Minutes of the first Skype meeting, 9pm-11pm GMT, 17-03-24
Dates for the meet-up are fixed as 9th-13th August 2017.
Location is fixed as Berlin.The seven people confirmed as interested in staying in Berlin are LL, Fargo (LL's girlfriend), gkrieg, kkrieg (gkreig's wife), Space, Calamitas and silver. We also think Joseph is highly likely to join. Also faust lives in berlin anyway, or will be able to stay with friends if he's stopped living there by then, so he'll join us without needing extra accommodation.
gkrieg&kkrieg would like the option of having their own room, and have a preference for central accommodation. The lowest cieling in terms of budget is 35 Euros per person per night, which is actually quite difficult even with air bnbs. We have the links I've posted already as a fall-back option, but we agreed that we all should keep looking. We also agreed that if necessary, a couple of us are able to pay a little more than the average to help subsidise the people who can't afford it otherwise, but that we'd prefer to keep this extra contribution below ~200 euros overall (split between several of us).
Faust suggested a group-house place just north-west of Berlin (
http://www.kinderwald-berlin.de/cms/index.html) and has emailed them to ask questions, and will report back to the thread. This is definitely cheaper than the suggested AirBnB options, but probably fails on the private room criterion and realistically could be rather more than 30 minutes' travel away from central Berlin. (Can we also check whether this is within the free travel zone covered by the Berlin Welcome card, if some of us are going to use that for transport?)
Silver said he'd ask his dad about implications of booking on Calamitas's behalf, since he's a minor. I'm happy to make the booking, but I'd rather not find myself legally responsible for other people's conduct or anything :-P gkrieg also said that kkrieg has a good set of reviews on AirBnB, so she's another good contender for being the person to book for us, if I don't do it.
Most people seemed happy with the idea of splitting up during the day to do independent/small-group tourist sorts of things, then coming together in the evenings for a meal and games/other hanging out. Nobody actually objected to the idea of having shared veggie meals, and if we do that, I'm happy doing lots of the cooking, provided we've got a decent kitchen.
Our next chat will be on Wednesday night, and Calamitas was mandated to make us a doodle poll, which he's already posted. I hope I haven't forgotten to cover anything too critical here :-)