Couchsurfers really do get everywhere

So, let's pick this blog up again.

Landed in Toronto yesterday afternoon, more or less on schedule, and with all of my bags present and correct - a first for my international trips since covid lockdowns.

On the train into the city, I got chatting with the guy who had moved over so I could sit - S., a Dane. He turned out to be a fellow couchsurfer, and had a layover of a few hours before heading home. 

We walked around the city for a bit before settling on a craft beer place for a drink and a bite to eat (some of the taps and pipes are shown in the picture).

What are the chances? Ok, a random stranger who starts talking to you about travel likely has a higher probability of being a CSer than the probability across the general population, but still. 

And I have finally got an explanation of the game with sticks that I saw in Århus when I was travelling there nearly 20 years ago (wow, has it really been that long?). It's called the King's Game. I did not ask why, as I got distracted by an explanation about the rules.

Off again!

It has been a long time since I have had a proper unplanned trip, and a long time since I have couchsurfed properly.

I am leaving the country on Sunday, bound for Spain in the first instance, and I will get a little bit of both. Well, the second half of my trip is now pretty planned, and two weeks is not really long enough to be completely unscripted - but it's more than I've done for some time.

Well, ok, even the first few days are now pretty locked in (but I do like to arrive on a new continent with my first night's accommodation secured so there is that). I have just found a host for my first two nights in Barcelona (or Barna, as my host reliably tells me locals call it), and I have another host outside the city for my third night. Plus a few additional CSers who would like to meet up while I am there.

I am looking forward to this so much.

Yeeehaaa!

An article about couchsurfing was just emailed to me by a colleague (to whom I may have mentioned couchsurfing once or twice...).

I find the tone a bit weird (especially of the captions to the photos), but hey, so what!

Maybe it shows, but I'm getting really excited about heading off again soon.

ETA: And another one! (Thanks Nat, whom I have yet to convince to join couchsurfing...)

No, I'm not going to link every article about couchsurfing here, don't worry. It's just adding to my current excitement.

A rest in Trieste

Sorry for the break - I've now moved into a place with no ADSL connection, and I can't upload anything at work, so updating is going to have to happen when I get myself to somewhere where there's a free wifi connection. Or something.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post about Trieste for a while now, but kept getting side-tracked. Trieste is where I had my first couchsurfing experience. I stayed with D. and his "family" - aka his flatmates and the random people who hung out at their flat.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon with only D.'s address. Well, I had his phone number, too, but that's beside the point... D. hadn't given me any real directions to his place from the station (on the basis that once you found his street, it was remarkably easy to find his place, and he said that everyone would know where his street was), and I hadn't had a problem with this when we'd been exchanging emails, on the basis that I'm usually pretty good at finding my way somewhere using a map.

In my experience, I'd always been able to find free maps at the train stations.

You can guess what's coming, right? Yep, no free maps at Trieste train station.

So I asked a few people if they knew where D.'s street was. In my very bad Italian, which I've described before.

Turned out I had the pronunciation of D.'s street wrong (although that doesn't excuse the guy for whom I wrote it down). This was something that I encountered again and again throughout Europe. If you don't speak the language of the country you're in, it's often easier not to bother trying to say anything in that language at all, because people seem not to be used to hearing non-speakers of their language try. As a result, they're not used to hearing weird pronunciations or oddly substituted words. I think that in English-speaking countries (especially in tourist cities), we're more used to trying to figure out what someone might be looking for. Then again, a street name might be more obscure than a tourist attraction, so maybe that's all it was.

I spent a while looking for the tourist information office. However, every time I followed the signs towards it, I'd lose the signs. I gave up. I finally found it the next day; it would have been closed by the time I arrived anyway.

Eventually I followed some signs to a three-star hotel, on the basis that they would most likely have (1) maps and (2) someone who spoke (at least enough) English. I was right on both counts. Happily, the hotel was closer to where I wanted to go than the station. I had at least chosen the right direction!

D.'s "family" were very warm and welcoming, and I was adopted as a temporary sister. Which meant I spent the weekend being Looked After by a group of Italian men.

(For those of you who know how I would normally react to this: you'll be pleased to know that I accepted it in the spirit it was offered. Besides, it's kind of nice once in a while when you're travelling by yourself. But I couldn't live like that!)

And I was very pleased to find out that Italian men cook (well, the ones I met did - and very well, at that! - and they told me that this is standard behaviour).

We walked around the town that Friday night, bought gelato at the best gelato place in town, and I learnt a lot about the history of the town and the area. The discussions of linguistics that we started that night continued throughout the whole weekend. I don't remember all the details that the guys told me about the town, but I remember enough that I could bore you if I wasn't careful, so I'll just say this: Trieste was part of the last bit of what we now know as Italy to be joined to Italy - after WWI. Before that, it was part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary - and a major sea port for the Empire. Many government buildings were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a lot of these survive (indeed, a lot of them are still used for government purposes). They give the town a very Viennese flavour.

An interesting linguistic note: the local dialect is more closely related to Slovenian than to Italian.

So, some photos. I have quite a few from Trieste that I like, but I'll just put a few up now. They were all taken on the Saturday, the day after I arrived. I re-visited the places we had walked the night before.

Fountain in the Piazza dell'Unità d'Italia


Random photo of the Theatre


A very old church which is quite close to ...


The Duomo


And Mum, before you ask - yes, I did see the statue of Joyce, but I didn't take a photo.

Couchsurfing in Cologne: fresh mint tea and honey gummi bears

Apart from the cool couchsurfing stories, there's a direct connection between my experiences in Berlin and Cologne this time around - honey gummi bears.

I'll explain. In my post about Berlin I mentioned Bärenland, a rather cool shop on Schönhauser Allee devoted to all things gummi.

I had discovered honey gummi bears when I was in Germany doing the tourist-at-the-Weinachtsmarkt thing just before Christmas, and spending time with friends in various cities. I've got to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of normal gummi bears (although sour gummi fruits are pretty good). But honey gummi bears? These seriously rock my world. And apart from one packet from Munich, by the time I got to Berlin, it'd been 9 or 10 months since I'd had my last honey gummi bear hit. So when I found Bärenland I had to buy a couple of packets.

I hadn't finished the first when I got to Cologne, and I quickly discovered that S. was also a fan. It wasn't the only taste we shared.

But first, let me tell you how cool S. is even disregarding our common tastes.

S. plays guitar and sings and often goes busking. Or occasionally, she'll join one of her busking friends for a quick round of "In the jungle" (believe it or not, I joined in after taking this photo):



I had also been fairly indecisive about whether I would visit Cologne at all, and if so, exactly which one. First of all, S. was willing to accept me as a potential guest even though my profile was not as comprehensive as it could have been (eg I didn't have a photo). I did have quite a few references by that stage, so I guess that probably helped - it also helped that I had written TO S. rather than a general spam-type email AT her.

Once S. had established that she was willing for me to stay, she was also happy to put up with my flip-flopping as to which day I was arriving. And once we had the day sorted out, she was extremely patient with my one run-in with late trains. And then she even met me at the S-bahn stop.

Other shared tastes? The fantastic fresh mint (very spicy) from her garden, with which we made tea. Walking, especially randomly and especially at twilight - if you look very hard, you will see S. in this photo:



You can read a little more about our adventures on our melon tour in an earlier post. I'll just add that when in Cologne's CBD, I saw a shop selling Ben&Jerry's ice cream. I love Ben&Jerry's, particularly their cookie dough ice cream, so I bought a small carton of that. S. had never tried it before, and we discovered another shared taste.

So there wasn't anything extremely crazy; no stories I had to live up to about having spent three months in the Yucatan or anything like that. It was just a great day or so, hanging out with someone I really clicked with, someone I never would have met if it wasn't for couchsurfing.

When I was there, S. was talking about coming to Australia on a working holiday visa. I'm hoping she'll be in Melbourne when I am, so we can maybe take more melon tours, find a whole lot more shared tastes, perhaps find some more buskers to sing with, and generally have a lot of fun.

Couchsurfing!

Sorry for the long time between posts. I was going to post last weekend, and then suddenly I needed to move out of my flat (due to a build-up in tension between me and another flatmate). So I spent a lot of the weekend doing things relating to that.

Anyway, I've been promising myself for a while that I would write a post on couchsurfing, since it was such an integral part of my time in Europe and the US last year. I just wanted to double-check with a couple of people to make sure they didn't mind me posting about them. I've now done that, so welcome to the concept of

COUCHSURFING!

couchsurfing: v. to stay with random strangers whose details you find on a website. To find a huge amount of random kindness in the world. To see the "local" side of a city. Note: nowhere near as dodgy as it might seem at first glance, and probably safer than staying in hostels.

A little bit more detail: each member of couchsurfing has a profile (and you can choose to restrict viewing of your profile to other couchsurfing members only, if you choose). People often put quite a bit of detail into these profiles, including photos. As you come into contact with other couchsurfers, you can also write references for them, and they will write references for you. These do not have to be positive (although if you want to write a negative reference only because of personality clashes with someone, you are encouraged to either talk to them about it first, or just to write no reference at all). You get a sense of whether a person is telling the truth about themselves from these references. I only had one anywhere-near-negative experience with someone, and this was simply someone that I didn't click with. Everyone else I stayed with was fantastic.

Anyway, it's completely free, although you are encouraged to put back in what you can - whether it's giving something back directly to the person you're staying with (such as cooking them a meal, doing some cleaning, or whatever) or more generally (hosting people yourself, helping out at the collectives, being a CS ambassador and so on). But there is no obligation to do anything like this. There is certainly no obligation to host others. Since I got back to Australia I haven't been in a position to host anyone, but I have met up with a couple of people here in Canberra.

Ok, some specific stories.

The last post was about Berlin, and I mentioned in passing that this was one city where I had interesting couchsurfing experiences. I stayed with a Mexican guy there, Ig., who was living near Schönhauser Allee. He shared a flat with a German guy, A., who didn't know anything about couchsurfing. Ig. had never asked if it was ok; A. had made it clear from the start that he didn't mind if friends stayed over but Ig. had got the impression that it had to be friends only. So rather than try to convince A. about couchsurfing, he decided to give all his CS guests backstories as if they were friends. It got rather elaborate.

For example, my backstory: I had spent a few months at the University of the Yucatan the year before. This is where I had met Ig. I'd been on an exchange program studying.... archaeology. Fortunately A. wasn't the sort of person to ask too many questions about what someone knows. It was quite easy to get him talking about his own field. Luckily. Since I have absolutely no knowledge of archaeology, Spanish, or the sort of local knowledge one picks up when one lives in a city.

As luck would have it, A. got home the first night I was there just as Ig. and I were talking about couchsurfing. To cover up the break in our conversation, Ig. suddenly started talking about a professor we both supposedly knew. "Professor such-and-such was asking about you the other day," said Ig. "Oh yeah?" I answered. "How is ... sss... he?"

We continued the conversation, me making things up for all I was worth, some of them even making sense. I'm somewhat surprised A. didn't notice. Perhaps he did, and he was too polite to say anything. All I know is, had I been in his position, I certainly would have thought that something was going on, even if I didn't know quite what.

The events of the next few days would have made me even more suspicious. A couple of girls from Mexico were due to arrive the day after I did. Their backstory was easy to work out. One of them was to be the daughter of a work colleague of Ig.'s father - from the other side of the country, but that was ok. Her friend was just that, her friend. Ig.'s father had asked Ig. to take care of them like they were his sisters. No problem.

More tricky was the random Russian girl, AN., we met in the Tiergarten. We started talking to her because she was carrying a guitar around, and Ig. had been thinking about learning the guitar. As we chatted, we discovered she had nowhere to stay, and Ig. invited her to come back to his place. So we needed to work out a backstory for AN. Ig. decided she had been at the Yucatan the same time as I had been; he hadn't known her at the time but she and I had been mates. She knew that I was travelling around Europe and had only worked out the day before that she was going to be in Berlin at the same time as I was. The only issue was what she had studied.

"It's got to be linguistics," said Ig. "That - and archaeology - is the specialty at the Yucatan. That's why people go there on exchange!"
"Yeah, but A. doesn't know that. Besides, I don't know anything about linguistics! I know, why don't I say that I went to study the development of Mexico's economy - that'd make sense for a Russian who has a degree in economics."
"But people don't go to the Yucatan for economics! It's got to be linguistics!"

An executive decision was made to only tell A. if he actually saw AN. By the time I left Berlin a few days later, A. still didn't know of AN.'s existence. Not sure if he ever found out.

Anyway, it might seem strange that we started talking to this random person on the street, but that's what Ig.'s like. He's living in Berlin to improve his German, and one of the ways he does this is to take random empty food containers on the S-bahn, sit down beside a nice-looking woman, and ask for her help in interpreting the words on it. He would read through it and check his pronunciation, and ask for an explanation of any words he wasn't sure of. When I was with him, he did this with an empty can of Schlagsahne - that is, whipped cream.

Now, just imagine the look on someone's face when two people sit down next to her or across from her, and one of them - the guy - pulls out a can of whipped cream.

Hey, but this is Berlin. Everyone I saw went along with it and helped him out, even if they did think it was rather odd.

And here is Ig. with his can of whipped cream and a random Berlinfrau. Sorry it's a bit dark, but you still get the idea!

Next post, I'll go back to Köln for some more couchsurfing stories with S.!

Photography strike in Poland

For some reason, although I was in Poland for a week, I didn't take very many photos. Actually, I have a pretty good idea of the reasons for this, which have to do with not getting enough sleep either immediately prior to or immediately subsequent to my arrival in Poland, getting a raging bacterial infection as a result, and the rain in Warsaw. Really, I'm amazed that my wonderful hosts in Warsaw (A.A., her family, and A.J.) thought that I was even human, given that the by the time I got there I was wandering around in a bit of a daze. This is also the reason I couldn't eat as much food as A.A.'s mother would have liked me to eat. I'm so sorry - the food was wonderful, though! Anyway, I felt much better by the time I got to Poznan, and I did actually take quite a few photos there.

Anyway, despite the above paragraph, which makes my week in Poland sound rather ghastly, I had a great time, and I definitely want to go back there. I found the three cities I visited (Krakow, Warsaw and Poznan) to be very different, both in looks and feel. But something which was consistent throughout the country was the warmth and hospitality I found.

I've spoken in this blog about staying with people. Really, I'm not just talking about this to make myself sound really popular, as if I have friends all over the world who are ready to host me at the drop of a hat. Although, in a way, that's true (of course I'm really popular! ;) ) - it's just not as direct as that. As many of you are already aware, from about the fourth week of my trip, I started using couchsurfing (check it out!) to find accommodation. Once I started using it, I stayed in hostels only 2 nights. Keep in mind I was travelling for 2 ½ months... that's a LOT of hospitality! Both before and after I started using couchsurfing I stayed with people I already knew, but really, that's how the concept of couchsurfing began. Anyway, I'm going to write another "couchsurfing" post later, to share some of my favourite stories, but I've got to check with a few people first to see if they mind me posting the stories in which they feature, as well as maybe photos of them.

But as an aside... some of you will be very amused to know that at least every second couchsurfing reference people have left for me mentions the fact that I can (and do!) talk. ;) You might be surprised to hear that they usually also say that I talk about interesting things (and/or am interesting to talk to). ;)

Anyway, back to Poland. In Krakow, I stayed with A.P. & S., and hung out a bit with both them and A.P.'s little sister. I cooked dinner for them all on a couple of nights (including some wonderful pierogi I found in the local supermarket). Their flat was really central, so it was easy for me to get to various parts of the city, particularly the old city, and I've got to say that I found it really pretty. I also hung out a bit with A.B., who took me out to some interesting nightclubs with his mates. The group of them seemed to know everyone worth knowing in town, so the night included a visit to the VIP section of one of the more pretentious clubs (I know I'm not offending A.B. and his mates by saying this, because they kept telling me how pretentious it was, both before we went there and while we were there - but it was fun anyway!). It was a good night, and of course, much Polish vodka was involved.

I have a grand total of ONE photo from Krakow, despite the fact that I was there from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday morning. It is a photo of St Michael's Church, which is really quite pretty. I took it from the banks of the Wisla river, which is a bit nicer in Krakow than in Warsaw.


Krakow is a really nice city to just wander in. It is also quite close to some salt mines (which are apparently quite spectacular) and Auschwitz. I would probably have gone to both of those sites had I not got sick. So I will have to go back.

Warsaw was very, very different from Krakow. It is not so pretty and quaint, but it definitely has its charms, and I even managed to take photos of some of them (despite the rain!). The old city (Stare Miasto) is particularly interesting. It was completely destroyed by the Nazis as a reaction to the Warsaw Uprising in the Second World War - think of the scenes towards the end of The Pianist, when Adrien Brody comes out of hiding and finds ... rubble. However, it was rebuilt during the communist era (I think it was completed in the 1960s), with a real attempt to build it as it had been. The results are pretty spectacular. I had a couple of interesting conversations about the rebuilding with A.A. I initially thought it was strange that the communist regime had been so keen to rebuild the city as it had been, rather than to rebuild in the communist, more utilitarian style. A.A. explained that Poland's communist government had wanted to prove its Polish-ness, to display an independence from Russia. Which makes sense. So, there's clearly something to be said for some level of nationalism!

Anyway, here is an example of the re-building effort, the Warsaw Mermaid (symbol of the city), with buildings from the old town square behind her:

The detail on the rebuilt buildings is pretty incredible.

I also really enjoyed wandering around Lazienki Park (and the palace there is quite spectacular), even if it was drizzingly miserable at the time. I took a break from the rain in a pavilion, with this lion to keep me company:


The next day I headed to Poznan. By the time I got there, the rain had finally stopped, and I got some lovely pictures of the very pretty old town square:


Poznan was one of the places I had to stay in a hostel, but I did meet D. and her houseguest for a drink in the evening. My reason for stopping in Poznan was to break up the train ride between Warsaw and Berlin - it is only a 5 hour journey, but I was in no hurry and figured that two shorter legs would be preferable. I was glad that I did, since the evening with D. was so pleasant, and the town is so pretty. I also learnt a bit more about Polish history (and the long argument about which is the real first capital of Poland - which added a new dimension to the rivalry between Krakow and Warsaw). However, my attempt to shorten a leg of my train ride failed miserably. My train from Poznan to Berlin took an extra two hours due to - well, I never really found out. Some sort of engine failure, I think. I was quite glad to get back to the German rail system after that experience!