Time to write again, and time to write in English. Cause I’m in Germany, and people abroad should have a chance to see and understand what’s going on here without google-translation. Too much happened since I’m arrived, so only the important things.

Most important, I had a nice cheese breakfast directly after arriving in Berlin. You might know that India is not really famous for it’s cheese, and there are reasons for that. One of the main reason is that you can’t get any cheese there, so had a breakfast worth the whole trip. There were other reasons too. For instance the cold and empty streets of Berlin, had nearly forgotten how quiet it is there in winter… (and how cold, too)

After enjoying a great welcome table tennis bar evening in my favorite ex-squat, I choosed to meet the weihnachtsmann, which is the german version of the santa klaus and at all a really nice person. As far as I know… and he usually drops by at the flat of my mother around the 24th, so stayed there for some days.

After Christmas back to Berlin, the Chaos Communication Congress invited all freaks for the yearly gathering. Went with the hacktrain there and visited interesting sessions for instance about gorilla knitting and things alike. You never know what you have to expect at the cccongress. There is only one constant there:

The legendary LEGO-Sumo. Presented by the c-base mechatronic team, an ad-hoc layer-8 mesh which forms usually at the congress to spread some LEGO-bricks around and motivate young and younger people to play with it. On our rules, for sure. Which had been this year: Use what you like, but build a robot, which has not more than 5 Engines, 5 Sensors, one controller and don’t exceeds the maximum weight of one LEGO reference book. Start your robot and don’t touch it again, there are two robots on the black-bordered field.

Winning means staying on the filed longer than your opponent, easy, isn’t it? And really funny, seems like everybody enjoyed the competition. The winner, just to mention, was Dumbo2.0, which was not only famous for pushing every other robot (except one) from the field, but for introducing himself in the first round with an unforgettable straight jump over the border of the table to the ground (dividing himself into 42 pieces).

 

And, facing the new years day of 1984, most of the congress participants decided to take part in a demonstration against data retention, which was established in 2007 for „security“ reasons. Great, new interesting databases are built, which are an fruitful target for state agencies, private corporations and terrorists too. Nice to know that they will remember who you have called, so if you once loose your telephone book, no problem anymore. Just ask (or google?) for a list of the calls you made last year…

The congress ended without changing the whole world, but with hopefully giving a lot of people good energy for the next year. I used my energy (part of it) to go to a smaller than village place to enjoy the new years day with some friends in the nature, and after this visiting Rostock, the town I lived before I went to India. Only few days left before I leave to France, looking forward to see my girls place the first time.

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