I’m back and alive but my luggage still decided to continue travelling. It’s probably in Copenhagen, it’s a soft bag and full of red wine. Let’s see if the clothes have a brand new colour when they finally arrive…
After 11 days of travelling and not more than five minutes of shower in total during the whole trip, hot bath didn’t feel too bad invention at all. Good to be home. But I’m definitely going back there one day.

BIGGER view here.

San Salvador, on the other side of our mountain, about one hour away, was a small and beautiful village between the mountains, in a much nicer valley than the one we’re living in. The bar I told earlier about was also small but crowded with happy people. There was some feminist Spanish stand up comedy. Didn’t understand a thing. Perfect chance to laugh at the wrong spots.

Slept at some guy’s place. This guy, Pedro, had a guest room with probably the softest beds I’ve tried. And several blankets. For the first time on this trip I wasn’t freezing during the night.

Today’s still another party here and tomorrow a seven hour workshop. Then we’re basically done and can start a nice 16 hour way back to Finland.

It’s damn humid everywhere. Once the clouds got to this valley, it’s not too probable that they’ll leave anytime soon. Last night it was raining like hell, which caused the streams coming the nearby mountains overflow. We woke up as the paths leading uphill had turned into small rivers and the front yard was flooding. After building small dams it got a bit better, but it’s still cold and humid inside the house.

We’re leaving tonight to another village to a bar owned by two local lesbians. It’s a freaky place, we’ve been told. Hopefully it’s warmer there.

There’s some fog outside and the internet connection is completely dead. I’m writing this offline.

I guess all the environmentally well informed people already know everything about these vegetable oil cars, but let’s still have a closer look how they work. As I don’t have too much knowledge on anything which has four wheels, this is going to be brief.

Certain diesel motors have the ability to run on veggie oil. As diesel oil, also the veggie oil has to be pre-heated before you can start the engine. Veggie oil, however, needs a much higher temperature in order to start the engine. That’s why you need to build another pre-heater especially for veggie oil.

When pre-heated, the car should run normally. It uses approximately the same amount of fuel as the normal diesel engine, with the exception that you can get your fuel for free from local restaurants and bars which use oil for making food. The veggie oil engine also produces less emissions – but the smell is worse, though :)

If you think vegetable oil motor is old news, have you heard of the motor running with compressed air?

The highlight of today was getting a shower. The water was above zero celcius, luxorious!

I also learned that the nettles won’t sting you if you hold your breath. That sounds as crazy as it is, but it works.

One guy – Richie – arrived here two days ago, obviously an old friend of many. Richie had been eye-witnessing the Oaxaca protests in Mexico in late 2006. We spent the evening listening to the story and seeing some incredible video footage of demonstrations of over 600000 people.
The whole thing had started of the teachers’ strike. The government sent over 3000 police without a warning to the city early in the morning to break up the occupation. The following street battles led the situation to chaos and set several other work unions behind the teachers’ strike. Massive demonstrations and fights between the government troops and locals followed and since June 14, Oaxaca has been in a state of civil rebellion.
Scary, scary stuff. Things you definitely don’t realize even the things would get big enough to fit to the Finnish news broadcasts.

The next days we’ll be concentrating fully on media education methods. Sharing and teaching different workshops and going through different digital media teaching methods with the locals. They seem to be pretty excited about our contents and we’re hoping to get some new ideas in return.