(A much shorter version of this article was published in the March 30 edition of the Catalyst, a monthly magazine in Salt Lake City, UT.)
The Freedom of Couches
One of my friends says CouchSurfing.com is for bums. My girlfriend’s father says it’s for freeloaders. CS.com’s nearly 150,000 users believe the site helps unite the world—its cultures, locations, and its travelers—in trust, tolerance, consciousness, and understanding.
CS.com is not your run-of-the-mill social-networking Web site: It helps you sleep on people’s couches. Whereas sites like Facebook.com, Tribe.net, and MySpace.com serve mainly as a means to keep tabs on one’s circle of friends and keep them informed of the crucial events in one’s life (actual quote from a random MySpace.com blog: “Every few days I would buy a bag of Hot Cheetos…”), while these sites serve mainly to foster online community, CS.com seeks to actually physically connect people, to put travel-weary butts in otherwise unoccupied couches. By providing travelers a resource to help them find cheap, friendly accommodations, and hopefully an informed and friendly personal guide to a new place or culture, CS is revolutionizing how the world interacts via the internet and rewriting the rules of travel. I was eager to test my hypothesis so I created my CS.com profile, made my own couch available to potential surfers, put some serious miles on my personal pedometer, and went out to surf some couches.
Losing My Couchsurfing Virginity
This past September I traveled to West Africa via NYC and Paris, laying-over in both locations for a day or more.
FACT: I cannot afford either of these places.
Using CS.com’s “CouchSearch” utility—the White Pages of the CSing community—I found and contacted Tim Tolka in NYC. When CouchSearching one can choose from a number of potential hosts, that number ultimately dependent on how remote or otherwise your destination is. At the time of writing there were 300+ potentially available couches within 10 miles of NYC: There were four couches in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
It took one simple email exchange to finalize my surfing Tim’s couch, but I soon learned there would be a catch.
In late September, Tolka was subletting with a couple guys in Queens. The CSing situation there was a little tense. Tim had failed to let his roommates know about the CSer he had previously hosted which proved to be something of a surprise when his roommates came home in the middle of the night and found an apparent intruder asleep on their couch. We were, as Tim told the story, old friends. In reality we had met in Union Square earlier that day.
I was standing baffled among a squad of rollerblading thirty-something’s, all wearing matching white shirts, red sweatpants, and clad in neon-green helmets and hand, knee, and elbow pads. Along with a growing crowd we were watching a break-dance troupe perform coordinated head-spins and various other acrobatic maneuvers (for which, and I apologize, I don’t possess the necessary terminology) when Tim found me. Here is a transcript of our introductory conversation:
Tim: Are you Ben?
Me: Yes.
Tim: Do you smoke pot?
Me: Every once in a while.
…and we walked to a set of benches deep in the by then dark heart of Union Square, G. Washington’s back to the soon-to-be and currently drug-addled homeless men there, and Tim and I really no better at law-abiding, though we really were hitting it off like the old friends we were supposed to be. He had even blown off a hot-date with a 32 year old Puerto Rican so he could show me around.
I asked Tim if smoking herb in the middle of a public park in the heart of downtown was something he did often, seeking reassurance that this was a common and probably safe thing to be doing. His reply, “I’ve never done this before,” was quite distant from the response I was hoping for.
This was all as I had imagined the CSing experience to be—well, minus the pot-smoking. Before setting out from Salt Lake I had described CSing to my inquisitive family and friends as essentially like having a friend wherever you went. An acquaintance who would enthusiastically welcome you into their culture and home, and it turns out that’s exactly what it is.
Tim and I had only ever communicated in a sum total of two emails, and we had little in common besides our love for travel, but we are both open and trusting people, which, as we shall discuss later, turn out to be the most important characteristics of the CSing community.
How Safe Can This Thing Be?
But before we get any further I’ll address what’s probably on your mind; all of the above raises a number of issues, most importantly, safety.
How safe is CSing if the first thing my host asks me is whether I’ll do drugs with him? That’s a hard one. I guess if one has ever had any experience in turning down drugs or alcohol the situation is easily diffused. There are several approaches one can use, the most effective probably being “No, thanks.”
But what about potentially hostile, dangerous or mal-intentioned hosts or surfers? According to CS.com, “CouchSurfing has implemented several precautionary [safety] measures for the benefit of its surfers, hosts, and community. Every user is linked to the other users he or she knows in the system through a network of references and friend links,” which benign though it may sound is really CS’s best safety measure. It functions basically on the same feedback system used by eBay, which seems to work well-enough for major, frequent, and global exchange of goods and currency.
Had Tim proven to be a less than savory character I could have gone onto the website and posted a negative opinion of him on his profile, thus alerting others. This kind of feedback is highly encouraged by The Collective, a group of constantly rotating volunteers who manage the website from a globally inconstant location. Peer review has proven to be a reliable safety-valve for the most part.
Of course, some bad-apples slip through the cracks. When that happens, the only option available to The Collective and the CS community is complete exposure.
Recently, a user known as REDXKING was accused by CSers of writing fraudulent checks for thousands of dollars and stealing credit cards. So a mass-email was sent to all 150,000 members containing the user’s name, his photo, his email address, and his aliases. His profile was disabled, and every effort will be made to prohibit him creating a new profile. That same email emphasizes CS’s safety measures:
“Our referencing system is the most important security measure, which I would like to reiterate to our members: If you have a negative experience with another member of this site, it is your duty to leave an honest factual reference. Your reference could help to protect another member. Safety on couchsurfing is the responsibility of all of our members, not just a few!” (Emphases theirs)
Meanwhile, Back In NYC…
My Kongian backpack was killing me so Tim and I went back to his place in Queens and then out into the city. I have never been to NYC and Tim proved to be an exceedingly friendly, knowledgeable, and willing host, introducing me to the city as no guidebook ever could. Together we explored more of Manhattan in one night than I possibly could have through the lens of a Lonely Planet or Fodor’s.
While such books are largely necessary for a traveler without ties to a location, they become wholly optional for the CSer. A guidebook could never be as dialed into a city or culture as a local.
With Tim as my guide we ended up in a Texas-themed bar crowded by white-collar suit-&-tie types where a lady dressed in black leather chaps and wielding a bull-whip danced on the bar to “La Cucaracha” then poured vodka all over the bar, took a swig herself and proceeded to blow fire and set the bar ablaze. We got a ride with a porn-star cabbie, visited a poetry-bar where I talked with a fifty-something Aussie punk lady obsessed with Andy Warhol, met up with one of his friends who revealed her engagement to an Israeli, and ate pizza slices at two in the morning and talked with a trio of Japanese musicians who had traveled to NYC to start a band.
Suffice to say it was a rich experience and I slept like the dead at the end of the night on Tim’s full-size couch.
So This is Paris?
I arrived in Paris after a restless flight across the pond. FYI: flight-attendants on Air India have a tendency to physically wrest you from sleep (or else employ other passengers to do so) to offer you free booze and really delicious Indian food, which sounds cool, but at three in the morning over the central Atlantic you might not be all that interested in a tall glass of Johnny Walker; I don't know, maybe it's just me.
A quick ride on the Réseau Express Régional—the rapid-transit train that connects Charles de Gaulle International Airport with the Île-de-France region of which Paris is a part—dropped me off at Le Forum des Halles in Paris’s 1st arrondissement. All of this might be as familiar to you as it was to me at the time, which is to say not at all!
I had no idea where I actually was in Paris until I found the house of Julien de Casabianca, my host there, and his fellow artists on a corner on Rue St. Martin. Nobody was home so I put my bag down and waited in front of the door, feeling really out of sorts because I had only studied French for two months before setting out to explore Francophone West Africa.
I was soon approached by a friendly German who spoke perfect English. I explained my lack of geographic orientation and he told me that I was only a block from the Louvre; that I was in the heart of one of Paris’s oldest and most popular districts.
Rooms in the 1st arrondissement run from roughly $150 to $600 and into the unadvertised if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it range. There are about four hostels in the area and they will all cost you US$50 and up. Thanks to CouchSurfing, I would be staying here for free!
Julien’s housemate Sophie arrived about an hour later. She let me in, showed me my room, and told me that Julien was busy working but that I should meet him at 8:00pm at La Fontaine, a café on rue de le Grange-Aux-Belle at the Colonel-Fabien stop on the Metro. I explored the Champs-Elysées, walked in and out of the Louvre, and then jumped on the Metro at 5:00 to make sure I knew where I would be meeting my CouchSurfing host.
I killed time in the area by walking to Montmartre, running up and down the seriously numerous stairs that lead to le Basilica de la Sacré Coeur, and then jumped back on the Metro.
Unfortunately, Julien and I were unable to connect at La Fontaine that evening. Instead, I sat outside of the packed bar and talked with Damien, a circus performer who was more than happy to help me muddle through my limited French comprehension.
I returned to Julien’s place in Les Halles and found my bed on the second floor of his apartment, in a studio space that was occupied and used by a number of artists. As I learned from another of Julien’s roommates, Héloïse—a somewhat surly and moody but altogether charming girl who kind of fit my personal prefab mold of a Parisian—the house I was staying in was an artist’s squat-house provided at no-cost to Paris’s more creatively talented.
Luckily for me, most Parisians speak better English than a good deal of Americans (which made me feel like I fit the typical prefab mold most of the world has of Americans as insular and unwilling to learn another language or culture, but hey, I was doing my best). Héloïse squatted at the edge of my bed and smoked maybe five cigarettes during our hour discussion about travel and art and people’s preconceived notions of Americans and Parisians.
The following morning Julien and I finally met. He was handsome in a rustically urban kind of way, his hair and well-trimmed beard variously black, grey and white. He could easily get work as a model for expensive men’s clothing.
As kind of a rule of CouchSurfing etiquette, a CouchSurfer treats his host to a drink or does the dishes or polishes the silver or something. Julien and I went down to the café next door and had the opportunity to finally get to know each other. CouchSurfing is a great way to build one’s interpersonal skills. If you have a shell you’ll need to come out of it to get the most out of the experience.
As it turned out, Julien had been at La Fontaine the previous evening, but because A), the place was so packed, and B), we both had no idea who we were looking for, we just missed each other. He told me that La Fontaine was Paris’s first Jazz bar and really important to a lot of people, and that, for reasons I couldn’t quite intuit, it had just seen its last jazz performance. I had unwittingly witnessed history in Paris thanks entirely to CouchSurfing.
Julien and I talked about a number of things over strong and delicious French espresso, getting a feel for each other, trying to find common ground. If you’re at all interested in sports and traveling abroad I recommend learning about football, “soccer” to acolytes. If you do so, you will almost automatically be able to generate conversation.
Sports aside, there’s something about the brief time a CouchSurfer has with their host that makes everything you say doubly important. Because you’ll only know this person for maybe a day or even a single evening, and because they’re opening their door and their home for you and extending you a terrifically generous amount of trust and kindness, you want to be as genuine and real with them as you can, as a way of showing them that you appreciate their efforts. Sincerity, gratitude, and your honest interest in your host or CouchSurfer is worth much more than a beer or a cup of coffee.
CouchSurfing Vs. The Hotel Industry,
I’ve slept on numerous couches, often under less than sober and/or ideal conditions, on couches soiled, frayed, and outright decaying. I have also slept on floors, and once on a lawn. These occasions were often impromptu and (maybe you can identify with all of this) unenviable and often followed by a morning of intense cerebral trauma: some report feeling as if they were struck by an eighteen wheeler, and typically a couch isn’t as comforting as one needs after such an experience.
In such instances, CSing lacks in glamour, comfort, style, and is maximally utilitarian, primarily a last resort.
While not typically as cushy as any number of chain-hotel accommodations (there are always exceptions), the perks inherent in CSing are manifold and are in many ways more valuable than simple comfort.
Allow me to explain by example.
During the Research Phase of this article I completed a trans-continental drive from SLC to Providence, Rhode Island. Along the way I CSed in Lincoln, Nebraska, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Poughkeepsie, New York. If one follows the posted speed limit, SLC to Lincoln is approximately a thirteen hour drive. If you’ve never experienced thirteen solo hours behind the wheel yammering to yourself and chewing at your cheek, consider yourself cosmically blessed.
In Lincoln, Avishay Artsy, my CS-host there, and his roommate Amy took me out to a downtown bar called Duffy’s where a metal-turned-bluegrass band was covering Misfits (“an American punk rock band formed in 1977” (source: wikipedia.org)) tunes with thunderous banjo twang and washboard scratching fit for the gods.
At the end of the night I slept on the Persian rug pictured in the inset. As you might expect of a rug, this one was on the floor. Sleeping on the floor isn’t most people’s idea of a luxurious get-away, and I’ll be honest, if luxury is what you’re after you might want to forgo CSing and surrender your hard-won cash to the hotel industry’s overflowing coffers. I for one would prefer to spend my hard earned cash on a dormitory experience that excludes 150 channel television, single-serving shampoo bottles, and sheets starched so effectively I’m afraid they’ll cut me.
Having just spent thirteen hours in an accelerated solitary confinement bubble I was eager for some human interaction, and CSing helped me find that. There is no doubt I would have slept better on a hotel bed a hundred yards from the highway, far from the bustling, raucous center of NE’s liberal heart. As it turns out, I had in fact stayed in a hotel just outside Lincoln on a previous cross-country journey, years before CS.com went live. That experience was only note-worthy for being stunningly bereft of redeeming qualities.
CSing isn’t only valuable as a way to meet people and create memories; it’s also a valuable alternative. Let’s be honest: the majority of hotels that anyone on a limited budget can afford suck.
Staying in a hotel is an exercise in confinement. They confine one to a familiar and antiseptic environment. They are designed to mollify and passively entertain. There is little or no active stimulation. They are lonely, innocuous, and unoffending. Like schools, hospitals, government buildings, and most business offices, they are, by their very nature, institutional, that is “characterized by blandness, drabness, uniformity, and [a] lack of individualized attention.” You get the point.
Hostels are little better. One often shares a room with others, the noise-level can be unsuitable for getting adequate rest, they are difficult to find and in short supply. Hostels are cheaper than hotels, but sometimes only marginally. Still, they cost money, and money spent on accommodations is money that cannot be spent on transport, entertainment, dining, adventure, or shopping in strange bazaars and markets
Give me accommodations in the homes of friendly, outgoing, generous, intriguing strangers who will welcome me and my dog; give me a sleeping bag on the floor; give me genuinely friendly faces in the morning and a bowl of cereal and genuine house coffee; and give the continental breakfast to the guy in room 33.
Not Your Typical Surfers
I hope you’re not getting the impression that CSing is a social-networking site for ascetics. There are cushy couches out there. One such “couch” is that belonging to Peter and Thily Hayes.
As you can plainly see, to call the accommodations provided by the Hayes family a “couch” would be like calling the sun a “light bulb.” The tranquility of the bed is enhanced by the view it commands: the back of the Hayes’ eastside Salt Lake house lets out onto a local mountain-fed stream which one can see from the large window that sits above the bed.
According to Peter, “Accomodations are primo!”
He, Thily (pronounced TEE-lee) and their son Lucas invited me to their gorgeous home to talk about CSing. In true CSing spirit they also fed me dinner and introduced me to their pet ferret Ding-a-ling, after Chuck Berry’s only U.S. number one single.
It was Thily who first suggested that the family provide their downstairs bed to travelers. She self identifies as the family’s CS liaison.
“I read about [CSing] in a local paper a year ago and I created my profile soon after,” she told me.
Thily also describes herself as a very shy person. For Thily, CSing has been a good way to overcome her timidity. Peter, on the other hand, is as shy as a Kandinsky.
The Hayes’s are apparently financially well-off and live in an affluent neighborhood, which is to say that they’re not living or traveling on a strict financial budget as some CSers are. I asked them if CS.com enables freeloaders.
Peter was adamant in his response. “CSing is absolutely not for freeloaders.”
I then asked him why he and his family recently CSed for five days in an unoccupied beach house in Florida if he could afford to have stayed in a hotel instead. “Nobody in the U.S. is saving money,” he told me, “So we save our money rather than spend it on hotels. I’d rather take a vacation and save money for something else. Is traveling only for the affluent? Is there another way that people can afford to travel? There is. Listen: CSing is a legit way to travel and stay within our means. Period.”
Tourism is considered by most to be the largest and fastest growing industry in the world. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the tourism industry generated US$680 billion in revenue in 2005. Numbers aren’t available for the global hotel industry, but Smith Travel Research tracks U.S. hotel revenues. In a press release published last May, STR made the following statement: “The year 2005 marked the most profitable year ever for the US hotel industry. [It] generated some US$122.7 billion in revenue.” That’s only accounting for the U.S. market, the third largest tourism market in the world behind France and Spain. Even considering that the UNWTO’s numbers account for other receipts (e.g. entertainment, attractions, ancillary services, surf-side daiquiris, etc.) the U.S. hotel market alone accounts for almost 20 percent of tourism revenue. That seems like a pretty significant share to me. Hotels are doing just fine; spend your buck elsewhere.
Financial concerns notwithstanding, when Thily first mentioned CSing to Peter the idea raised some red flags for him.
“I was leery at first because of stories you hear,” he said, “But every experience we’ve had has violated that initial trepidation. It reminds us that people can be friendly and nice. We grow up in a paranoid world. You can’t try anything new because you’re so worried about what could happen.”
The Hayes’s have hosted five CSers in the year that they have been part of the CSing community. Their guests have run the demographic gamut, from a recently widowed 60 year old attorney out on the road to rediscover her life, to Adam Schofield, the legendary couchsurfer who is on a mission to couchsurf the world and write a book about doing it. For the Hayes’s, CSing reflects the trust we have for one another.
“Trust is something we need to get back to,” said Thily. “Everyone we’ve met has been an intellect. [CSers] are not superficial or flashy. They’re liberal, open-minded, activists, Burning Manners; very Bohemian. They’re adventurous and they’re not a threat. CSers are not out there to get you.”
Peter has come to embrace CSing, but he wants to keep things in perspective. “There could be predators,” he said, “To say that something couldn’t go wrong is irresponsible. Just don’t be stupid. If you sense something is odd, trust yourself. We have no reservations about denying someone who wants to CS with us if they look sketchy,” said Peter.
The Big Question: Can I Trust You?
All of this is a circuitous way of addressing one serious flaw in American social relations: “stranger danger.” I’m unsure exactly when this term entered our popular lexicon, but its basic premise is that people you don’t know want to harm you and you’d best avoid them. This dangerously loaded term is directed at America’s youth but ends up permeating pretty much every age demographic.
I ran into an 18 year old guy while CSing in Indianapolis who said he liked the idea of CSing but would only ever CS outside of the United States because people here are dangerous psychos. I don’t want to get into all of the logical trapdoors of this guy’s impaired reasoning, so let’s just say this: he was talking to one of those potential psychos—me. I left him unharmed.
Embracing CSing makes a statement about one’s value of community. Communities only exist through a web of trust expressed through tacitly understood and adhered to agreements. Take, for example, the simplest, most historically common community: two platonic, heterosexual friends. There are so many trust agreements here that to list them would bore us both, so let’s list one: You do not kill a friend. Pretty elementary. If you and a potential friend can’t reach an agreement on that one I recommend discontinuing relations post-haste.
But these are unspoken agreements. How do I know that you know that you’re not supposed to kill me? I could ask you, but if you really wanted to kill me you probably wouldn’t let me know. So, I have no alternative but to assume that you know you’re not supposed to kill me. I have to trust that you won’t kill me. But I can best extend that trust if I myself am also willing to agree to that maxim. I trust you because I hope that you trust me, and then over the course of a relationship, no matter how brief, we continue to define where our trust boundaries lie. Sure, this is all theory, but much of our social lives are built on just this theory of trust.
Agreeing to a CSing exchange is an amazing expression of trust in other people. It expresses our belief in humanity and the kindness and generosity of strangers, people who we’re constantly reminded—by news organizations of all kinds, by our governments, by our schools, etc.—want to harm us.
In addition to the safety measures noted above, the all-volunteer Collective that manages the site encourages minimizing rather than encouraging the growth of the CSing community. They want the cream of the world’s traveling and hosting crop, people who trust other people. This could potentially insure CSing’s independent and free status: by maintaining a small, tight-knight community of users, CS.com can be effectively managed by a small team at a low cost (which cost is now funded entirely by donations: the site also operates free of annoying advertisements—thus, it receives zero advertising revenue); it can also fly under the radar of companies who might potentially want to purchase it to make a buck
But so, let’s face it: someone with less than golden intentions will, in the end, take advantage of the admittedly utopian altruism of CSing. Bad things happen, and maybe one prerequisite for joining the CSing community is a pair of roseate glasses. It is unfortunate but inevitable that some great misfortune will befall a CSer or a CS-host. The questions this eventuality poses are crucial to the future of CSing.
What will happen to CSing and its values when this bad thing happens? Will the community dissolve and return to its hostel and hotel beds? Knowing that bad things can and will happen what do we do? Do we remain geographically stationary? Do we allow fear to force us to experience the world, its cultures and peoples, its wildlife and landscapes, its winds and tastes and smells and textures, its smiles and frowns, it beauties, do we let ourselves be compelled to experience all of these only so far as the internet or magazines or television or radio shows or hotels can take us?
Or do we allow ourselves a tiny slice of utopia? Do we open ourselves to the possibilities contained in trust?
