I sat in a McDonalds across the street from the Brussels Stock Exchange. There I could take advantage of free wireless Internet while waiting for Pieter, a 21-year-old Belgian I’d only seen in photographs and talked to through brief online messages.
Though I had never met Pieter in person, I’d be staying with him for the next five days in Brussels. As he explained in a text message, he was running a bit late.
“I’m wearing a dark blue and white stripped T-shirt and dark blue shorts,” he wrote in a follow-up text message.
I quickly spotted him as he walked through the door five minutes later. After a brief introduction, we walked along Brussels’ cobblestoned roads back to his one-room flat.
Encounters such as this one have become routine since I left my friend’s house in Bonn, Germany, more than two weeks ago. Now they’re one of my favorite things about traveling.
But why stay with complete strangers instead of in hostels or budget hotels? The answer is two-fold.
The first reason seems obvious enough. Six weeks of travel in Europe would be well outside my budget without a certain perk: free accommodations.
Even hostels can cost upwards of 20 Euros a night. That’s more than I typically spend on all other daily travel costs combined. A six-week excursion would become little more than a three-week vacation if I had to pay for a bed every night.
So instead I couch surf. Simply put, I ask complete strangers whom I find online if I can stay with them for several nights before moving onto another city where I repeat the process.
Yet this oversimplification fails to accurately describe couch surfing. It’s the impression many people get when I tell them about courchsurfing.com, a free hospitality service website with nearly two million members. And it’s why most people hesitate to sign up — it sounds dangerous.
Dispelling this common misbelief is at the core of the second reason I couchsurf. William Butler Yeats’ famous quote I spotted on the wall of a small Irish Pub in Hamburg summarizes it best: “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met.”
With that in mind, it becomes apparent that couch surfing is far more than a free bed. It’s an exponentially growing network of friends. More than 17,000 people signed up last week alone.
Saving money is why I started couch surfing; meeting new people is why I continue. Sure there are plenty of people to meet at hostels, but such fleeting relationships have a short shelf life in comparison.
Though I’m considered a newcomer by couch-surfing standards — I just surfed my tenth couch — I can’t imagine traveling any other way.
To quote Yeats again: “And say my glory was I had such friends.”
(Disclaimer: I’m ashamed to say that as I write this column I sit in the lobby of a hostel. The one downside of couch surfing: sometimes it’s not always easy to find a host.)