Without a Traceroute

I swore I would get caught up, and by god, I intend to get caught up even if I have to keep writing all night (it’s currently 4:41 am and I’m in Zagreb, Croatia). After HAIP, I got a ride from a girl I’d been couchsurfing with to Koper, which is one of the coastal towns in Istria. Funny sidenote about driving in Slovenia: I made some off-handed remark about renewing my driver’s license, and my kind driver was confused,
“Huh? You have to renew your license?”
“Yeah, about every 5 years. When do you have to renew yours?”
“Um…2062?”
“WHA…?”
It’s true. The Slovenian government issues driver’s licenses good for 70 years, and my CS host’s license has a printed expiration date of January, 2062. Hilariously, it includes a photo. What good a 50-year-old photograph will do when she gets pulled over in 2050 I couldn’t begin to fathom. I just hope the licenses are also valid for hovercars.
I told one of my American friends about the Methuselah-esque Slovenian licenses, and his theory was that it was the Slovenian government’s way of positively asserting that they will exist in 2062. I guess I just can’t imagine what it would be like to hold a document with an expiration lifetime almost four times longer than the history of the nation-state that issued it.

From Koper, it was cheap and easy to catch a bus to Pula, Croatia. This was the first time on this trip I’d left the Shengen zone. The border guard who boarded the bus at the border (I just want to see how many variations of the word “board” I can get into once sentence), asked me if I was carrying any alcohol or tobacco, but he was bored by my books and computer equipment. I did get a passport stamp, finally!

I was in Pula for almost a week, but luckily it was mostly really boring so I should be able to cover it in one or two posts. Pula is a seaside summer vacation spot, and in November it’s a virtual ghost town. I stayed at a somewhat-depressing Youth Hostel about 3 km outside the city center. Most nights I was the only guest there, and the internet cost 30 Croatian kuna (about €4 or $6) per hour, so I didn’t pay for that. The hostel’s only redeeming values were its proximity to the beach (the water was freezing the one time I tried to swim) and the adorable, friendly kitten that lived there as well.

The only good thing about the hostel

I dropped emails to my hacker contacts, and then killed time waiting for them to get back to me by visiting the major sights in Pula. The best thing there is the extremely well-preserved Roman amphitheater. It’s smaller than the Colosseum in Rome, but it’s in much better condition, the pope never stole all the marble, and I felt like it actually gave a better sense of what a Roman amphitheater must’ve been like. In the summer months, they still hold concerts and theater productions there.

Pula’s Roman Amphitheater

Interior of the amphitheater

I also saw the Istrian historical museum, located in kind of a cool military fort on a hill in the center of town. The exhibits in the museum were a weird hodgepodge. There was an exhibit on shipbuilding, which made sense because the port of Pula is a center of shipbuilding, and besides tourism, the shipyards are the major industry in town. There was also an exhibit on the history of pharmacies, and a large display of souvenir pins, medals, teacups and other memorabilia sold by the Austro-Hungarian empire in order to help finance the First World War.

Istrian History Museum Fortress

On Monday, I’d gotten tired of waiting to hear back via email, so I just went over to the Rojc (pronounced “roytz”) building where the Monteparadiso Hacklab website indicated they were located.

The Rojc building is really crazy, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. First of all, it’s ENORMOUS. It’s the biggest building in Pula, by far. It might be like 2 or 3 million square feet, including all four floors and the basement. It was built as a military headquarters for the Austrian navy and later used by the Yugoslavian military until that ceased to exist. Later, it was used to house war refugees. After the refugees moved out, a few groups were given permission to use parts of the building: the city orchestra, some groups that had already been there providing humanitarian aid to refugees. Over time, other groups moved in as well, opening and squatting new sections of the building. Eventually, their status was normalized. Currently, groups don’t pay rent, but they do sign a contract with the city and have permission to be there.

Today, there exist a wide range of different people and groups using parts of the building. There’s environmental and human rights groups, a couple student bars, a dance club, music venues, the orchestra is still there, a lot of punk bands rehearse in the basement, an indoor climbing gym is upstairs, the economics faculty of the university use one part for offices and classrooms, there’s also rooms with cots where people can sleep after a late show. One kid I talked to was like, “The Rojc building is great. I go to class here, work out in the gym, go to a show and get drunk and then sleep it off, I never have to leave!” Even with everything going on, the majority of the building is still vacant.

Cthulhu devours a plane in the Rojc stairwell

To top it off, for reasons that I never quite figured out, in the parking lot outside the building is a fake American Indian tepee village. It’s like a little Native American theme park thing for kids. They had tepees and a campfire, totem poles and pony rides. The first night I was there, they were showing some old Western film projected on a screen. The focus seemed to be on fun, not any kind of historical or cultural accuracy. Half the staff were dressed up in cowboy costumes, and whereas a similar place in the USA would probably be playing fake Indian tribal music, this place played almost exclusively modern country-western music. I mentioned this to one kid I met later, and he was like, “Yeah, cowboys, indians, to us it’s all just the same thing.”

Playing cowboys and indians

I did eventually find the ex-hacklab through my patented technique of walking around asking people and triangulating a variety of vague “yeah, I think down that way somewhere” answers. The hacklab has now been converted into an “infoshop”, and it’s open Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights as a hangout for Pula’s punk/activist/radical youth. I did get the distinct feeling that one of the reasons the Watson people picked me is because I’m the kind of person who will barge into a room of Croatian punks uninvited and introduce myself.

Infoshop slash ex-hacklab

Their bookshelf was an interesting mix of “radical” texts, in English and Croatian, fairly serious-minded economic texts, some “fun reading” including Jane Eyre and Angels and Demons, and perhaps most surprisingly, creationist pablum in the form of The Edge of Evolution.

In this case simply showing up in person turned out to be the best practice. I met a bunch of the kids running the infoshop and they were generally pretty friendly and cool. They didn’t know much about the hacklab, but said they’d get in touch with Edgar, one of the hacklab founders for me and I could probably meet him if I came back on Wednesday.