Our last dinner in Christiania was special - thanks to Kirsten and the staff at Spiseloppen we got a sponsored meal in this fancy Christianian restaurant. It was a perfect start of the last evening: delicious food and wine, live music and all of us around one table.
Thank you!



Should anyone ever be in CPH, looking for a place for dinner, we can more than recommend Spiseloppen!

Friday - our last day of work - we finished several of our work projects. One of them was the 2nd hand clothes shed (see the entry and photos above) and another one was the Newspaper Wall.

We knew that nothing is everlasting, especially here in Christiania where houses are repainted constantly but still we hoped that our results wouldn't be as temporary as they turned out to be.
Only a few hours after we had finished work the pinkish wall of the shed was "decorated" with tags and last night our wall suffered from somebody venting his anger on it. See the photos!

yesterday...





today...

Cristina, Anna and Iris used their last day of work to fix up a shed in Christiania where people can put their clothes, shoes and other stuff they don't need anymore and others can take it. In fact, this place is really popular so that you can find some new items there almost every hour. Unfortunately it was pretty shabby and dirty but with "special" tools and bated breath the 3 girls managed to bring everything in order and to clean it. Afterwards they painted the shed pinkish. See the matemorphosis:

Last week we already had to say "Goodbye!" or rather "See You!" to some of our group because Theo, Maria and Yuki had to leave us earlier due to work etc.
Fortunately we also got some support: Iris's brother Stefan came to visit yesterday and already helped us at work today.

Teresa

Another great invention in Christiania is the bathhouse. In this house you can find an unisex shower and a sauna, which makes it to a unique place in Christiania, because most of the Chritianites don't have any shower. At the beginning some people were a bit scared of this unisex shower, but in fact it turned out to be a pleasure and nobody cares about it any longer. Especially for me the bathhouse became a second home beside fabrikken. In average I spend probably about one hour per day in the bathhouse. For this reason I'm also called the "saunaking". For me the bathhouse and the sauna is more than just a place to take a shower. Especially the sauna is a "hotspot" to get to know people and listen to their exciting stories. I already heard stories about russians, who stay for more than one hour in an icehole to cool down after they had a sauna. Wow, even for me impossible to imagine...
Beside this I also met people who were discussing about Bill Gates and other Hyperbillionaires. In the eyes of thoose Christianites Gates, Jacko and Co. should just give all their money to welfare organisations, so that we could create a better world.
Very funny for me as a german is it to hear danish people talking about german tourists in Spain. They are considered to be mostly fat, sunburned people, who are running round the beach with cameras. What a lifely picture, I can only say, that theese danish guys are quite right...
But not everything that happens in the bathhouse is fun. One day, I also had a very scary adventure in my favourite christianian place. When I entered the sauna, I realized, that it was empty. I was ready to enjoy some minutes of silence, but suddenly the door was opened. An old guy, probably about seventy years old, came into the sauna and said something in german. After a while of thinking, I decided to be polite and answered in german as well. So we began a conversation. Than, the situation became strange. He sat down next to me, we still were alone in the sauna, and started to touch my knee, while he was talking. Damned, the situation was really strange, my friend!!! So I decided to escape and left my loved sauna. It was really strange...
Except this experience, I have to say, the sauna is just great fun. Even people from outside Christiania come here, just for having a sauna.

Georg, Germany

Today Yuki, Delphine and Maja continued work in Pusher Street Area where they dug holes again to put up poles in order to make a fence.

















Most of us helped in the Grey Hall where there is a lot of cleaning going on. It's so dusty there so that people needed masks! Part of the work there is also rearranging and painting the bar.

























Lizi and Maria finished painting the fabrikken door. That's what it looks like now:













Paul, Erik and Iris worked on the Newspaper Wall. We took down the wooden boards and the roofs and started to paint them in black and bright yellow. We also painted the wall of the house in a very light yellow. The next steps will be painting the bottom of the wall in black, finishing painting the boards and the roofs and putting them back on the wall. Also the top of the wall still needs to be painted.

Last Wednesday, we had a spanish, polish, german cultural evening. The kitchenteam was Cristina, Teresa, Paul and Georg. For lunch, we prepared some delicious Pierogi, but Paul didn`t know how to calculate the right amount of Pierogi per Person. Finally the kitchenteam had to prepare about 100 Pierogi, which was a way too much. Poor kitchenteam :(….
We spended a lot of time on making Pierogi and so we went wild, making a flourbattle!!!
There was no winner and no looser, but a lot of fun.
Beside this, the spanish girls started to prepare sangria for the evening. With a lot of fruits and wine, they made this traditional spanish drink. The Pirogi got really delicious and everybody enjoyed the lunch. For dinner was a catalan-spanish dish on the plan, “ tortilla de patata” and “pa amb tomàquet”. The preparation took a long time and when we finished, everybody was really hungry. The people liked our cultural evening a lot. It was great!!!

Anna and Teresa at the top of the Round Tower in CPH

Shopping tour to Netto with our trolley and Long John

Teresa, Delphine and Erik in Tivoli

Sarah from Mexico who makes a documentary about Christiania visited and filmed us

Almost all of us

At the beginning of Pusher Street there is a beautiful area with all kinds of plants and flowers and a snail made out of concrete. We’ve been told that there was a lot of rubbish in this areas which has all been piled up and covered by concrete – the result was the concrete snail with all the rubbish inside. Maria and Erik made this snail more visible by painting it.
















Another project we're working on is the Christiania “Newspaper Wall”. It’s a wall of a house at the end of Pusher Street for posters of events or any kind of news. It looks pretty battered, so we’re going to renew it. Because it was rainig so much when we worked there on Friday we haven't taken any photos yet. But they’ll be added soon!

One of our most physical work projects was digging a hole for the water system in Christiania

We’ve also sanded the door of fabrikken and painted it green. (Photos of it to be uploaded soon)

There is a stone pyramid in Christiania that hides a garbage dump. This pyramide is covered by a lot of grass and we spent one and a half days cutting this grass.

In course of the Austrian Cultural Evening Iris tried her best to bake her very first Apfelstrudel with the help of the rest of the kitchen team.

Here’s the recipe: (for 15 people as a dessert)

We didn’t make the dough ourselves but bought 5 packs of filo dough instead
3kg apples
150 g sugar
100 g butter
250 g breadcrumbs
250 g raisins
a little rum
cinnamon
2 eggs to daub the Strudel before baking


Peel the apples and grate them, heat the butter and stir-fry the breadcrumbs, the sugar and cinnamon. Mix half of the sugar-breadcrumb-cinnamon-mix with the apples and add a litte rum. Roll out the dough and put the mix on it. Spread the rest of the bradcrum-mix on it and roll the whole thing so that it is a roll with the stuffing in the middle. There shouldn’t be any holes in the dough - you shouldn’t see the filling anymore. Daubt the whole thing with egg and bake it in the oven for 45 minutes, 180C. Enjoy the Apfelstrudel cold or warm, with vanilla sauce, powdered sugar or however you like it!

Friday night, after the cultural evening (Mix of French Crepes and Dutch Pancakes) we had a nice little bonfire (thanks to David from England who visited us because he’s writing a book about utopian places such as Christiania not a BONE FIRE) at the lake. Emerik also joined us and we played “Living Cluedo” – by miming, some of us had to find out that Ole from fabrikken has killed somebody in Netto with the help of the dutch chocolate splits “hagelslag”. It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed sitting at the fire until it started to rain…

Since a few days small presents, greeting cards, messages hanging on the toilet door and other little surprises can be found all over fabrikken. The reason: We’re playing “secret friend”…

Couscous Salad

Since two days a group of us is trying to turn an area in Pusher Street that was just bad soil, dogshit and dead plants into a nicer place. After emptying the fabrikken cinema from sand we brought this sand to Pusher Street and tried to make a frame around the area with old wood. That was the first two days. Even though the result was far from what we had hoped to create, we were satisfied as we could at least see some progress and as we all agreed that the area already looked much better than before. Soon we grasped that our main target group of this area wasn’t the Christianites or the visitors but the dozens of dogs running around there – so soon our sandbox was dubbed “shitbox”.
As we knew that this wasn’t the final result we could live with that, but after today’s work the dogs’ paradise was suddenly named “the shitty shit box”. Why? Lack of good material, too weak chain saws, too few workcamp-participants’ muscles, rain, complaints from Pusher Street, dogs and unfulfilled expectations resulted in a rather unmotivated group, sitting around and waiting a lot, with “bringing wood from A to B to C to A and back to D breaks” in between. At the end of our worktime our beach-area had turned out to be a mix of a dog-shit-box and a place to store wood and we totally understand that Dorte (a friendly Christianite who gives us projects to work on) was rather shocked when she passed the place.


See the photo story at the end of this entry to understand the developments)


Luckily we’re also working on other more successful projects. Hopefully somebody will also write about them! What is most important is that despite the shitty shit box we’re having a good time (making fun of today’s HARD WORK) and looking forward to tomorrow when we’ll give the Pusher Street Area another try…






Tuesday, when everything began. Unfortunately we don't have a photo of the area before we started working there but believe me, it looked very bad





















Wednesday, when everybody was busy, digging holes for the frame of the area, spreading the sand and making a stone-cement wall around the tree

























Thursday - more and more wood in the area. We try to make boxes out of this wood but as we
don't really know how to cut it to get triangle boxes the wood just becomes shorter and shorter...




















Thursday after "work": The area is nothing but sand with a lot of wood in it. Actually it's a miracle that there's no dog in this picture because as written above they love it!

THUMBS UP for the shitty shit box!

The study part of the first week included interviews from people of Christiania and also tourists and danish people from the outside. It was a very interesting experience cause I discovered many things I didn't know beforehand.
The idea of democracy and how it could be applied in a society found an experimental ground here in Christiania. When people have to decide about several issues, they meet altogether and base their decisions upon the will of the majority. According to a member of this society for the past 22 years, this is not always an easy task. For some people it's difficult to speak out their opinion in big meetings and evenmore this process might take a lot of time until people reach out an agreement point. Nevertheless time is the cost they have to pay in order to respect each person's opinion.
Another interesting point of this study was that each person that was interviewed stressed the importance of the existence of a place such Christiania for different reasons. I would most probably agree with the idea that in a world that is ruled by sameness and repetition, diversity and alternative lifestyle enforced by creativity in all aspects of daily life promote freedom, authenticity and a healthier way of being.

Maria Arapoglou

Delphine, France

Erik, Netherlands

Maria, Greece

After almost one week here I think it’s time for us to show you how we live here at fabrikken in Christiania.

In our kitchen we have a different cooking team every day, caring for us and preparing delicious international food (more recipies are supposed to be here soon). It’s always very very tasty!






This is the room where we sleep, eat, live – do everything. Maja and I called it “Valhalla”. It’s quite a mess here actually but especially in the evenings there’s a nice, cosy atmosphere and the good thing is that there is a lot of space and that people can’t escape to their privat rooms as there are none – so spending a lot of time together is unavoidable.







Luckily we seem not to have many snorring people – but maybe I’m just too tired or too busy talking in my sleep so that I don’t notice them snorring.














This is Erik on “Long John”, the bike we got for free for our 3 weeks from the Green Hall (tak!). It’s huge and thus quite difficult to ride but the boys manage and it’s a great helper for going shopping. It’s also a good way to impress others and make friends by taking them on a ride through Christiania in the box-thingy.










We also have a "toilet-room" with another door, leading to the toilet. But we don't have a photo of it yet. It looks something like the photo above which is the "corridor" between kitchen and Valhalla. It's a lot of stuff being stored there!

Another daily must here at fabrikken is the bathhouse. As Georg turned out to be the bathhouse-champ he promised to write about it soon…

iris

This is Ruben:
























He lives in a UFO! He has this seperate building which is his bathroom. It's a copy of his own UFO house. But the thing is, it has to be torn down by tuesday! (But the house he's living in stays:) He is of course not happy about that, but nevertheless, that's what's he's doing and he asked for our help which we of course provided gladly.

We had some really great time with him. He lives right by the waterfront and he has a porch actually on the water. When we took a break we sat there and enjoyed the sun and the nice coffee he was serving us.



















We worked there all day but we are not quite finished yet so we will be there again on monday to finish the job. The "Demolition Team" will demolish some more...

Beneath there is a photo of the UFO he's living in

Maja, Denmark

We had a great time singing and dancing in the rain, which would be seen as strange anywhere else, but we didn't feel stupid at all - cause we're in Christiania and we didn't really see what we looked like, being spectacled cobras all three of us, having glasses like diving goggles.

Back in fabrikken we decided that a second, real shower would still be great, also because the Christiania Bathhouse that seemed so scary at the beginning turned out to be one of highlights of our daily life (read more about that soon...)

Iris, Cristina, Georg

`And the 3rd day it rose again from the dead...`
Yeah, thank God (and thank Ole, as well) our blog is again among us, in a cool, new fashion!
In the next post (maybe) there will be some details about the passion, death and resurrection of our blog...stay tuned!

fAbRiZIo (Italy)

During the afteernoon, we went to demolish a house in order to rebuilt it on another so that the government would not destroy it.

Making this work is part of fun and give us the occasion to talk with Chritianites, trying to understand Christiania lifestle, why they chose to live here and in what Christiania is different to any other place.

-Delphine, France

Today is our third day here in Christiania work camp. Yesterday we made posters to put on the streets to inform Christianians about us and about what we are doing in here. The posters were put in their place today. Now we are hoping that these posters will encourage Christianians to contact us and to come and visit us here in Fabrikken.Yesterday we ate food made by Greek-German-Spanish kitchen. The kitchen team had a very strict Greek head cheff. The food made by the kitchen was very delicious. That was good since we had some guests from the apartment above us over for dinner. It was really interesting to get to know them.Today we are experimenting with Japanese-Italian kitchen with Finnish dishwasher/helper. It should be interesting. Later today we will learn more about MS as Morten from Global Contact will come and tell us about his work.

-Satu, Finland

"fabrikken" is a great place - and that's why many people use it. Not everybody likes cleaning but we just love it ;-) so we just couldn't stop ourselves doing up the kitchen. You will see...

Maja and Iris in front of "fabrikken"

Within this short time, we already feel very very comfortable here because we met so many friendly people who welcomed us warmly and who are looking forward to seeing you too. We´re trying to organize all our plans and ideas we have for you so that we will have a great start alltogether when you get here.

See you on Tuesday!

Iris (Austria) & Maja (Denmark)

To find out more about the place of our workcamp check out