Looking for an alternative to trendy lounges and mindless club music? Need allies for your next political action? Looking for a free place to crash? Head to CRK, Wrocław’s counter-culture headquarters. In a dodgy neighbourhood north of the city centre, across an isolated quad, buried between some forgotten back-lot apartment buildings, the ‘Cultural Resuscitation Centre’ (Centrum Reanimacji Kultury) has been breathing fresh air into the iron lung of Poland’s conservative culture and pissing on the shoe of the powers-that-be for the last eight years. Walk through the gates of CRK on a Saturday night and you’ve discovered a home grown scene of do-it-yourself debauchery. Hippies, hipsters, artists, activists, runaways, crusty punks, drunks and dogs swill vodka and smoke roll-ups together in the secluded courtyard of this abandoned tenement, surrounded by righteous murals, car parts, bicycles, empty bottles, rotting sofas and chairs. First squatted in 2000, this semi-legal site has been expanding its scope and activity within the community since its embattled inception. Already hosting some 150 concerts in the small live venue on the left-side of the courtyard, CRK has developed a renowned reputation that regularly draws acts from as far as the US to its stage. From hardcore to punk to post rock to avant-garde, it’s not the music as much as the independent, anti-commercial aesthetic and message that matters here. Across the courtyard you’ll find Cafe ‘Utopia’ – a quiet meeting place and art-cafe by day; now filled with pierced punk queens, dreadlocked pacifists, chair-kicking teenagers and aging activists downing dirt-cheap drinks and moving madly to energetic ethnic music and Polish hip-hop until the power cuts out (which it did in true squat spirit while we were there). And while it’s 4 am and these kids aren’t shoving off until this rig goes live again with Goran Bregovic’s ‘Kalashnikov,’ it’s not all counter-culture chaos at CRK. On the contrary, you’ve gotta have a lot of respect for the projects being organised between bouts of revelry. Tomorrow morning the debris (human and otherwise) will be cleared and the communal kitchen will start cooking. CRK’s ‘Food Not Bombs’ program has been running for the last ten years providing hearty meals for everyone in need of one in nearby Staszica Park (F-2), where every Sunday at 15:00 hungry locals line up with their own flatware for a hot meal. CRK is also home to an art gallery, silk-screening workshop, music studio, internet radio program and literary magazine, as well as providing a backdrop for countless demonstrations, film screenings, meetings, readings, exhibitions, lectures and workshops for children. More information can be found on their website, as well as the events posters and flyers all over the city. If you want to mingle with Wrocław’s alternative youth, this is the place to do it. BYO booze and get busy.