Due to the summer holidays there are no updates to be expected in the near future. Also, I will be leaving for Hermosillo, MX taking off from Copenhagen, DK on August 11th, so updates will be scarce also in a somewhat longer perspective. In the last few days, I have been converting the clip on the Danish minority to another (and larger) format and transferred it from te commercial “Windows Movie Maker” to the free for use AVISynth. FOr those of you who had problems reading the subtitles on the previous version, the upcoming version should bring relief. Right now it’s stuck in the Google Video approval system, but I’ll update all links once it’s up and running.

I am just about to finish another visit at my parents and so I’ll be heading back to Oslo for now in order to help with the Afghan refugee actions, before I’ll go to Berlin to visit my friends from highschool and take the IEALTS (English test) on July 29th, and from there on to Schwaan to participate in the Solid youth camp (watch the video from last year) up until August 6th. After that I’ll hang around Zealand, Dk until I am to leave this continent.

Now you might wonder why I participate in a youth camp…

…but this organization defines “youth” as being between 14 and 35, and you actually have people from that entire age range participating. I have been going to the camp since 1999 (with the exception of 2001), and for many years it was quite an experience given that it’s the youth of the Linkspartei, which is almost only present in Eastern Germany. I still remember the first camp, when I believe we were only two from Western Germany. The other one was “Thomas”, aged 24-28, from the industrial area further south. He had a little car, and he was banging his head on the steering wheel while driving when he got frsutrated. We all believed that to be very West-German, as it just seemed to be something no-one else here was doing. My personal highlight of that first trip was that a few of those from Rostock, McPomm (North-Eastern Germany) concluded after a few days that I was “not behaving really West German”. Wow, what a success! West Germans were looked upon as snobbish, rich and generally without a clue as to how the world hangs together, you must know. Another year two guys from the party newspaper showed up. The photographer had a camera that looked like it was from the 1970s and it seemed like quite a complicated process for him to make it take even a single. When he felt my starring eyes, he started explaining: “See, they don’t make them like this any more.” “Well, you bet!” I thought, but he then went on to explain how none of the western digital cameras could compete with his ancient East German camera. Suddenly the conversation took a turn for some reason or another, and he just genrally started talking about things from the former East Germany. I had of course prepared for these situations, and had already memorized most of the abbreviations for various institutions they had had in the former GDR. Nevertheless, when it came to the hierarchic system of the FDJ, and he talked about it in a way so I’d need to know who was above whom, he got me. I tried to make it look like I had simply been too young to remember such details, but then someone else came along and said out loud “He’s from the West.” “From the West???”, the photographer blurted out, while he starred at me with amazement, just as if the wall had still been up. Since was simply not imaginable to him — what would a west German do at the youth camp of the PDS, obviously more of a East German cultural society rather than a political party? Then I told him that I came from the Danish minority and lived in Norway, and that seemed to comfort him…

Since then participation in the camp has been changing widely. While in the early years we had several full time politicians or quasi-politicians using it as their summer break, we now only seem to have those participating who have no real position within the party, at least as of yet. At the same time it has turned a lot more political, and there are now actually parallel seminars lasting all day, and it has turned a lot more theoretical (and radical) in that the talk is not only about day-to-day politics. And also, the numbr of west Germans has been steadily growing, and so I am no longer anything out fo the ordinary simply for being West German any longer. In order to regain that status, I have to mke sure to point out that I’m also connected to the USA, Norway, Denmark,…