produce, consumpt, and die

happy 2009 from claudia's harbour...

lost along the road to peace

a sustainable island

however, in the middle of the whole xmas-consumption hysteria, there is an island where hope still holds...
EQUAZIONE, the fair trade store here in salerno. i always try to pop in whenever i'm in town, just to check what's going on. most products are the same, or very very similar to those we sell in the weltladen in heidelberg - they're evidently distributed by the same associations. some others are different, instead. for example, they now have fair trade jeans and sneakers, which we don't have. but also, this time i found a few products that are not from fair trade, but anyway pursue a more sustainable approach, which here around is pretty hard to get: the brita water filters and, more important, draft detergents for the house, dishes, washing machine, whatever... remember i already blogged about draft detergents a few times?? now i'm so happy you can find them back home :)
just they don't advertise it on their website, and they should! so i hope my voice counts as advertisement:

I DETERSIVI ALLA SPINA A SALERNO SI TROVANO NELLA BOTTEGA EQUO-SOLIDALE EQUAZIONE IN VIA IANNELLI, GIUSTO DIETRO PIAZZA PORTANOVA!!!!!!

maybe i'll even try to drop the idea in the heidelberg one...

xmas with the yours

back in italy, embedded in xmas stress up to unreasonable levels... me feeling mostly like the grinch, wanting to take the xmas spirit away from everybody, yet have to walk around wishing whatever to total strangers, and everything i see looks like this... xmas under the sea:

xmas eve, the salerno way:and after-xmas waste management...

seriously?! guess it's understandable now why i'm feeling grumpier than usual and even ended up dreaming about good old boring heidelberg (which hardly happens to me when i'm there!) and even in german! however the situation was so scary & unrealistic it could never happen... well, whatever...

at least there are the girls...
well, we're missing the gattacc, but still, the good old girls...
so here's my best wishes of grumpy holidays and a crabby new year to all the readers of this blog :)

fair-disco-labyrinth

last weekend i organised an anti-xmas-stress party (check the poster out: i made it! and am so proud of it!) with some people from the weltladen, and the dj - who works for this group called Party & Activism here in heidelberg - told me about a club in the Netherlands where they are trying to use sustainable technologies, like that they produce electricity from the energy of the people dancing... how cool is that?? i was super excited, as i am always whenever i hear about energy that is conserved and reused in a clever way, and not only dissipated! so i started looking for info about the whole business, and i found out a lot of stuff...

the club is called Watt, it opened 3 months ago in Rotterdam and it's the first sustainable dance club ever. first, there is a special dance floor which makes use of the piezoelectric effect: some elements, crystals like quartz, if deformed or compressed are able to develop a potential difference, which can be plugged into a circuit and directly transformed into electric energy! which means that the more the people dance in the club, ie. the better the party is, the more energy is produced, and you can directly see it in the light show of the club itself! it clearly has a tiny energetic efficiency, but still it raises awareness about energetic issues, plus the club is sustainable in so many other aspects, from the refillable cups to the spectacular toilet where the flush water comes directly from the rain collected on the roof... for more info check out the website of the company (Sustainable Dance Club) or - if you trust me! - this article i recently wrote (in italian...)

and now i want to go there and have a look, dance it out, produce some positive energy - and maybe take it along with me, i feel i need some...


Image credits: Mike Nolte & Giulia Melloni

a young... well, me

sometimes it happens that i see a baby that looks exactly like i did when i was born. basically a small head full of hair. makes me smile. a lot of things make so much more sense when you look into the eyes of a baby. and when one of them looks like you, and it's so brand new and everything, it's like breathing fresh air. a fresh start. everything is possible, or at least it seems.
last week something similar happened. i saw myself, but not 25 years younger, this time only 2 or 3. there is this girl, who came to visit and work with me (oh gosh, i feel so important when i hear that! but it's not true!) and she reminded me of myself when i started. young and enthusiast. where did my enthusiasm go? when did i become so scary and damaged? how did that happen? don't know, but actually it does not matter. i don't care. i'm done now. well, not really, but feels like it. and then, we'll see...

jigsaw falling into pieces

i feel absolutely awkward tonight. like i'm high or something. everything in my head is running at 1000 beats per minute although all my movements are slow and relaxed. i was packing - which i hate btw - and the train of thoughts and images and sounds in my mind couldn't stop. it's going so fast... maybe it's bec i'm sleep deprived. or anxious. too many things changing here around. don't know. maybe also bec i've been voiceless for the past few days, i felt the urge to blog, which is cool. and i realised i haven't been blogging in a veeery long while. it's weird. when i started, i was writing on my notebook less and less often, basically only when i was travelling (and couldn't blog). which is weird anyway, bec the blog has a different scope thus i write absolutely different things here than i would in my notes. but still. and now, i started writing for real - well, for real, what a big word, let's say for fun... whatever... and i stopped blogging... and another month is passing by, the year is almost over, i couldn't leave without a last post. i'm taking a train tomorrow, and then a plane, and then back to italy. i haven't seen the sea for almost 4 months, and the sun for nearly as much. and hopefully i will, but now i don't even want to leave, and i forgot why.