Whoa, my trip has reached its end! Since I arrived in the Netherlands I seldom had the possibility to write a post. These two weeks have been so intensive!Everything started in Germany on July, 25th. Denise and I took a SchönesWochenendeTicket and after 7 and a half hours sitting in a train, we reached Enschede, the last station we could go to with the regional train. we found a Mitfahrer, so we basically went to Holland for 14€ each, which is not bad. There we surfed a couch on the University Campus, that apparently is only populated by computer nerds. The guys who hosted us had a recycled computer in the kitchen with soft keyboard on the fridge door, an intranet to share films and media on their TV, and they even nailed a couch onto the kitchen roof, so that it swang like a hammock, and installed a subwoofer in the couch!After crashing in the laundry room, the next day we started hitch-hiking West at around 1 p.m., although we wanted to start much earlier (usual). We had 4 hours to reach Leiden (160km), because I had to attend the welcome reception in a restaurant at 5. At first it seemed that it would have been a bit hard: we quickly got a couple of rides, first to the motorway and then to a big gas station/restaurant. We got bad luck at the gas station and moved over towards the restaurant's parking lot. I tried to talk to some truck drivers, but all of them were sleeping or didn't want to have hitch-hikers around, like the Polish driver that I greeted with "Autostopowicz", without success, as if I had named a bad infection. The Spaniards were really nice and sociable, but unfortunately they were going to Spain: they would have actually taken us to Madrid, they said, if we had wanted, but 
had to go the other way...We had a sign, and experience says that with a sign it takes a bit longer, but then you find the right ride. So it was. We waited almost one hour, but eventually two cars pulled over, one bound to Rotterdam and the other to... Leiden. They were a nice old couple who showed us pictures of the royal family from a glamour magazine, and brought us all the way to the restaurant. We got there at 5.15, so I was 15 min late and had missed nothing. Later on we reached our first host, Tommy, the CouchSurfing ambassador of Leiden. He had an insane passion for Norway and an even more insane sense of hospitality: he lived in a one-room apartment and managed to host 6 people at the same time, with 3 mattresses and 2 couches. It was weird but also in a way cozy, and the other people nice, although I had to listen to the adventures of an American girl in Rome, who found funny that taxi drivers there would pinch her butt. The other Surfer we stayed at, Klara, was less fun but finally a civilized place to stay, and a clean kitchen where we could finally make a nice dinner.
In the weekend, we packed our stuff once again, wrote a carton sign bearing the title "A'dam", and hiked to a gas station. After 2 seconds we found a ride to the City, and in less than 30min we were there. Amazing. Without knowing it, the guy stopped at a coffee shop on the way to the centre, where I realized that we were 5 min walking from the Casa. We went there and everybody started hugging us. I felt like joining an ashram, and we were offered delicious (but sooo hot) couscous at 10 pm. Then people decided to go out, and got the key of two bicycles. They have a system with bikes: they have a frame on the wall with nails and keys, and the names of the bikes; the bikes are locked in pairs, so the keys are also organized in pairs, and if some keys are missing, you automatically know which ones are available and which key you have to pick. Apparently, the bikes also have a profile on their website.Downtown, everything was full, and we eventually ended up sitting on the pavement, which wasn't bad after all, it just felt so much like Italy. The next day we watched the Gay Pride Parade, which was even grander than I had imagined, especially because afterw
ards the street likened an immense open-air landfill (apparently you cannot get money for returning beer cans in Holland). In the evening, I cooked vegan pizza with fresh tomatoes, aubergines, capers, garlic & herbs tofu and olives. The kitchen was full of dumpster-dived artichocks, and every evening people make amazing organic bread out of sourdough brought over by the PastaMadre project.The Casa was an amazing place. I found it because I wanted to find it, and I surfed it because I really wanted. It's not a place where people end up by chance, it's not a squat, it's not a commune, it's just magic. It's a magic bunch of people who made me feel more at home than in any other place where I have lived. Depending on when I will finish writing my thesis, I have to go back, do some activism in Amsterdam and learn some Dutch.I think I understand now why people at the Casa don't do CouchSurfing. CouchSurfing is great, but it's limited. The Casa is unlimited, is not for tourists or backpackers, it's a living thing, that calls you for becoming a living part of it.Right now I am in a wonderful apartment in Leiden, hosted by two great hosts with two beautiful huskies. I will stay here until Saturday morning, and then I will hitch-hike to Maastricht, where I will spend the night, and move to Cologne the next day, and in the evening fly back to Reykjavík.
The course that I am taking is really challenging. I am basically taking a 3/4-months workload in two weeks. I have even reconsidered my wish to take a master's degree here in Leiden, because the level is so ridiculously high, and the time when you're supposed to complete your studies so tiny, that I would probably die on my books, and I most certainly don't want that. Leiden has a huge team of top scholars, and they do things their own way: I learned Proto-Indoeuropean in Italy with the /a/ and some schwas, but here, even in the Proto-Germanic class, after one day they started putting laryngeals everywhere, not to mention things like Balto-Slavic accentuation, which apparently nobody understands yet...Next post after my comeback to Iceland!
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