Day 11 Copenhagen First Real Snow

It has turned really cold. I moved from where I was staying with Oleg & Suzanne today, to Andrus Jensen and Angelika Gregoruissen's home, in a beautiful old working class part of Copenhagen: Norrebryggel (sp?). The snow slowed down the buses to a crawl and I waited in the cold forty-five minutes for the right bus and then took the closest I could find. By then I was so bone chilled, it took hours to warm up later. Dragging my suitcases thru black slush was an ordeal and since I've stacked one heavy suitcase (full of paper from COP15) on top of the other, I lived in fear of the whole metal infrastructure system breaking. I've already noticed a loosening screw- sort of like the COP15 negotiations for better or worse.

The demonstrations seem to have cooled down with the weather.
But more dire accounts of the demonstrations yesterday (attack dogs) and the following video supplied by Amy Lipton:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/dec/17/copenhagen-climate-change

Today, was connect with colleagues from my own practice day. So I met Juanita Schaepfler, from the Z-Node PhD program group I'm part of out of Zurich. She recounted waiting two hours in the cold Monday to get into Bella, giving up and waiting 8 hours Tuesday to get in & then being too tired to attend sessions, so she & a friend ended up going out with some of the Nigerian delegation, who apparently told endless jokes about how bad things were there. Aside from that, we shared our mutual burn out before she headed for the airport.

We had met at the Klimat Forum, where I connected with another Z- Noder after she left, David McConville, who is connected to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge grant folks, in his dizzying black dome planetarium:
http://www.350.org/geodome

After the viewing, we talked about events here. We shared a sense that things will go forward regardless of the policy people because so many people with a sense of urgency are doing good projects.

I hung around and watched the plenaries on screens and then met up with Ian Garrett, Executive Director of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. He's really concentrating on doing the arts and other events outside Bella here and told me about a lot of stuff I've missed, including the YesMen press conferences. I wanted to go to their reception tonight but had committed to dinner with Andrus and Angelika and was just too exhausted on this bitter cold night to go out again afterwards.

Ian's work is at:

http://www.sustainablepractice.org
http://connect.sustainablepractice.org
http://wiki.sustainablepractice.org

We did an interview for his blog and the ending was pretty close to the conversation with David, to the effect that hope is in the horizontal.