Couchsurfing

Someone a few years ago told me about this website called Couchsurfing.org where you make a profile about yourself and then you contact others if you would like to spend a night sleeping for free on their couch, or air-mattress, or extra bed or whatever while you’re traveling and then when people want to stay in your city you return the favor. It’s like a huge community and there are hosts and surfers all over the world. I made an account a few years ago but never used it. Then, while I was in Bolivia, a friend of mine lived with her boyfriend in a house with lots of couches and extra space and they hosted couchsurfers all the time. We met a bunch of cool people who were mostly backpacking around South America. That was the first time I had seen how it really works. When I moved to Spain I decided I’d participate in couchsurfing, and luckily my roommates were cool with the idea too. We started at the end of October and have been hosting people a couple of days at a time.  People send me requests almost daily, and I read their profile to see what type of people they are, send back and forth exchanges, and then decide whether or not I’d like them in my apt and if we have time and space to host them the dates that they will be in Sevilla. It has been an awesome experience so far. Everyone we have met has been super nice, neat, respectful of our apt, independent, and a couple of them have cooked for us, or brought us things, and we’ve taken them out for tapas and drinks and introduced them to our friends here.

So far our list of couchsurfers include:

10/23/11 Cameron (USA)

10/24- 10/26/11 Simon (Germany)

11/7/11 Jen and Leigh (USA, New Zealand)

11/11- 11/13/11 Luca (Italy)

11/17- 11/19/11 Sirena and Pamela (South Korea)

11/20/11 Zac and Virginia (USA)

12/1- 12/4/11 Fabio (Italy)

When I travel to Budapest in December and Malta in January I’m thinking of doing couchsurfing there. I also plan on contacting the girl from Hungary that I met in Andalo while I’m in Budapest, and in Malta I’ll be traveling with my friend Armando so we’ll have to find people willing to host us both. I’ve already contacted people about couchsurfing in Madrid in between those two trips so we’ll see how it goes. In big cities it can be hard to find people willing to host because they get so many requests a day it can be overwhelming. When I first switched my location to Sevilla I was receiving about 15 requests a day, but now it has died down a bit. I asked all of our couchsurfers about their experiences, some of them had never done it before, others had traveled all through Europe using only couchsurfing, and none of them had any bad stories to tell.

More couchsurfing in 2012:

1/20/12- 1/22/12 Laura and Milena (Germany)

1/23/12- 1/24/12 Maria and Mirjam (Netherlands)

1/28/12- 1/30/12 Alvaro and friend (Spain, Latvia)

Thanksgiving in Spain

I know it’s well past Thanksgiving but I’ve been slacking on the blog posts and thinking back, Thanksgiving here does deserve a mention. One of my roommates is an Auxiliar at a culinary arts school and when Thanksgiving was coming up one of the teachers there offered to make traditional American Thanksgiving food for her in one of his classes. He said he would make a bunch that she could take home and then we could have a dinner here. She decided we’d have a Thanksgiving party and we invited around 25 people, although sadly only about half them showed up. In fact we ate Thanksgiving food for over a week after and then finally had to throw some out because we were worried it was getting too old. I ate sweet potatoes for every meal for about 5 days, I’m surprised my skin doesn’t have an orange-ish tinge these days.

My roomie gave the teacher some recipes, and others he looked up himself, and then the class cooked us food. We then invited other Americans we knew as well as some people who had never celebrated Thanksgiving, Spaniards, Germans, Bolivians etc. The class made us 2 turkeys, 2 bags of mashed potatoes, 2 bags of sweet potatoes, 2 bags of green beans, 2 bags of stuffing and one bag of gravy and one bag of cranberry sauce. I say bags because they literally gave it to us in sealed plastic bags. It was very very strange looking. We squished the food out of the bags and served it in mix-matched bowls that probably date back decades and we had people bring beer and wine and we had a feast/party/gathering.

I’m not a huge fan of Thanksgiving food as it is but here’s my verdict on the food. The turkey was quite good, not too dry at all; the gravy, although I never eat gravy, was good; the cranberry sauce was suuuuuper tart but tasty in very small dosages; the green beans were gross because I hate green beans (I even gave them a try this time, but still gross); the sweet potatoes were really good because they weren’t too sweet, and the mashed potatoes weren’t at all like what we eat at home; they were exactly like Spain’s puré de patatas which don’t taste like they come from real potatoes. Well, don’t get me wrong, they were good, they just tasted a bit like instant mashed potatoes and they had no lumps at all and an oddly smooth texture. The stuffing was nooooothing compared to Nana’s stuffing (which I missed!) but it was good, even though in true Spanish style they added ham to it.

All in all it was a success, I explained the history of Thanksgiving which I had only really learned a few days before when I had to teach classes about the holiday to my students (slightly but not completely sarcastic comment). I told our dinner guests about what it means to “give thanks” or “be thankful” a concept which was completely over the heads of all of my students but our friends seemed to get the gist of it. There isn’t even really a Spanish translation for being thankful. The highlight of my classes was when I made my 16-year-olds trace their hands and draw turkeys. Some came out so terrible I lost my composure in class and laughed so hard I cried and brought up the worst ones to show the whole class. Really professional, I know. Anyway, besides our leftovers lasting forever, Thanksgiving is not such a distant memory because I just finished scrubbing the spilled wine off the floor yesterday. I would say we did our cleaning in stages, food that will go bad being first, empty booze bottles second, moving chairs and tables back third, and finally cleaning the obscenely dirty floor. So yes, our apt looked a bit like a Sunday after a house party for about 2 weeks. Although I did a lot of cleaning, I am thankful that the cleaning lady who comes monthly is coming tomorrow before my parents arrive!