Casa Robino

I've been in the Ciemmona 2009 in Rome - it holds the Critical Mass Interplanetary.
It was a very beautiful event, stimulating and creating this consciousness to use the bicycle.
We were in 2 or 3 thousand people, riding through Rome's roads, for hours, all the day long, until the night.
People participating from many countries other than Italy, like France, Spain, Brazil, Indonesia.
And of all ages, from babies on the chests to old people. Also, lots of artists, playing and juggling during the ride.

We got gypsy and Mirtilla working last night.

Hooray, we now have 12,5 working bikes. After three weekly bike-repairing days we finally got all bikes working minus two. As it was the third Thursday today that we were fixing bikes (this time it was Shaun and me) outside of the house, we had more people stopping over to ask if we could help them with their bikes. So we helped two neighboors with their bikes, and we even had a lady stopping to ask if we could repair some of her bikes for some small cash.

the working bikes we currently have are:

Once in a while the bike-police goes around the neighboorhoud to take away bikes that they think are useless. Be aware, they will make these decisions for you. First they will put up an orange sticker on the bike, and after a week they come back to cut your chain and steal your bike without any mercy.

I brought a new old bike to the house. It needs some air and oil, but it's otherwise fine.Germ

Due to its built-in baskets it's thé bike to bring your dumpstered veggies safely back home from the market.

We will call her 'The Germ' (or more properly 'Zééé Shjurm'), referring to the German girl who still officially owns the bike.

Friday night Rene and I decided, quite randomly, to go on another bike adventure. We had several possibilities as to where we could go. After some thought we narrowed it down to either National park De Hoge Veluwe, or all around the sea, north over the bride, then south and around, back to Amsterdam. The following morning, we woke up, and began to prepare. And finally around 10, decided on the national park.

We've had quite some cyclist passing through the house. Cycling around the world, or just the Netherlands, or people cycling from Paris to Copenhagen for example. Most of these people found out about the house through friends or through hospitality exchange networks such as Couchsurfing (closed-source and top-down structured) or Bewelcome (which is more grassroots and based on open source/ free software). But so far none of the cyclist had contacted us through Warmshowers.org, a hospitality exchange network for touring cyclists.

Repairing bikes is an ongoing thing here at the casa, we now have 12 bikes of which 7 are fully functional. Today we went to repair some and to bring some new structure again to the bike-system. We are now using the notebook that Charlie made for bike-notes and you can read in this book the latest state of the bikes. You can also find in the corridor a piece of paper with information about which bikes are working and which are not. The keys are on the notice-board. The only thing still missing are photos of the bikes so people also know which one is which.

Functional bikes as of now:

As Rene wrote prior to this story we took a bike trip to Leiden. It got me thinking,.. There is something enormously calming about riding your bike in the mist of the evening. It makes you feel as if you could go back to the time before you when someone else ventured a similar path, in those same woods, with the same feeling. It is almost as if you forget yourself in the world for those magic moments. You truly become anonymous and you forget about all the things that were going on in your head just an hour before. I think it should become a Casa event you know?

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