29/4: According to my plan, I was supposed to stay with a guy close to Downtown my last two nights in Vancouver. But a combination of circumstances (forgotten e-mails, tight schedules, tempting invitatins, laziness) lead to me ending up in Kits again, on Elise’s and Jeremy’s couch. The main reason for this was, without a doubt, the invitation to join them for Sunday TV show night.
Did I tell you that Elise, Jeremy and most of their friends are students at UBC? Staying at their house was like stepping into a collage movie, the independent kind, where people have a compost in the backyard garden, play guitar, smoke weed, take midnight strolls to night open coffeeshops and have deep existential discussions at two in the morning. It was just the kind of collage experience I saw myself missing out on when I chose to start studying geography in Stockholm instead of applying to collage in North America.
And I know this sounds silly, that I write like a thirteen-year-old in love for the first time, everything is just sparkles and rainbows – but it’s really true. For those three nights that I spent in the house on Trafalgar and Fifth, I really enjoyed pretending that I was a part of this … community. Just when I was about to leave on Tuesday morning, Jeremy said that he hoped that I’d liked staying with them and that I’d had a chance to get a feel for young Vancouverites too. I couldn’t’ve had expressed strongly enough how thankful I was for their hospitality and generousity.
I might have been uncommonly lucky with my Couchsurfing hosts in Vancouver, I don’t know – but I do know that by the limited empirical evidence of two Couchsurfing households that I’ve gathered thus far, I can do nothing but draw the conclusion that Couchsurfing must be the best thing ever created for travelers since the invention of the sleeping bag.
Katja Malmborg 