breaking the ice

I have spent my Saturday night at a stand up improvisation comedy theatre show. I have to admit that it was simply great. The basic rule was, when you get bored you raise your hand, when enough hands are in the air the host of the evening will mention a warning to the actor on stage, if he or she changes his programme and the audience is happy again, he or she can stay on stage, if everyone is still bored, then he or she has to leave and it is the next actors term.
I watched 6 actors and had more then 2 hours great fun! Really fascinating how good the crew was and in which ways they reacted to the wishes for change from the public.
Afterwards we went to bendl, an original bar of it’s own kind. We were listening and singing along old Austrian songs, Austro-pop at it’s best! Really wonderful cultural evening!

I have spent 2 days now doing handicrafts work, bricolage and tinkering around with kids under the age of 10. We made candleholders, we made mini Christmas trees, we made Christmas tree decoration out of fir cones… lot’s of cool things and half of the material is still under my finger nails. We also made some Weihnachtswichtel – Santa’s little helpers or Christmas elves you might call them – here the clear evidence that I am not lying to you! Not that they are beautiful, but they are self made – Mum will be proud of me!

I was waiting to write about the council of members till I have the pictures – so here they are now! From the spirit and the mood during the CoMem everything went well. Politically member thought us how to write policy papers, but all the working groups went well and the penal discussion was well appreciated! On one picture you can see the whole assembly on one only the bureau – all green and black

My first time in the UK was in 1994, in

Minehead

, Summerset for a language course of 3 weeks. It was a really nice holiday, basically my first one. Lately these 3 weeks come back into my memory more and more often. I still have a shirt that I am wearing from that summer, that I bought at a market there. I just broke one of my earring creoles that I bought in Minehead.
I also brought my mum a present from England, a picture with a foggy landscape titled “misty moods”.
I have just discovered Irish singer-songwriter

Sinéad Lohan

, when I listen to her songs, I get melancholic and ruminative. I imagine all this misty landscapes, I can see the Irish west cost cliffs very clearly in front of me, I can see myself walking in green meadows with this stone walls and the sheep (no s even in plural!), that have those funny colours sprayed on their asses.
But mainly Sinéad Lohan brings me back to the comfort and safety of my mum’s living room where the “misty mood” picture is still hanging around.
So if you get in a contemplative mood towards the end of the year I can only recommend you to listen a bit to Sinéad Lohan and make your imaginative trip to Ireland!

…snow is falling, all around me, children playing, having fun… Winter came to town. Actually I like winter. I do not like winter in cities though. Trams are uncomfortable and dirty and much more likely to get stuck, my luggage does not roll so good on the crushed stones that are on the streets to prevent them from glazed frost.
This weekend I was for a walk on Kahlenberg, a Viennese city mountain, when it was all frosted with snow.
Really romantic but also very cold and windy; I did my best to prevent myself from the cold though and looked like an old acquaintance from the Michelin commercials.

From 11 o’ clock this morning till now - almost 7 pm I did nothing else but try to organise and clean my desk. I tried to find all my invoices and receipts that are due for reimbursement of the forum; I divided my huge paper piles in papers for the recycling pin and papers for further use. I made piles of documents that I am supposed to give to others, piles of papers that I have to further work on and - I filled in my reimbursement formats.
I hate reimbursements. I know this is boring for you, but I had to share it with the world. 2 hours for this f…. reimbursement formats.
And now, when entering my room, one can identify Fakturist again, my beautiful birch desk from ikea!

I have been at home for the past 4 days. This allowed me to get enough sleep, the read and comment what I was supposed to, to meet friends but also – an extra dose of

Gilmore girls

and

CSI

! And I love it. Saturday afternoon was the best – I actually did "Internet surfing". You know that kind of – I do not feel like working and look at a page and click on related links and read some articles and google for more and so on…

I have been at my first drag king show ever. It was simply fabulous! Women performing as kings, kings dressing as queens, boy bands, funky housewives – just splendid entertainment! Was also really interesting to chat with the

Kingz of Berlin

afterwards. One quote of a related web site “Ich bin eine wunderschöne Königin, gefangen im Körper eines schwulen Mannes, der in einer lesbischen Studentin steckt.“ or in English “I am a beautiful queen, captured in the body of a gay man who is in a lesbian student”
I learned words such as bioqueen and double drag and it all makes sense to me all of a sudden!

The whole show was because of the first European TransX congress in Vienna theses days and the 10 years anniversary of Trans-X the Viennese trans association.

But back to the show - If they ever come near you – the kings of Berlin – watch them!!!!

The world is queer tonight, more then I imagined so far!

It is autumn everywhere. I really like this season. I like the red-yellow-orange shades of the leaves, I like the mood that the sun conjures and the fog creates. In autumn there are the most beautiful sunsets and you can have the most mystic walks through the old towns of Salzburg and Vienna –all the imperial and huge buildings will make you feel small and humble, but there is no other time of the year where those cities architecture is more impressive!

This youth forum office is just one big whole – the moment you enter it, you can never be sure when it will spit you out again!
But to start with the beginning of the day - Today was Information and Networking day for International Youth NGO funding. It was open for youth forum member organisations and non member NOGs. The meeting went really well and it seems to have attracted a lot of NGOs (more then 80 participants present) who are now even thinking of applying for membership at the youth forum. So this is what most of my coffee break discussions were about. I can say, I am very happy for the forum, but I am a bit worried for our policy officer dealing with membership issues.
After this I went with the other staff members just quickly to the office and have dinner right after. This was some hours ago and it seems to be impossible to leave this office in reasonable time and now I am starving.

Now at home with the family

Whilst writing this I am sitting in the train from Budapest to Salzburg. I am going home (yes indeed, Bettina is going home!!!) and want to see my family again – have not jet picked up my birthday presents! But the bad thing is – it is a 7 hours train ride and we are already half an hour late. First I had something to read, then I had the energy to do some work. Trains do take away all my energy quickly though! So I tried it with food, now I fell sick, really sick! Next thing was that the battery of my laptop was empty – so I had to find a place somewhere with an energy plug. Well I found it and now - best of all is, that I also share the compartment with a group of Hungarian 10 year olds on their way to Zurich! The more silent compartments do not have energy plugs.

I can tell you though, that these 10 year olds are better then Scottish toddlers! On my way from Malaga to Glasgow I was in a plane where 1 third of the passengers were between 5 and 48 months and 1 at the time minimum was screaming his or her lungs out. I have a dilemma now; I cannot make up my mind if Hungarian 10 year olds for 7 hours or Scottish toddlers for 3 hours is worse. Once I made up my mind I will tell you all about it!

After Strasbourg I was in Budapest now at the research seminar for social inclusion. It was refreshing and gave a lot of food for thought. It was so good to switch from the policy-making terminology to the academic jargon for a day. I cannot remember when I last heard someone saying in the introduction round “I am a critical post modern feminist by nature” or heard the words “deconstruction” or “heteronormativity” so often and the statement that “experience and consciousness are dialectically connected” just made me smile.

In addition there were some really practical thoughts I could gain from it. To give you an example - a discussion about family dependence in lack of social support schemes and the different implication that has for vulnerable youth groups was really interesting. Whilst it is obvious that this is limiting for every young person and I have already though implications that this has for LGBT people whose parents do not accept them - and the linked drastic social consequence through support schemes that are connected to parental income and of course the emotional damage this makes. But one of the speakers drew my attention to the even worse situation of people with disabilities, who do not even have the legal rights to overturn their parents decision and have no way out of this dependence in way to many countries.

So all in all, a pity that I was not able to attend the whole seminar, but I for sure will try to study the reader of the seminar carefully!

I spent my last week in Strasbourg, preparing and running together with friends and colleagues the Symposium “all different – all equal”. The Symposium was living from the expertise and enthusiasm the participants brought with them. It was a real motivation factor for my personal work in the youth forum.

Unfortunately the end was not so nice. The Secretary General of the Council of Europe disagreed with the outcomes of the symposium and told the participants working hard for the conclusions and concrete results over 4 days quite frankly so. Not that this has a large political impact but they way he did it and the way he ruined the motivation of the people was a disaster. Several people very really sad, angry or frustrated about it and had the feeling they were wasting time during the symposium.

On the other hand he will not be the last one that we have to struggle with. The message of the campaign is to lower the levels of acceptance for humiliation and discrimination. By far not everyone is at the same level of awareness for Human Rights, diversity and participation and how those things are interlinked. There is a lot of personal and political struggle ahead of us. But this discouragement was also to a large extent a uniting element!

I hope that people were able to regain their motivation, through talks afterwards, through the party that was really nice and through the networks and friendships they have built during the seminar!

I do not like opinion polls. They just make you disappointed!

I attended the preparation conference for the Austrian presidency youth event in Vienna. This whole thing was an extremely weird concept. My favourite quotes were such as “the only argument you have against my ideas is missing representativity and legitimacy, that does not count” or Ministerial Representatives asking, “how can we lobby national youth councils to lobby there governments for a policy change”. So let’s look forward to the real youth event in March!

So – I have been in Moscow. My first time in Russia, so far I have never made it further east then Minsk. Vika picked me up from the airport and it took us almost 2 hours to get to the hotel. Then we continued the journey to the office of NYCR – another hour in the car. Diogo in the mean time was stuck with diverse plane delays in Frankfurt and landed hours later then supposed to. We had a wonderful dinner in an Uzbek restaurant and a romantic tour of Moscow by night – in the car again, what else? So all in all I spent all my birthday in cars, planes but mainly in traffic jams! And after the lady at the reception tried desperately to find out under which of his 6-10 names Diogo is registered and should check in I found out that she speaks perfect German and that everything could have been much easier then talking with the hands and signs trying to make her understand English! So the most impressive thing in Moscow is the traffic and some really beautiful buildings such as the Kremlin and the Stalin towers all over town!