Nuclear Power, Dreadlocks and Hobos like me

Home! Yay! I havent been here in forever! So I shall use the occasion to tell you about the most amazing weekend I had in a very long time. It's gonna be one of those super-long Sophie rants, done very hastily.
Every year or so there is this huge, big, giant anti-nuclear power thing. It's in Gorleben and its surroundings, a small village in central-north Germany, where there is a dump for nuclear trash and every time a train with new trash arrives, this demonstration/festival/protest takes place. You cant really call it a demonstration, cause the demonstration is only a small part of it. More important are the countless little activities before and (mostly) after. Like chaining yourself to railroads or concerts or whatever. Of course there's more than this one dump in germany, but instead of doing small demonstrations for each of them, it's all bundled up in this one symbolic place.
I've wanted to go there for a really long time and some weeks ago I told a friend about it and she wanted to go, too. So we googled 'Gorleben', found the email adress of some people who hired busses from Berlin to Gorleben and who told us to transfer around 10 bucks to their bank account or whatever we could afford, if we felt like it. That's where our preparations ended.

So we showed up at the place the busses were supposed to show up and they took us to Gorleben, where we participated in the official demosntration. It was great: There were lots of really different people, from hippies to punks and farmers, and the atmosphere was amazing. I've never met so much simple friendliness and readiness to help each other ever before. Also, i got the chance to reconect to lots of people from the green party. There were 16000 people, which is totally crazy for a demonstration in Arizona-sized Germany and was more than there had been in many years. After all the speeches were given, a pretty famous band rooted in that area gave a great concert. After their concert, we ran to their tour bus (I dont even know why) and hang out with them, which in itself was kinda crazy cause they are the type people who are too famous to hang out with ordinary mortals like us. But they were really nice and we hugged and took pictures together.

As it turned out, we didnt have place to sleep. Which was kind of, you know, an odd feeling. But we had heard about an sitting blockade (i dont know the right term in english) right in front of the dump. We didnt have anywhere else to go, so we went there. Maybe we would meet people who could tell us some place to sleep. But by the time we had made it through th 4 or so miles of woods and darkness with heavy luggage and hundreds of special-unit policemen staring at us and shining flash lights at us and us thinking "theyregoingtoarrestustheyregoingtoarrestus" since we were obviously on our way to participate in an illegal blockade, we were at the point where we didnt feel like going anywhere with anybody.
But then we got to the blockade and it was totally awesome. There were about 200 made of awesome people, the farmers gave out straw-sacks so nobody had to sleep directly on the comcrete and robin wood supplied soup. We decided to stay. It was recommended to form groups, so to organize everything more democratically and safer for the individual. We got in a group with 5 super-alternative collge- guys and two girls. They took really good care of us, explained us essential information, like who to call when we get arrested and what kind of arms the police might use against us. we hang out with them all night, except for the random hours when we slept. Most of the time we spent with a guy who looked and acted exactly like Jason Castro (although I did not tell him so cause I figured that guys who look like jason Castro dont necessarily take that as a compliment) and was unbelievably nice. All three of us cuddled up against the extreme cold and moistness and got through the night fairly well that way.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the next day to get back to boarding school. We much rather would have stayed until the end, but oh well. We tramped with some people from some other blockade for about 100km and then took the train, getting back to the "real world", to which we must have looked like dirty crazy hippies. Which actually wasnt too wrong.
That weekend, although it probably sounds uncomfortable, dangerous and totally insane to you, was an absolutely amazing experience, that I think really impacted me. It felt like total freedom, like doing the right thing, finding people that share my values and a way of life I can completely identify with. You cannot imagine how genuinely happy me and my friend were.

One of the things that have definitely and irreversably have changed for me after Gorleben, is my trust in the police. It virtually non-existant. There were 19000 policemen, more than two for every single one of the 9000 protesters they had thought would come. Only that the people who demonstrated were total pacifists and would never ever use violence. Any Highschool Cafeteria would be more likely to cause some act of violence than the poeple at Gorleben. The police on the other hand was extremely agressive and partially really sadistic and despotic, deliberately abusing their powers and breaking the law. We watched lots of videos and tv in the following days ( Gorleben is always topic no 1 on the news) and the way they treated the demonstrators was definitely unecessarily cruel - we were worried sick about the friends we had made and who were still there. Our blockade turned out to be the largest one of the many that there were that night, with 1200 people during the last hours, so there was lots of coverage about it , which helped a little.

I shall shut up now cause I still got lots of things to do and tomorrow there is another big demonstration in Berlin, so I gotta get going.

Lots of love,
Sophie



Jason is singing you a song! His German twin has way awesomer dreads though. and he's less corny