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.

This girl didn't know who Joyce was or why some random guy wanted a photo with him

One thing I noticed is that poverty is much more visible in Croatia than it was in Slovenia. Whereas in Slovenia, I don’t think I saw one homeless beggar in my whole time there, I saw them regularly in Pula. Much of the population of Pula seems to be elderly pensioners just barely scraping by. I was talking to a couple of young Croatians at a coffee bar/internet cafe, and they felt the difference was the effect of war.
“You know, the war barely touched Slovenia, but there was war here in Croatia only 5 or 10 years ago. You can still feel it in the air,” suggested one girl
“Not in the air. In the people. You see it in the people,” corrected her friend.

I'm pretty sure somebody lives here

Other people I talked to felt that the fault lay with the Croatian economy. After explaining the grant I’m traveling on, one guy I was talking to reflected, “You see, that’s the great thing about America. Somebody can get money just to study something. Here in Croatia, there’s no money for anything. The government blames the problems on the worldwide economic crisis, but it’s just an excuse. The economic crisis in Croatia began ten years ago.”

Whatever the causes, conspicuous poverty is a tough thing for me to deal with. My natural inclination is always to give money to beggars, especially if it’s the amount I’d piss away on a cappuccino later anyway. I know that it’s ultimately sort of futile. There will always be more beggars, and I have no way of telling who really needs it and who doesn’t, who’s going to buy food and who’s going to buy booze, but it’s still hard for me to say ‘no’.
I’ve decided I’m going to do some research and give a lump-sum donation to reputable charity that helps the homeless. I hope the Watson Foundation will consider allaying my liberal guilt a worthy use of some small fraction of their money. It’s either that, or little amounts given away in dribs and drabs where it won’t do any good.

Wednesday evening, I returned to the Rojc building to meet with Edgar. He surprised me by being older than I’d expected. I’d sort of assumed he’d be the same age or slightly older than the infoshop kids (late teens/early 20s), but he seemed to be in his late20s/early 30s. He said he and his friends had started the hacklab around 2001, after returning home from university in Zagreb. It was designed to be a place to educate people about technology and free software and cater to the political activist set. In 2004 they held a pretty large Transhack meeting there. He said Richard Stalman had come to visit (for non-geeks: this is sort of like John Lennon coming to hear your garage band). John Zerzan, had also paid a visit, although why an anarcho-primitivist would want to visit a hacklab is beyond me.

However, over time, it became clear that the hacklab wasn’t serving its intended purpose. Most of the visitors were teenagers from the juvenile delinquent house down the road, who were fond of stealing the cheap mice for no reason beyond wanting to steal things. Edgar said theonly other users were Roma or the very poor. Providing access to technology for undeserved groups is a worthy goal of its own, but it wasn’t the original goal of the hacklab, and Edgar said he was tired of feeling like he was babysitting delinquent teens and trying to explain to them that stealing from a community hacklab was only screwing themselves over.

Edgar in the hacklab office/storage room

Edgar said he felt like Pula probably just isn’t a big enough town to support the hacklab. There aren’t enough hackers or enough activists around to justify it. Like many other people I’ve talked to, he noted the widespread availablity of cheap, highspeed ADSL as a factor in the death of the hacklab. He told me that MaMa in Zagreb is doing much better, but he thought they had sold out a little bit by being non-ideological and setting up a commercial web cafe to finance the hacker/cultural stuff.

On Thursday, I talked to Ivica, another one of the founding members of the Pula hacklab. Another contact who knows both Edgar and Ivica told me that Edgar “will tell you the dark side” and Ivica “will tell you the bright side,” and indeed, Ivica did seem to have a much more positive take on the status of the hacklab.He told me that he didn’t feel like it was an ex-hacklab so much as a hibernating hacklab. He noted that as an infoshop, the hacklab was still providing technology access to activists and artists, alibeit in a more closed way than originally intended. He also emphasized that the hacklab people still did hardware recycling, fixing up old computers and giving them away for free, and still ran webservers for many of the groups based at the Rojc building.

He did concede that perhaps the hacker scene was too small in Pula. He told me that there were 15 or 20 people on the hacklab’s internal mailing list, but that only about 4 or 5 of them were the kind of people who could easily install and configure a Linux system without assistance. He echoed Edgar’s frustration with “yelling at kids for looking at too much porn”.

He also gave me a little bit of background on the origins of the Monteparadiso collective. Apparently it started at another Austrian fort on top of Monteparadiso Hill (almost every place in Pula has both an Italian and a Croatian name; there are 7 hills in Pula [just like Rome], which is why the Romans built an amphitheater there). It’s in a residential neighborhood, and the area teens used to hang out there. Eventually they bought gates and locks and installed them to keep out drug addicts. Ivica told me a funny story about how one day the cops came by the fort and were like, “What are you doing?” and one of the kids told him, “Oh, it’s ok, we have the keys,” and the cops accepted that and went away.

They started organizing their own DIY punk shows and festivals, which became a pretty big deal. Eventually they outgrew the Monteparadiso fort, and moved their collective to the Rojc building. The hacklab was the “Monteparadiso Hacklab” because it grew out of this collective. Ivica was kind of wistful about that, saying that “punk got to Pula 20 years late, same with the DIY movement; with the hacklab, we felt like for the first time we were part of a movement at the same time it was happening everywhere else.”

The next day, I went up and saw the old Monteparadiso fort, before catching a bus to Zagreb.

Where it all began

Best. Clubhouse. Ever.

Zagreb was cool, much livelier than Pula. The group at MaMa was really awesome. They are very much less ideological than the people in Pula, but that allows them to be more inclusive and they have a great community. They have a thing called “Skill Sharing” every Saturday, where people come and hang out and show each other how to do cool stuff. There’s a pretty diverse (in terms of age and gender) group of 20-50 or so people who come frequently. They even have a few people in their 50s and 60s who AREN’T old-school hackers, but rather people who learned computers/free software later in their lives. I think that’s really cool.

Saturday Skill Sharing

Oh, and after the meetings, everyone goes out for pizza together. Everyone at MaMa was really friendly and welcoming. They were even willing to switch a whole table of conversation from Croatian to English just for my  benefit. Probably the funniest comment was Marcell talking about people who know just enough about computers to seem like they really know a lot about computers, they’ll drop a phrase like “I had to recompile the kernel,” or “flash the BIOS,” and if you never actually ask them more questions or have a real discussion with them, you’d assume they were totally 1337. He said it reminded him of a guy who’d been teaching him yoga and meditation: At first, Marcell thought the guy was the smartest person in the world. He hardly ever spoke, and when he did, he’d dispense really wise aphorisms. Then after a while, he realized the guy was actually really dumb, and just spoke in nothing but wise aphorisms.

One guy told me he thought it was harder to become a good hacker these days, because lots of the small, but tricky problems have already been solved. These are the kinds of problems that one person just starting out might work on.

I also went to a couple museums in Zagreb. The technical museum was pretty cool. They had a lot of really good exhibits on different subjects. My favorites were probably the section with very early computers, a whole room full of very intricate and informative models of heat engines (everything from a refrigerator to a Saturn V rocket) by Ivo Kolin, and also a big exhibit on Nikola Tesla, including live demonstrations of some of his inventions.

1.21 gigawatts!

I also saw the naïve art museum, which I really liked. I’d gotten kind of burnt out on art museums in Italy, but this one had some really cool stuff, and it was very different from anything I’d seen elsewhere. I especially liked the pieces by Ivan Rabuzin.

Ivan Rabuzin: On the Hills - Primeval Forest, Image Courtesy Wikimedia Foundation, licensed under GNU Free Documentation License (I saw this in person, but Wikipedia had a better photo)

After Zagreb, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I had a 20 hour layover in Budapest. I went to see the Memento Park, where the Hungarians dumped all the communist statues after the fall of communism there. It was the main thing that I’d missed in Budapest the last time I was there. The park is pretty far outside of the city, and getting there takes about an hour. Once you get there, it’s also kind of expensive by Hungarian standards. The irony of communist iconography being turned into a money-making tourist trap was not lost on me. What better way to remember a morally bankrupt, repressive government than with your very own McLenin’s t-shirt?

McLenin's or East Park t-shirt

So yeah, the Momento Park was a good way to kill time, and it would’ve been pretty cool if it were 70% closer and 50% cheaper.

The rearguard of the revolution?

I went out for drinks with a couple people I met the last time I was in Hungary (the bar had swings instead of seats!) and then went out and slept in the airport (which was much warmer than the one in Milan). My flight left for Warsaw at 7 am. In Poland I emailed some developers and white-hat security hacker types. I’ll probably meet with them when I get back there. Yesterday (!) I caught a train from Warsaw to Vienna, Austria for the Roboexotica festival.