On the train I wrote a letter home to friends and family describing my time at the casa. I've pasted it here for everyone's enjoyment (minus the part where I talked about how much I secretly hated everybody).
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Wow, so, where to begin...
I left paris the morning of sunday the 21st, catching a chunnel train to london. This was also my "first day of work", and I managed to get quite a bit of work done on the train (eurostar carriages 5 and 14 have power outlets, and I found this out early enough to change my seats - woo!). I arrived at my hostel at about 4pm, and checked in to find that the bunks were piled 3-high in a low-ceiling room. Suffice it to say that I didn't have much room. They did, however, have wifi, so I finished off my day of work and then went for a run before dinner. I ended up finding a beautiful canal and running along it for about an hour, which was wonderful. I came back, showered, and tried to figure out where the hell I was staying the next night.
My plan had been to spend just one night in london to switch my schengen visa from 'student' to 'tourist'. I had a ticket to brussels for the next day, and was planning on catching a train directly from there to amsterdam. Over the past 2 weeks I'd sent quite a few couchsurfing requests, but to my surprise I hadn't got a single positive response (I guess amsterdam is popular in the summer). I had also stumbled across a crazy-sounding guy who lived in a hamburg co-op who I wanted to visit, so I messaged him telling him my situation, and that I might come straight to hamburg if I couldn't find anywhere in amsterdam. He replied letting me know that I could come anytime, but that there was a place in amsterdam that I "needed" to visit.
Thus entered into my life Casa Robino, where I lived for the next 10 days. I only had time to make vague contact with 'robino' on the #casarobino freenode IRC channel (a very old but still-much-used chatroom technology - the same one used by mozilla developers) before I lost wifi in the uk, so while I thought I might be able to find the house, it wasn't at all clear whether this was somewhere I could stay. So after doing a full day's work on my london->brussels->amsterdam train ride, I arrived at 10pm and haphazardly managed to navigate myself to the base of a building where I had reason to believe I might find Casa Robino. I'd paid 4 dollars to book a hostel for the night just in case, so I figured that if things didn't work out I could probably at least find someone to direct me there. I pressed the intercom button, waited for a moment, and then heard an female italian voice pick up the other end.
"um...hi. Is this casa robino?"
"sometimes"
"...does robino live here?"
"sometimes"
"may I come in?"
"do you have a password?"
"umm..no...I don't think so. Maybe I missed it in the IRC channel somewhere? Here...let me take out my computer..."
"no no, it's ok. you can make your own password."
"I can make one up?"
"sometimes"
"ok... How about 'helicopter'?"
"...that's a very boring password. But I guess it is ok. "
With that I heard a buzz, and the door unlocked. I made my way up 3 flights of stairs, and arrived to find an open door. Gingerly stepping in, I found a kitchen bustling with people. A girl (who later turned out to be Valentina) smiled at me as she walked by (though she did not stop): "hello helicopter!". I deposited my pack in the hallway and found a bustling kitchen with a few people stirring pots of lentils to reggae blasting from the stereo. I asked someone if robino was there, and was directed to the balcony where I found two men smoking home-rolled cigarettes.
"are either of you robino?"
"sometimes"
"...which one?"
"I'm rob, he's ino"
"sometimes it's the other way around" (the other one interjected)
"...can I stay here?"
"sometimes"
Nevertheless, I didn't come in completely unprepared. I'd done some googling on the place before I lost wifi, and had discovered that it was a "post-couchsurfing" "nomad base" for travelers and self-proclaimed nomads to live in as long as they wished. Environmental sustainability is a must, and so "dead animals" are forbidden. Moreover, there are no guests. Upon entering the house one becomes a host, with all the implied responsibilities. Initiative is prized, and questions of "is there anything I can do to help?" are despised and considered to be signs of a lack of initiative. At this point, it seemed like the decision to stay was my own, and so I took some initiative, found directions to a corner store, and departed once again. At the store, I picked up fruits, vegetables, bread, and a 6-pack of beer. I returned, offered some beers around, and set to work making some pico de gallo. I had intended it to be an appetizer, but since it was finished at the same time as the lentils, it become a second dish to be eaten with bread. When the food was almost ready, a few people walked into the living room and rolled out a large circular legless table and spread out pillows. Before I knew it, we were dining middle-eastern style, sharing beers and stories, in the cozy living room of casa robino. At some point in the evening Valentina hugged me and said "we already like you. But we would like you even more if you shared one of your skills with us". This skill turned out to my native english, as she asked me to proof-read the first 15 pages of her masters thesis (due the next morning). I happily obliged. Some time later, the table disappeared and was replaced by mattresses, converting the living room to a bedroom where I fell asleep, content, alongside several of the other hosts.
As the days progressed, I started to get a feel for the place, and discovered as people came and went which of the people I met on that first night had been short-term hosts and who was there for the long haul. Robin (aka robino) had been on a waiting list for affordable social housing for 7 years, and he'd finally gotten an apartment in central amsterdam about 18 months ago, and turned it into "his little utopia". With travelers coming and going and weekly vegan community dinners, the place quickly became a hub for the nomadic and sustainability crowds of amsterdam (and the world). Valentina, an italian student of archival philosophy studying in amsterdam, came to one of the weekly dinners and eventually moved in. Rene is a french guy who, about a year ago, came "just for a few days" and has been living there since. On a given night there might be up to 8 travelers staying as well, which makes for a very lively atmosphere.
I found the initiative/everybody-is-a-host system to be pretty interesting, and it actually worked better than any sort of chore list. When there were dirty dishes, someone cleaned them. When people we hungry, someone cooked. When something needed fixing, it was repaired. When the bathroom needed cleaning, someone cleaned it. Despite the number of people and the constant turnover, the house was remarkably unchaotic. Packs were kept mostly zipped up and out of the way, so there was a fair amount of open space as well.
Casa robino was a perfect place to work. I could sit in the living room, working quietly on my laptop (with super-fast internet) as people came and went, and there would always be someone to talk to or have a snack with when I needed a break. I was insanely efficient and wrote tons of code, rewriting a good chunk of Mozilla's image-rendering code. Though Robin occasionally complained that firefox was too slow on his (very) old laptop, in general people had very positive feelings about mozilla and seemed to like having an open-source programmer hacking on firefox in the living room. I also was directed to an anarchist squat under a bridge near the central train station that turned out to be a pretty cool spot as well, complete with couches, a kitchen, a bar, a computer cluster, a free store, and wall-art aplenty. There were lots of hacker-types there as well, and I ended up joining in a session on wireless security. Another guy had hauled over a derelict arcade machine, and the two of us set about installing linux on it to turn it into a multi-game homebrew arcade machine (I got Space Invaders running before I left).
As time went on, the people in Casa Robino morphed from strange and enigmatic people to close friends. The house itself no longer seemed like a crazy experiment and became a comfortable home that seemed just as much mine as anyone's. The week was filled with dinners, bicycling adventures, canal boating excursions, picnics, and of course plenty of quiet work time. So far, so good.
I left amsterdam today, and I'm writing this on a train on my way cologne, where I'll visit a friend I met in buenos aires last september and go to a reggae festival (I built up a big buffer of work before I left so I have some breathing room if things are too busy). On july 8th, I'm off to prague to meet a certain sister of mine. We'll see what happens next.
bholley out.
