Blogging
From Abroad

Okay, this posting is all about couchsurfing. Doesn’t sound familiar to you? Never mind, you’re not alone. The internet has lots of applications – some of them useful, some of them questionable. One of the best in my humble opinion is the webpage www.couchsurfing.com.

Its dedication is to enable easy travelling and exploring new cultures. How? It is accomplished by providing a platform for people who search a free place to stay and for people who offer such a thing. Now, why would somebody do this – let foreign people stay in their houses or apartments. I don’t know, but years ago people decided to just do exactly that. On the couchsurfing wikipedia webpage you can learn more about the history of this project. I added some pictures to illustrate my experiences so far.

The internet acted as an accelerant for this system, allowing searching and finding hosts and places to stay throughout the world within seconds. And nowadays, you find in some city thousands of couchsurfers, many of them offering a place to stay, some of them currently on a journey themselves. I just had a look and found 25 couchsurfers in Morgantown.

But it’s probably best explained with an example. On the next weekend we are going to visit Philadelphia and New York City. Since we can stay in my friend Colin family’s house in Philadelphia we only need to find accommodation in New York. Luckily it is easy to modify the search results to your constraints. We were searching a host within Manhattan, allowing at least 4 persons to stay.

I got a few results and looked on those people’s profiles to find hosts that fit to us, like students or young professionals. I already contacted two of them and it looks as if we found one perfectly situated near the train station where we’re going to arrive. And it’s free. Isn’t that hilarious?

On the other hand, you should of course not just take these opportunities, but also give. To keep this system running and expanding, you also have to provide a place to stay to foreigners. But how can you trust them? couchsurfing.com puts a considerable effort to verify their member’s trustworthy. Therefore you should review every couchsurfing experience you already had and state if you liked it. Also, you can define friendships with other members were you can set a certain level of trust you have to this person.

So if you are a host and you get a request of a person, you just look at his/her profile. If this person has some friends that trust her and already made some good couchsurfing experiences, you can assume that there won’t be any problems. To speak for myself, I had only positive experiences, although I am quite a newbie. Altogether I spent six nights at three different hosts.

Of course there are some things you could consider to be drawbacks:
• Never expect hotel room standard. Most of your hosts will be young and won’t have the prettiest apartments
• Sometimes you share your room with several other couchsurfers or even with your host. So your backpack should always contain earplugs.
• At my stay in Vancouver, we share our room with 10 other surfers. Altogether there were 15 persons in this apartment. And one bathroom? If such thing happens, just stay calm and use your bathroom time wisely ;)

And now the advantages:
• Free accommodation (!!!)
• Meeting open-minded people from all over the world
• Your always can ask you host what to see and where to go. He’s an expert in the place where you just stay and quite often s/he will undertake something with you.
• Being part of a growing society of couchsurfers

As you see, I am very enthusiastic about this project. And I would be glad, if some of you, my fellow readers, start to explore the world for free. Go on www.couchsurfing.com and create a profile now.