So it is Sunday now and I have already missed out a day on my internet diary. We just went to see the fireworks at the end of the festival. It got quite misty and foggy and rainy at the end, so we did not see much. The festival was so expensive this year, that I went as usual only to the stuff I could see for free, and even that I didn’t do properly. I went to see “The Girls of May” and found it fantastic, I really wanted to write a feature about it on IMcUk and ImcScotlands new culture section.

Hi, this is the first message on my freshly set up site. I am so excited. Still, I have absolutely no clue where this blog will lead me and what will come out of it. Will it be a diary? Will it be a dictionary, and moreover will I write in German or English or both? A reminder of what I have to do? Crazy isn’t it. I guess this century might develop to be one of the best-documented so far, concerning what the people living in this time actually think and do rather than the leaders. Probably blogs full with minor problems and in some time back future generations might ask: Why have they been so ignorant about the destruction of the environment?

The Argentina Autonomista Tour visited Edinburgh on the 2nd and 3rd of July, arriving from Glasgow before moving on to Ulverston. Graciela (pictured) from the Argentina Autonomista Project had a full timetable with interviews with the BBC and the Big Issue, showing slides in the Forest Cafe linked to a Q & A session, and presenting a puppet show in the evenings. Neka, from the Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina, gave her talks in Spanish, and they were translated into English in the Q & A session. The event in the local Muirhouse Millennium Centre was excellent, and many locals helped to make it happen in a collaborative effort.

“Goodbye Lenin” is a film about the fall of the wall in 1989 and shows the historic events in the background of a personal story. It is a wonderful and charming film, which explains a lot about the events in autumn 1989, how it came about and what followed afterwards. The personal story is a vehicle to transport how people in the East felt and dealt with the change, and how the change dealt with them. In fact, it is a bit like a hidden documentary topped with a quite unbelievable personal tragi-comical story. The beauty lies in the contrast and honesty of describing the “real socialism” in the GDR and showing what it actually meant to people living in the system, and what it was later glorified to have been after the East has basically been taken over by the West and its capitalist values.

From Tuesday 24th till Saturday 28th the “Oyster Wars Project” took place in North Edinburgh. This Project consisted of a theatre show, an exhibition and a community event. The main topic was the Oysters and how they defined the local community and how the oysters were transformed from a poor fishermen’s food to a luxurious delicacy, and in future might be a Genetically Modified fish-replacement being sold with chips as a take-away food. The play was written out of a local, working-class perspective and involved via time-travel the different difficulties in everyday life in various important points of the local history, including not only past time and present events, but also different possibilities for the future.