Coachella festival

photo: www.popsugar.com

Hey guys!

Spring is finally here! Can you feel those spring vibes already? No? We do, and we will totally bring you to our spring wave, that we are on. The time, when flowers are blooming, the sun is shining and festivals are beginning, has arrived.

One of the most popular festivals is in California and it’s called Coachella and has been around since 1999. The main idea of Coachella is to be peaceful and to be dressed in the spirit of Indio, which is the main theme. It’s already well known, that Coachella is full of good music produced by the best artists in the world, for example, Calvin Harris, Coldplay, Jay-Z, ACDC and many others.

This year Coachella will take place on April 15th – 17th and April 22nd – 24th at Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, California. General admission tickets cost 840 dollars, a 3 day pass costs 1000 dollars and the VIP-3 day pass costs 2100 dollars. It’s true, they’re quite expensive but references from past years say that it’s worth it.  

photo: svilenebube.com

Coachella is so popular, that even famous celebrities are coming year after year. Nowadays Coachella has become one of the festivals, where visitors, mostly women are dressed on point, in the spirit of Indio. So if you want to visit Coachella, you should wear something that looks peaceful- colorful, has flowers on, or some interesting ornaments and be sure to wear a lot of accessories. You can also show much more skin than with other outfits you wear normally. With this starter pack, you should be ready for Coachella! We are leaving you with some pictures of celebrities who visited Coachella and which could also give you some inspirations for your perfect Coachella-outfit!  Be sure to leave us a comment, which of these are your TOPS! 

Reports by volunteers with migrant backgrounds

Last week on 9 November 2015 our team wanted to see for themselves how it's like to be a volunteer at a refugee center. The Dusika Stadium used to be a sports center for cycling events but was closed to become a place where refugees can stay. If you are inspired by the following stories and want to go help out yourself, you can visit Dusika Stadiums Facebook Page.

http://www.oeft.at/images2015/Dusikastadion-Fluechtlingslager_2015-09-22.jpg

Melania 

photo: CzechAut

Helping at refugee camp was definitely a great experience for me. Although I spent only two hours there I met some very nice and friendly people there and I have also had a lot of fun. I was trying to do my best even if my jobs were not so exhausting. My first job was to sort clothes according to size and gender and later, me and my classmates were helping to serve dinner for refugees. We could also help by teaching refugees some german words and show them how to say the words properly. At the end I felt very happy because of meeting those people.

David

After we were divided into two groups (I was apparently in the group with our professor), organizer took us to the gym, where the families were accommodated. The first group was working in this place, so we went back to the first place after they had been assigned to their job. Our job was to hand out some supplies, for example toothbrushes and toothpastes. Also they were bringing their dirty clothes to put it into the washing machines. Many of them couldn’t speak English, maybe just some words or phrases, so the communication between us consisted more of the gestures than words. Overall the people were really nice and thankful for every help.

photo: CzechAut

Dajana

The refugee camp Dusika Stadion is divided into two camps: in the gym are families and in the main Stadium hall are men. We were given orange signal vests and could begin to help. With my classmates we sorted winter clothes into cardboard boxes in the family camp. Meanwhile some refugees came to ask for clothes that they needed. Then I helped in the men camp to hand out hygienic products. They have a possibility to wash their clothes too. People there were nice and they thanked us for everything they got. Some of them could speak very well English and some of them learnt German too. It feels good to know, you helped someone who needed it. 

photo: CzechAut

Alina 

I was personally really excited to be there and help a little bit. My impressions were really good and we had the opportunity to get to know a lot of people from different countries. The fact that all of them were sleeping on the ground or in tents was really sad for me. First we were sorting out the clothes and then we were serving them dinner. Almost at the end we were helping one guy with German. I am really glad that we had the opportunity to be there because we could see how it really is and form our own opinion about it. It was really emotional for me but we also had a lot of fun.

We had a really great time there.

Elections: Regular and Irregular

Vienna Elections 2015: Results

Here are the results of the Vienna Elections that took place on Sunday, October 11


Elections to the Vienna City Council:

                                                                                      %                             Number of seats (100 total)
Social Democrats (SPÖ)                                           39,5 %                                           44

Freedom Party (FPÖ)                                                30,9 %                                           35

Greens (Grünen)                                                      11,16 %                                             9

Christ Democratic Austrian People`s Party(ÖVP)      9,5 %                                   7

NEOS                                                                           6,2 %                                              5



Chart:

                                                               
           http://www.profil.at/oesterreich/wien-wahl-2015-live-ticker-ergebnis-5908900

Pass Egal Wahl 2015

In addition to the results of Vienna’s election we also summarized the results of Vienna’s Pass Egal Wahl, about which we already wrote an article in 2013 and mentioned it last week. 1223 people went to this year´s Pass Egal Wahl to cast their vote even though they are not allowed to vote on a regular basis in Vienna, Most of these people from 75 different countries have been living in Vienna for quite some time but don´t have the Austrian citizenship.

This is the longest queue that has been seen on the Friedrich-Schmidt-Platz in a long time. Because of the amount of people who wanted to vote they even had to close a half hour later.

These are the results of this years Pass Egal Wahl. Interesting is the slightly different coloured chart for the results compared to the regular city council elections. 

These elections for Vienna city council will repeat in another five years.

If you were living in an other country and couldn't vote there would you go to a similar project like the Pass Egal Wahl? Are you satisfied with the results of this years elections? Why so?

#Refugees

Current situation of refugees in Europe

In the last months Europe has experienced an mass arrival of refugees from the Middle East. After seeing pictures of a child corpse washed up on the beach after an unsuccessful attempt to get to Europe and also after news about a truck with 71 dead bodies found by the side of an Austrian motorway, the German chancellor Merkel stated, that Germany would accept as many refugees as possible. This statement probably caused, that a large majority of the refugees are trying to find their new home in Germany. There have been almost 700.000 refugees so far this year and the amount will be rising. Germany closed the borders, but after a few days, the border closure was changed to temporary border controls with so called ‘refugees trains’ coming to Munich from Vienna. 2000-8000 refugees are coming to Vienna every day. Most of them stay inside Vienna's Main Station or West Station, where approx. 200 volunteers care for them.

Refugee routes to Europe

Thousands of refugees are risking their lives while coming to Europe even if the route is very dangerous. Refugees from Syria need to go through several countries to reach their final destination. Most of the time it is Germany, Switzerland and Sweden. They choose the safest way which starts in Turkey and continues in Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Austria.

Source: dailymail.co.uk

Here is a simple abstract of refugees in other countries:

Refugees in Lebanon

The number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon is around 1, 1 million.

Refugees in Turkey

Turkey is the largest host of refugees in the world. There are over 2 million refugees in the country.

Refugees in Jordan

There are over 628 000 Syrian refugees, 2 million Palestinian refugees and over 47 554 Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

Refugees in the Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is mainly a transit country for refugees.  Within the framework of EU it belongs to countries where the number of refugees is minimal. So far 679 foreigners have applied for international protection this year.  (22.6.2015)

Refugees in care

Men           649

Women      94

Children     176      

TOTAL        919

The most frequent nationality of clients in refugee centers are from:

Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh. (20.9.2015)

 

Refugees in Austria

Today are in Austria about 44.000 refugees in care. The most refugees come from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. The most common reasons why people are fleeing from their country are:

•War conflicts

•Direct pressure

•Afraid of ISIS

 Refugees in Slovakia

Source: dennikn.sk

This statistic shows us, how many Refugees want to come to the Slovakia, but also, how many of them will get or not get asylum and also the rest of them, who are still waiting for an answer. Even though many people say, that refugees don’t really want to come to Slovakia, they actually do. This statistic shows us that about 12 000 refugees applied for asylum, but only few of them really get it. The rest, about 10 000 have to wait for a decision about their asylum requests, which will maybe never come. Is this this one of the reasons, why they don’t want to live in Slovakia?

As you can see, the apportioning of refugees through the countries doesn’t seem so fair. The states Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have taken in about 2 million refugees and Czech Republic only about 700  but we have to look at the economy, too.  States like Turkey have a far better economy and when you look at the size of this state and compare it with the size  of the Czech Republic, its size is just like a tiny little piece of Turkey. On the other hand, it’s true that the Czech Republic can take in more refugees than it has done. 

PUTIN TOPS FORBES‘ LIST OF MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE, OBAMA IS SECOND

Even though most of the time we try to focus on local topics, this time we reached out for a global one, reason behind this being a) we find this one quite interesting, b) there’s not that much happening around here anyways and some more local focused post should be coming soon, covering happenings in Austria/Czech/Slovakia, c) Press freedom! We can write about anything we want to write about.
Anyways, back to the post itself:

Forbes takes list-making to a whole new level: the magazine is well known for its annual lists, including ones like ‘The World’s Billionaires list’, ‘The Richest People and America list’, ‚The World's Most Innovative Growth Companies list’ and – the most recent and talked about – ‘World’s Most Powerful People list’.
(All this ‘list list list’-ing makes me think of obsessive–compulsive personality disorder, and yes, I had to google it to get the name right.)

Putin tops the list, winning for the second time in a row. Forbes reasons for this choice are ‘a proxy war in the Ukraine’, ‘the deal to build a more than $70 billion gas pipeline with China (the planet’s largest construction project)’, ‘(giving asylum to) NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’ and the ‘chess match over Syria’.