Chapter 110: My first night as a couchsurfer – Kitsilano

26/4: The first couch I ever surfed on was in Kitsilano, Vancouver. Elise, the host, had given me directions for how to get from the Greyhound bus station to her house, and somehow I managed to carry my huge green backpack through the rush hour human traffic and two different city busses without hurting anyone.

But when I finally arrived at the corner of Trafalgar and 5th, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The house with the number from Elise’s e-mail was a huge blue villa on a street with other huge villas, lush gardens and blossoming trees. More or less what you’d expect if you got an address in Kitsilano, as I would later realise, but standing there in front of that house in the Thursday evening sunshine, I almost thought I’d been tricked, written down the directions wrong or something.

Well, I wasn’t in the wrong place. Turns out, the house was divided into three different suites. Elise lived in the bottom floor and basement suite with her boyfriend Jeremy and three other room mates. They all had a room each, and shared a kitchen, a common room with three couches (where I slept) and a cute little garden in the back. Not so luxurious, maybe, but definitely cozy. There were paintings on the walls and fabrics with Indian and South American prints. In the common room, there was even a collection of old LP record covers on one wall. The sexy jeans butt of Bruce Springsteen (I would presume), just to mention one.

To be honest, I was quite nervous about the people I might end up with while couchsurfing. There could be loads of reasons for a person to sign up on Couchsurfing and a profile text is easy to manipulate. I only sent couch requests to people with good references, but that only meant I wouldn’t end up with lunatics. Social chemistry is a completely different matter. What if I ended up having an entire evening of awkward silence after the most obvious pleasentries were done with?

Well, in Elise’s and Jeremy’s house, I wouldn’t’ve had to worry about that. As the kind of shy and quiet person that I am with peole I don’t know, the beginning of a conversation is always hard. But here, there were always lots of people coming and going, always a discussion or a game of something or other going on. They asked me if I wanted to join, but didn’t force me to be the center of attention. There was always someone else craving that spot. But once I felt comfortable enough, I could just join in the conversation and they would listen to me as to anyone else in the group. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a more including group of friends.

This Thursday night, they watched the most recent episode of Community, which in my oppinion is one of the best sit-com shows running at the moment. And it felt strange, sitting there with maybe seven strangers, watching this so familiar show with the characters that I embarassingly enough almost consider as my friends, laughing at the same jokes, getting the same pop culture references (because Community is a show mainly built on pop culture references). I usually watch the TV shows by myself, knitting, or during my and Natalia’s Saturday and Sunday TV show marathons. Now we were a whole bunch of people and everyone seeming as nerdy about this show as me. It was amazing.

Then, they taught me to play Warewolf, a game where one random person is seceretly chosen to be the warewolf, and then the participants/villagers have to guess who the warewolf is before he/she kills the entire village. The game is played sitting down and talking, rather than through physical action. It usually ends up being a loud discussion about who seems the most guilty, and why the other villagers shouldn’t suspect me in particular. Good nerves and a sharp tounge is vital.

Well, naturally I was crap at this game. I’m a bad actor and was starting to feel tired, which meant my brain worked far too slow in the foreign tounge of these Vancouverites. But I really enjoyed playing. The others got so animated by the game, someone picked up the guitar and we ended up playing an entire game with a musical theme. Actually improvising songs. Then a Pokemon theme, old style country, Game of Thrones theme and eventually we stopped playing and just listened to the guitar and mandolin being played by almost every member of the group in turn. The night ended with some classic reggae. Then I crawled into my sleeping bag and slept like a log.

The next evening, after a day of sight seeing, I was really sorry to pick up my backpack and leave this cozy street in Kitsilano. Elise and Jeremy were going camping for a night, and I was due to stay with another Couchsurfing host. I couldn’t’ve had a better first couchsurfing experience.