Tales from Abroad: Couch Surfing

Couch surfing. You might have heard of it as a strange thing hippies do, maybe in the U.S. on an epic road trip or when backpacking Europe. Before I go on, please take this short quiz to find out if couch surfing is for you:
 
Yes or No:
 
(a) Are you okay with sleeping in someone else’s bed?
 
(b) Are you okay with sleeping with three of your friends in someone else’s bed?
 
(c) Are you okay showering in someone else’s shower?
 
(d) Are you okay showering in someone else’s shower that consists solely of a shower head in the corner of a bathroom with a clogged drain?
 
(e) Are you okay not having a towel to dry off with? (If the answer is no, it’s ok; you can bring your own towel.)
 
(f) Will you be okay when, after all this, two Greek girls show up?
 
(g) Are you literally ready for anything? Including not knowing where you are going to sleep that night?
 
If you answered yes to each of these questions, you are officially ready to couch surf.
 
Now for some background: Couchsurfing.org is a website started by a Scottish man who wanted to connect the world. The website’s motto is “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time.” Setting up an account is totally free. When you do, you choose a username and put in however much of your real name you want to. Then, you choose if you’re looking to “surf” or “host.” As a traveler, you click “surf.”
 
 Depending on where you are trying to go, you may have a very limited choice of people to “surf” with. This is how my friends and I ended up staying with Benior in Paris. We were running out of travel money and needed to couch surf to save money on a hostel. Hostels are rumored to be super cheap, but an acceptable hostel is usually around $35 a night, and any hostel is always between $23 and $42. So, a month-long spring-break Eurotrip extravaganza is only made possible, for most of us, by the amazing institution of couch surfing. My friend found 22-year-old Benior in Paris, and he seemed like a nice guy, so we decided to roll with it. Also, nobody else agreed to host us.
 
We arrived in Paris in the early afternoon, aftertaking a 7:30 a.m. bus ride for 9 hours from Amsterdam to Paris. The bus trip was nice. My two friends (both coincidentally named Anna: Anna R. and Anna W.) and I consumed an entire wheel of brie cheese, a bottle of red wine, a liter of guava juice, a box of melba toast, one tomato each and a container of hummus. We had a 45-minute layover in Brussels, and nobody looked at my passport during the entire journey, including when we embarked and disembarked the bus. We took the Paris Metro to Benoir’s house in the 18th arrondissement, in the northernmost section of Paris. 
When we got there, nobody answered the door buzzer. So we waited. And waited… until a girl came up to the door. We asked her if she knew Benior. After a few seconds, she admitted that she was his ex-girlfriend who was there to clear out of the apartment. She said that she did not know where Benior was, but if he failed to host us, we could call her. She gave us the extra set of keys. Otherwise, she refused to take responsibility for Benoir’s actions.
 
Well, okay, we thought, we have keys! Life is weird, but good. Benior’s apartment was tiny but beautiful in its own bohemian way: living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. One bed, but we were three small girls and could fit. The shower was the only disgraceful part; it was simply a shower head, a drain and a curtain. We didn’t remember to pack our own towel, but I had a washcloth which the three of us shared to dry off. We were not overjoyed, but we agreed that when you’re showing in the house of a guy you’ve never met, you have no grounds for complaint. The apartment had yellow uncovered bulbs as lighting, a record player with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Credence Clearwater Revival amongst piles of vinyl and a makeshift wooden plank as a bookcase with a stack of philosophy books in French. Needless to say, we were in Paris, and we were excited. When Benoir came back, we would try to be friends with him, but until then, we were taking over his home.
 
We got supplies from the supermarket and went to cook dinner. We had a lovely floor picnic and were getting ready to go out and explore Paris at night when we heard the buzzer. Oh no, we thought, did we lock the guy out of his own house? We pushed the intercom button and a girl said, “Hello! We are couch surfers from Greece!”
 
What? No. We’re the couch surfers here! What’s going on? 
We let the two girls up. We agreed if it had been guys buzzing up, we would have told them to fend for themselves, but we couldn’t leave fellow girls out in the cold. When the two girls come up, they told us they were Greek and lived in an Island near Athens. They are only 18 and 19 and both studied Industrial Design. The Annas and I had a powwow in the bedroom. We agreed that the Greek girls were very nice, but where in God’s name were they going to sleep? We needed to find Benior.
 
We had Benoir’s number, but my cell phone had lost connection in Brussels and never got it back. (I later learned my cell phone carrier, Vodafone, doesn’t have automatic service in French-speaking countries). Anna R. had an overpriced international plan and sent Benoir a text. We waited with baited breath… until he answered! In broken English, he explained that his new roommate was playing a concert at the “Be There” Bar and we were invited to come.
 
New roommate!? We had to find this Benoir guy! So at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, we headed out to find the “Be There” Bar in Paris. When we got there, we all introduced ourselves. He explained that after his girlfriend left, he clicked “accept” on anyone who asked to couch surf with him because he had the space. He didn’t realize the dates would overlap. We stood outside the bar awkwardly for a few seconds. Neither Benoir nor his roommate spoke perfect English, and none of us could carry a conversation in French. Eventually we realized that we were all going to have to fit in that tiny apartment. Where? How? Who knows. We’d make it work.
 
It was also Benoir’s friend Alex’s birthday. Pubs close early on Sunday in Paris (rather understandably) so we all agreed to just get some wine and party in the apartment, since most of us were going to end up there at the end of the night anyway.
 
The rest of the night was awesome. When bedtime came, a little before 5 a.m., four of us girls shared the bed, sleeping in a row lengthwise, curled up or with our feet hanging off the end. The couch pulled out into a futon, and a bunch of other people ended up there. I wouldn’t say I had my best night’s sleep, but it was definitely a fun night and one I will always remember.
 
The next day, the Greek girls found somewhere else to couch surf, and Benoir left to work at a music festival, freeing up the house quite a bit. We still had the set of keys and the freedom to roam Paris. At the time, it was a slightly stressful experience, but in retrospect it was amazing. My one qualm was forgetting to bring a towel, but I’ve learned from my mistakes for my next round of couch surfing: FLORENCE AND ROME!