CouchSurfing, introduction to Anarchy!
I got inspired by @somethingrandom to create an article about this amazing concept called Couchsurfing. Many of you have heard of it before but im sure some havent already but dont worry, your about to now!
This website has been running since 2004 which is already over a decade long and the principle of it is that when you are not traveling yourself then you can offer to host other travellers , and then when you want to go travel you have already references and experience to go and this time be a guest.
Free things are cool right?!
If one of your reasons not to be traveling right now when its a burning desire that you will someday do it in the future and are having thoughts on finance, saying why you cant do it like "When you have saved enough" or "One last wage packet and then ill go" then this should help you see that you dont really need to save as much as you think you do.
I joined CouchSurfing when somebody told me about it, I cant even remember when now but it was 8 years ago I joined up. Im trying to remember the first time I used it, I think it was when I stayed with some people in cave and we put my van on the site to offer to back packers and some free space we had in the cave. Oh the Cave!
What a great concept! In total I have easily hosted over 200 people, maybe 300 or even more. Looking now at my profile there, it seems 300+. I actually didnt need to stay with anyone until I left Spain and had decided I didnt need the van anymore so I left it at a special place I can call home and go to anytime. I cant even remember where I was heading too hitchhiking and cant remember even if I had a dog then either. Dam this is going back some! I got invited to stay in Utrecht, Holland from a woman who had a really interesting profile and was also alternative as in she didnt live mainstream. We had a great few days and it was an awesome time.
Ive actually only ever stayed as a guest on Couchsurfing around 20 times. Most were unplanned after a hitchhike or ride share in a car. I havent really ever used planes, trains and coaches to move around the last years, mostly I would use a carshare website but they all want to be booked by bankcard and this is going against the way im living and so lately i use a bicycle since hitchhiking with 2 dogs dosnt work.
The longest I stayed with couchsurfing was 3 weeks in Zurich, Switzerland with some crazy students whilst I was on a mission to raise cash for solar panels in Spain for a small project I started there. That was definitely the longest I stayed with someone.
As for hosting, wow. When we had the place in Spain open to guests, was quite ridiculous, theres probably still some couchsurfers there actually. In Spain I had people staying for around 3 months haha, was a fucking cool year! Over 150 people came in total at one time or another and stayed and even people had come from word of mouth. Its great to start something and then just run off!
Perfect if its the "money thing" thats stopping you from changing the way you are living for now.
Everytime I have been a guest at someones house I offer to teach them about Dumpsterdiving and if they dont want to come with, I would go get food from the trash somewhere, come back show them and then cook a meal as to say thankyou for sharing their home with me. And usually people offer when they come stay to cook our help me cook and are very nice people. You can proberbly guess that im pritty direct on my profile there and people see that it will definatly be a very different experience instead of walking into an appartment full of Ikea products like the most people do on Couchsurfing. There are though all kinds of offers of hospitality to find also from tree houses to boats being offered on CouchSurfing.
Obviously Im male and so when I write my views and opinions about couchsurfing, im limited to one side of it although I can see both sides. Ill touch on the stigma thats attached to couchsurfing, and that is SEX. There its said.
Yes, there is this thing of hosts and guests sharing more than just hospitality and its called chemistry. Young adults are travelling more and more and more and more people are becoming very open with sexualiy and sexual freedom, and monogomy is dying out among backpackers and travellers. Its bound to happen on many occasions if one person is travelling they ask to come stay after judging your profile, so you see their profile and you judge them- are they nice, positive etc. I dont want to get into the phycology of attraction hahaha.
It does happen alot, I have put a post to say that im looking for a place in a certain city and ended up having sexual chemistry with the woman who had offered to hosted me if its no big deal between you both then why not just enjoy it!
70-80% of the requests for me as a man- are women asking to come stay. Its actually quite sad that if I apply to stay with a guy, they say yes like 10% of the time. And if a woman says they can host me then thats great but not often. So for males who have rastas and dogs, and a brutally honest profile on there, you dont get many offers from people to go stay, best to travel with a tent and a good sleeping bag when you work it out ;)
Ive only ever had one strange host who if I was a woman id have felt very uncomfortable, that was a guy in Bordeux who offered me and a girlf-friend to stay there. Wired Guy. So sure there are horror stories of CouchSurfing, but ive only ever had really great experiences, I enjoy hosting people more and to have very different people form all over coming to stay for free is just awesome. I have actually very good friends who I first met on couchsurfing and who I bump into again on travels.
You can also search you home town to meet other travellers and see whos looking for a couch. also there are many events that you can join on the website whilst searching the city you want. We recently had a woman from brazil come and stay and before that 2 german guys just on a roadtrip in a car. really the amount of people you meet is amazing, and if you yourself cant travel for whatever reason, you can get some multi culti in your own home by hosting travellers!
Of course If anyone needs a free place to stay near Oslo then just ask me on here, I wont link my couchsurfing with my steemit account :) We actually have a cabin a few minutes from here that we offer to whoever needs a place.
All images used are from searching couchsurfing and then images on google and anyway there is no person around to understand anything about legal bullshit
Go check it out and join up, its free of course!
Feel free to read up on my adventure when I finally left society in a van- totally broke of course, part 8 will be done this week sometime :)
Part 1- An Escape Pod To A New Life
Part 2-Waves Goodbye
Part 3- Lost In BCN
Part 4- Still In Barceloca
Part 5- Finally Able To Move On
Part 6- Tarragona, Spain
Part 7- Black Jesus And The Animal Graveyard
And also how I avoid paying rent to live in Houses by Occupying unused places!
The Workshop Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Eviction, and a lot of luck with the police!
Now, "CouchSurfing" is a registered trademark and a commercial company, I wouldn't call it a concept. To call it a concept is can in my opinion be compared with calling Twinings a category of drinks, or using the word "Ob" on the tampon concept.
The idea of home hospitality is age-old, I think Cervas was the first, though they have grown fairly obsolete after the age of Internet.
I've been hosting since 1998 (first through my own web page, later the Hitch Hikers Home Base, then Hospitality Club, now through the BeWelcome website), but have never been member of CouchSurfing ... just because ... I didn't like the name :p
I did this many years ago, I used to chuck who ever I stayed with $20 for a bed or a couch(usually a couch) a feed, shower in the morning and some entertainment for the evening.
Was way better than sleeping in a car
thats alot of diesel or gas money! what country are you in by the way?
Yeah but it worked out well, one of my friends who I usually stayed with would pour me a few drinks also, entertainment ;)
Im in Australia, hbu
Norway but english.
Ahh cool. that's one great thing about steemit, distance is no barrier.
In one particular circumstance have I been passing money to the host - when my employer otherwise would have paid for a hotel room - so the deal with the employer was that I'd get half the costs of a hotel room covered if I could do without, and those money I would try to pass on to the host. In one of those cases my host flatly refused receiving any money.
Yeah quite often my friends would refuse the money so I would buy a 4 pack of alcaholic bevvys and give them two. They never said no to them lol.
Awwwwwww at seeing my name! I've used couchsurfing in USA, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and will soon be using it to travel through the Baltics next month! Am in Holland now, will head to Estonia in April. Probably cant afford to hit Norway this trip =(
But totally agree with ya about making good friends on couchsurfing. And now I always have a free place to stay no matter where I am! Can't wait to write my version of CS soon!
My first trip as a guest was perhaps in 1996, I was hitch hiking around in Norway visiting people I'd met on Fidonet.
I've had some bad hosting experiences as well - but amazingly few, considering how many people we've been hosting.
Sometimes the chemistry simply doesn't fit. One thing I dislike is people that are just considering such offers as free lodging, an alternative to staying in a hotel. We've had guests we haven't even been seeing - sleeping when we go to work and coming "home" after we've gone to bed.
Some of those folks also make efforts to "disturb" the host as little as possible, if they get a room allocated they stay in the room, they don't participate in our meals but make their own meals instead, without sharing.
Sometimes we find that we simply does not like our guest, for various reasons. It's OK when the guest is staying only for some few nights - but it's horrible when we've appointed that the guests should stay for for several weeks and we learn on the first day already that we really don't like this person. Even worse, having ... ahem ... homeless people that have no plans on what to next, where to go or when to go. I think once or twice we've had to ask a guest to move out. We have had guests staying for more than half a year, it works out if the chemistry fits.
One of our best hosting experience was with some Singaporean-Chinese ladies coming to my home town, Tromsø, during the Chinese New Year holiday. They had never seen snow before, and there they came to our totally white landscape, having problems standing upright already as soon as they got out from the airport! Their stay was surely very exotic for them - they enjoyed it so much, they came back in the Chinese New Year two years later!
I've several times experienced some sort of cultural barriers with Asians and Chinese - like once we were travelling around in China for two weeks. We didn't manage to find hosting that time (difficult when being a family, and I only cared checking the BW site), but we did interact with some Chinese on the way. On our last day we decided to join a guided tour group, so we ended up being in the company with some old Australian retired people. It was wonderful being able to have some "small talk"-sessions with some "Western" people again! Hm, I'm digressing again.
Now those Singaporeans, they were totally on our wavelength - our humor was very much aligned, we were laughing a lot with them during their stay - though we were probably very much unaligned on politics. They were working in a copyright-enforcement-agency, obviously I didn't talk any politics with them, or the good vibes could have crashed completely and totally :-)
Hahaha I'm Singaporean (though I live in New Zealand), but I'm always happy to hear good things being said about Singaporeans!