A clip on couchsurfing:
As I got into traveling, I went through a progression of changes that I think most couch-surfers go through:
- discovering that there's more to a city than what you can read on wikitravel (to understand the customs/culture of any given region, it's wise to consult a local);
- being in a situation foreign to everything you're used to, and being left with no choice but to trust a complete stranger with your life;
- understanding what it's like to try to build a home away from what you had previously called home;
- realizing that you might not really know where/what home is, thus suddenly longing to root yourself in a new community;
- blamo! couchsurfing doesn't seem that weird anymore.
*Soap Box Alert*
I think this is a revolutionary project as it teaches us to overturn our individualistic American tendencies by opening up our "private property" to a community of strangers. Communal lifestyles have traditionally worked best in closed environments where people don't move around much (like islands) because if somebody does wrong (i.e. steals from you), they cannot run from their mistake. Because people are more mobile than ever, it seems as though communal living should be a thing of the past, and that nobody should be able to trust anyone. But this project defies these laws.
*stepping off the box*
There's a group of us from Raleigh that have been meeting up on the weekends to go to concerts, surfing (as in, the wave kind), Euro dance parties and so on. This weekend I missed the Raleigh couchsurfer activities as I headed to Black Mountain for LEAF. I drove up to the festival, and arrived 5 minutes after they closed the gate, meaning I wouldn't be able to camp there that night. Bah humbug! I drove into a grocery store parking lot and calculated exactly how much leg room I'd have in the back seat of my car if I did some re-arranging so that I could sleep there for the evening. Then I remembered a guy from Asheville that had messaged me some time ago about wanting to take a job in wilderness therapy, so I got on my handy iPhone and looked up his number. The phone conversation couldn't have been more awkward. It was late and I was rude for calling, but he and his roommates were more than gracious and let me stay the night-- even when he had to leave for a wedding the next day. Anyway, it happened that he just started training for a wilderness therapy program up in Asheville, and so we had a good time swapping stories about that stuff.
Getting more involved in couchsurfing has been one of the best decisions I've made since moving out here. Sometimes with my job I seriously feel like my sanity is at stake. I'm living with hormonally imbalanced juvenile delinquents, and sometimes I'll go days without even seeing somebody "normal". It's so easy to get caught up in camp life. But then when I meet people outside of camp--I'll be talking to someone-- and as soon as the job thing comes up, it's almost like I'm telling them I'm from another country that they've never even heard of. So I feel like a foreigner.
With couchsurfers though, it feels like I'm meeting "my people" for the first time, and yet it feels like I've known them forever. Every person I met has a good-natured unassuming quality to them. They also don't have the "I've got my social circle and you're not a part of it" vibe. It makes me realize how many people are trying to build a home away from home, or how many people are still trying to figure out where home is. f They don't judge me for being unsettled in my life, and yet they're some of the most inspiring people I've met. It doesn't make sense that a group of wanderers could form a community, but here we are...
2 comments:
this sounds very cool. i may just give this a go on my next trip. i have to admit, it also sounds frightening.
You should give it a go on your next trip to North Carolina! what-what! :)
Yeah, the concept at first seemed a little frightening for me, too.
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