Casa Robino

Music for today: Cake - Jolene
One of the biggest insights for me at the S.H.E. conference we organised in Berlin last November was the discussion about how to give nomads as much freedom in a nomadbase as possible while at the same time maintaining necessary or wanted restrictions such as no meat in the house. When I was at the Casa for the first time after the 888 in Paris, I felt a certain hypocrisy between the somewhat communicated "there are no rules" and arbitrary conventions such as that isn't okay to smoke tobacco in the Zula (the living room) but smoking joints is fine. What we came up with at SHE goes MAD was the idea of a "culture of the place", a set of basic ideas and practices that are ideally well communicated so the constant integration of new people takes less energy for both nomads and longer term residents.
When I arrived at The Trout House in East Van on late Monday afternoon, I was confronted with a much stronger communication issue: when I was there on Friday, Laura told me it should be okay to stay for a night, but now Matt didn't seem all to happy about it since he had turned away someone else literally 10 minutes before. Apparently there's often people just knocking at the door and the inhabitants feel that a constant stream of short-term visitors interferes the long term goals they have in the house. I had a good conversation with him about that and in the end he and the others agreed to have me over.
Most people in the house went to an open air screening of The Neverending Story. I couldn't find them in the crowd since they had left the house a bit before me and we hadn't agreed on a meeting point. The movie and the atmosphere (a bit like Berlin-Kreuzberg) were great anyway, a friendly Canadian let me use his cell phone and we were later joined by Katia. I had a great evening with her walking around Granville Island and having a beer at The Foundation, an amazing place with quotes about freedom on the wall, carefully chosen interior and a great cook (how I know this? Katia's boyfriend Rama works there :D). Overall the day left me pretty happy about my time in Vancouver and amazed about how cordially I was received by Katia and Julia.