Get into the swing: alternative lifestyles
The French call their 9-5 routine ‘metro - boulot - dodo’ (commute, work, sleep). The university students are filing back in glumly, their holiday shots packed away on their external drives. There are one or two of us who concoct alternative lifestyles to escape the monotone. Like Estelle and Espen, a Franco-Norwegian couple who live on water and will swap grey skies for the open sea. Germans Klara and Felix live through their hiking shoes on a Spanish pilgrimage. Polish-German couple Anna and Tom quit the everyday to travel eastern Europe and the Caucasus with their six-month old baby, Hanna, in a striking series of photos. Everywhere, from Polish freegans to eastern European squatters in Amsterdam, there are fragmentary examples of European dropouts. They share a small part of ‘their way’ with us in this week’s special edition
Spiritual Spain: two German pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela
In 2009 more than 140, 000 people took the pilgrimage that ends at St. James cathedral in the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela. 14, 000 of those were Germans. We speak to two of them
Franco-Norwegian couple: life on a houseboat in Germany
No trade barriers in the European Union means anonymous EU-registered boats can swan in and out of European waterways. Houseboats are proving the new accommodation trend. One woman shares her story
Freeganism in Poland: 'horror' of taking food from bins
Freeganism, a way of life for a small percentage of the world’s population, is above all an extremely anti-consumerist attitude calling for restraint. It openly expresses opposition to corporations that only want to enrich themselves because today the sale of goods in their pure form is disappearing
Alternative lifestyles: 'I came to Amsterdam to live in a squat'
In the 1980s, a political movement of squatters changed the face of the Dutch capital. Today, young apolitical Eastern Europeans are joining the squatter movement
cities, economy, housing, discrimination, lifestyle, drugs, multiculturalism, protest, cities, squat, ageing society, development, culture, amsterdam, architecture, society, fashion, house, freedom
