go CouchSurfing abroad

We’re not planning to go CouchSurfing anytime soon, as my partner is a little bit against the idea. He would much rather that we did house swaps, and now that we are indeed planning to buy a house, I might change my goal in a while.

However, we did start our couchsurfing journey during the Edinburgh Festival! An Argentinean girl called Isabel stayed with us for 2 night, and we had a great time showing her around the city. She told us a lot about her country, we shared a cup of mate (traditional Argentinean infused drink) and talked about our countries.

It really was a wonderful experience, but there lots of things I don’t like CS. Some of the requests to surf are quite demanding, as if we were a hotel that people could just book for a weekend. I got several of these a day during the Edinburgh Festival. With the baby in the house, we’ve mentioned in our profile that we’re not in a position to accommodate normal backpackers and would like to reserve our couch for families etc. As a result, we’ve had a couple of messages from families, basically assuming that we are automatically willing to offer them a couch. Strange.

Two days I got a message from an English guy who was “stuck in Edinburgh”. In his message he said he had “mailed 7 pages of people explaining my situation” and that he had ended up spending the night on the streets, which he described as “terrifuing. They don’t like English people here. At this stage, I can only rely on human faith.” This is utter b*llox! On so many levels.

Didn’t he have a tenner for a hostel? What was he doing traveling in the first place then? And what’s with the notice? Why didn’t he explain me his “circumstances”? If he’s expecting someone to open their home to him, he should at least have had the courtesy to send a decent message to people and choose who he is sending his request a bit more carefully. Arrr!

I heard about couch surfing a while back and though it was a great idea, but for some reason I never signed up. It would have been the perfect travel accommodation for me – I love going to visit friends abroad, that way I’ll always have someone local to show me things that I might be interested in. That way I don’t have to waste time or money doing the normal tourist stuff. However, I used to think that now that we have a baby, couchsurfing is out of the question. But it doesn’t have to be, does it? I’m sure there are people who would be willing to accommodate a little family?

And maybe we could offer our couch for another young family like ours, who want to travel without spending a fortune so that they can see as much of the world as possible. I discussed this with Ronan who obviously had his doubts about the whole thing, but he agreed that I could sign up anyway.

So now that’s done! I’ve just created a profile for us and I’m about to start checking out other people’s profiles. We’re not planning to go anywhere new for a good few months anyway, we’ve got too many family visits to Ireland and Finland scheduled, but it’s good to get used to the idea before actually taking any affirmative steps. So here I go, little baby steps but this goal has now been started! I’ll keep you updated.