. He had two little kids with him, but other than that he looked like a figure from a US ARMY propaganda strip. He stared talking to us. He started out by asking one of us about the correct spellign of his name, in order to conclude that it was “the Scandinavian way of spelling it,” but after a while he started asking more specifically about our politics. He first though we’d be from one the Masoist (right?) MLPD, but seemed relived that we weren’t. “For years I have been voting black (red.: conservative) but they’re only going to use the red pen (red: cut down on spendings) even more”, he predicted. It turned into quite an interesting conversation between people that usually are on opposite sides of th barricades.

Now besides the general feeling of the camp, there was of course also my personal experience of it. Again, as with my previous visit to Berlin, I thought it was positively fascinating how well I have gotten to know these people over the years despite me only being in Germany for a _very_ limited amount of time every year. Now I won’t name anyone not any details, but those that know me know what I’m talking about. Modern telecommunications do their part as well of course.

And back in Norway, I went to a few meetings the last few days, and at one of them was a person that was quite special to me. Now for most of this spring, my voice disappeared and I started acting really stupid when ever this person was near. But not so now. “Great,” I thought, “I don’t have to fear that no more!” Now she was the one saying the least, and she disappeared after some time, while the reast of us stayed for a few more hours. When arriving back home, it dauted on me: not only am I no longer afraid, but also my interest may have vanished. Is that so? Well temporarily yes, but that may also be due to the many new inputs I got at the camp. Whether it’s really a “love gone by” never to return, I don’t know quite yet. Well, and really, if that is so, it’s a bit sad. Not that there was any realitistic chance for us, but just the hope was there, and it may be replaced by just a bit of emptiness. And another school year is about to start, adn the whole story starts over again. Just that I am one year older, and one year closer to the grave…