Zwolle Earthship Day 1

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I finished day 1 of the earthship building project today. The site is in the early stages so it involved lots of pounding of tyres. The external walls are made from rows of old tyres filled with earth which pounded to reinforce them, before eventually being covered with clay. I got busy with a sledgehammer this afternoon and it took me ages just to do three of the buggers. Everything was going great until one of the american earthship crew chastised me for killing a wasp. It had just taken a swing at me and then landed on the tyre that I was working on, so I sledgehammered it into the mound of earth. The dude looked at me in disgust and asked “Why the hell did you just hurt that little bee?”. I said “it was a wasp and it went for me” and he said “no it didn't, it would never go for you” and made me feel highly uncomfortable and I just wished for another wasp to land in front of us so I could pound that one too, in order to prove a point. Then he checked my tyre position with the plumbline and spirit level and a small spider crawled out. He said “are you going to kill that spider too?”. Unbelievable.

I am looking forward to tomorrow though because we have a talk on the systems, ie water filtration, solar panels and wind power. I sound like a nerd but I really am excited about it.

I am now in my chalet on the campsite watching a classic episode of Knightrider where Kit goes showjumping, following a horse round the entire course, clearing every jump.The countryside round here is lovely. Loads of pigs, goats and miniature shetland ponies in people's gardens. Cycling is a total joy here because cycle tracks are equally main thoroughfares as the car lanes. So many people are on bikes here it is amazing. I even got caught in bike gridlock at a cycle path junction outside a supermarket called Boni in town earlier. Bonkers.

One of the women on the course used to be a coffin designer. She started exploring encouraging people to face their mortality and paint their own coffins ahead of time with scenes from their life. It got quite dark and so she went off to train as an art therapist in order to deal with the nutjobs painting teddy bears with needles for teeth on their investment etc. She never returned to expressive coffin design which I am very sad about. It must be one the best job title I've come across yet.