Monday (30/4) kind of became the left-over day of my Vancouver visit. The one big thing that I hadn’t seen yet was Stanley Park – this big city park that the Vancouverites are so proud of.

It is located on the tip of the headland that makes up downtown Vancouver. There are dozens of trails in the forest, and the trail that follows the water all the way around the park from one side to the other is almost ten kilometers. So, the park is quite big. And full of joggers, bikers, dog walkers and tourists.

I’ve been in quite a few city parks before, but what’s special about this park is that it still feels so wild. I’m pretty sure it’s the temperate rainforest vegetation – it grows so thick and lush and green, so that you actually can’t see further than the closest group of trees. Which means, that you can’t see the other trail that is just twenty meters from the one you’re walking on. And the noise from the highway that runs right through the park is easily drowned in the sound from the wind in the trees.

I really liked Stanley Park. I was walking around there for more than three hours and just couldn’t get enough of these huge trees. The Vancouverites are really lucky to be living next to this place of moss and ferns.

But I couldn’t stay all day. You see, Frida, Karin and Marit were coming, flying in from Edmonton where they had just finished university. So when I got the text that they had landed in Vancouver, I reluctantly walked out of the rainforest and into the glass skyscraper jungle.

But, on the way to their hostel, I happened upon a peculiar block among all the huge buildings. Instead of skyscrapers, it had a couple of small wooden houses with cute gardens around them. In the middle was this green, beautiful building, which turned out to be the Roedde House, a museum of a late nineteenth century home. Unfortunately, as it was Monday, the museum was closed. But as I was standing there reading the sign in front of the house, an older man came out of the house and told me that they were closed, but if I wanted to, he could show me around in the rooms on the first floor. Turns out, he was the vice president of the organisation that ran the museum and today they were having a dinner party in the house. He was there to oversee the preparations, but wasn’t doing anything special at the moment. And oh, was he sweet. He ended up giving me a private tour of the whole house, with it’s beautiful furniture and textiles and photos. I guess he enjoyed talking about the place, and I was all ears. He knew so many stories, of the family who built the house and of the time when it was built, and you know me, I love a good story. It was evident that he was really passionate about the place, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had to leave. He was the sweetest and the museum was beautiful.

So, I ended up being late to my meeting with Frida and the gals. But they didn’t mind. I found them eating wraps at a fast food restaurant next door to the hostel. Oh, it was so great to see them again. Especially Frida.

We went to Chinatown. Apparently, Vancouver has the third largest population of Chinese people outside of China. And it was a typical Chinatown, I would say, a lot of red, shops with strange, dried sea creatures on display and all the signs written in Chinese.

But it was also kind of rough and run down. Later that day, when I returned to my Kitsilano couch, I was told that that’s a rough part of town where you don’t want to go after dark. And I can see that. Many dark corners and strange-looking alleys.

By seven, we were starving. Conveniently enough, we were just about to meet up with a Norwegian friend of Marit’s, an exchange student at UBC, and she took us to a Japanese tapas restaurant. (British Columbia has a big eastern Asian population in general, not only Chinese. There are plenty of Japanese and Koreans and Taiwanese too.) Honestly, that might have been one of the best meals that I’ve ever had. It wasn’t Spanish in the least, the tapas thing in the description was just because the menu was made out of many small dishes and we ordered a whole bunch and shared – just as in a real tapas restaurant. But the dishes themselves were all Japanese fusion – strange fish and sea weed and rice and tofu. And it was amazing. Really. So many new and exciting flavours. So much more than sushi. Then and there, I decided that I have to take advantage of the fact that my cousin Ellen got married to a Japanese guy a couple of years ago. My next trip will have to be to Japan. Japanese restaurants in Sweden are a joke compared to what you get here – and, I presume, what you get in the country itself.

When dinner was eaten and payed for (and it wasn’t expensive either. I payed 14 bucks, which would be about 90 kronor. Where can you eat your fill of real gourmet ethnic food plus desert for less than a hundred kronor in Sweden?), I walked back with the girls to their hostel on Granville Street, said good night, admired the night neon lights while waiting for the bus, and returned to Kits.

There, they were watching Community, playing games and going to a night open coffee shop to buy cake. I didn’t get to sleep until after two. (Which seems to be kind of what I do these days. Go to bed late and rise early. I’ll be so sleepdeprived when I return back home that I’ll probably have to sleep for an entire week straight. But it’s worth it. I’m here to experience. Not to get a good nights rest every night.)

My four days in Vancouver were over. But I’ll definitely want to come back, some day.

29/4: That I just happened to end up couchsurfing with a couple who were these huge Game of Thrones fans must have been fate. Every Sunday, now that it’s running, they have Game of Thrones night, showing the latest episode as soon as it’s reaches cyber space. People gather from all over, and everyone snuggle together in Elise’s and Jeremy’s couch, on chairs and on the floor.

I hadn’t had time to catch up on the new episodes of the second season, so now that it had already reached the fifth episode, the plot confused me quite alot. But I didn’t mind. Game of Thrones is a show with so many good actors, great costumes and sceneries and even a few real hotties, so it’s totally enjoyable to watch, even without the excitement of the whole story. It was a thing, sitting there with a whole room full of Game of Throne fans and watching the new episode all fresh and steaming. I’ll have to see the whole season from beginning to end when I return home anyway.

But it felt a little bit wrong, too. Last fall, Game of Thrones was one of the shows that I watched with Natalia. It was kind of our thing, together with Bones and Pushing Daisies. When I told Nair (might be how he spells his name), who was sitting next to me, that it felt like I was being unfaithful watching this episode, he told me not to worry. He was sure she would understand. My god, it’s Game of Thrones. You can’t expect anyone to say no if they’re offered the chance to watch an episode at such a perfect occation.

And really, Natalia’s probably already cheated on me plenty. She’s probably seen every episode atleast twice with her nerdy art school friends by now. We’ll have to deal with this crisis in our relationship when I’m back in Sweden, and she’s returned from her summer holiday in Bolivia. I wouldn’t have missed the post-episode discussion about who should end up being the king or queen on the Iron Throne for my life. This was a group of people who took this TV show seriously. I loved it! It was a perfect night.

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.

Sunday (29/4), I woke up far too early, considering how late we came back from the BBQ the night before. But my days in Vancouver were rapidly running through my fingers, and I still had so many things I wanted to see. So I ate my bagel with cream cheese and walked down to Broadway to catch the 99 to UBC.

UBC, or University of British Columbia, resides on a kind of headland, with water on three sides, west of Kitsilano. The campus is big, with residential areas and different buildings for all the departments and a lot of gardens and parks surrounding it. For a tourist as myself, the Museum of Anthropology is the main attraction, but I couldn’t help taking a stroll around campus just to get a feeling for this huge university in this very hip North American city.

In many ways, the UBC campus and the Frescati campus of Stockholm University reminds me of one another. Most of the buildings are made out of concrete and were probably built in the sixties and seventies. Which means that they aren’t beautiful, but still have a rough kind of charm that I appreciate. The difference is that everything at UBC is comparatively new, while at Frescati, there are several smaller buildings that are considerably older than the main campus buildings. Take the Stockholm University student union building, the Nobel house. That’s an old brick building with crooked stairs and strange floor plan that just feels very cozy. And it gives a special kind of feeling, a sort of connectedness, to the campus, with these old and new buildings next to each other. At UBC, everything is new, and the student union building (above) might be the flatest, most uninspiring house I’ve ever seen.

But, as at Frescati, there is a lot of greenery around the UBC campus, and since the sun was just about to break through the clouds, I decided to go to the Nitobe Memorial garden before heading to the museum. It’s a traditional Japanese garden, tucked in between a few ugly buildings and a small piece of forest with huge Douglas firs. On a road nearby, there was quite a lot of traffic (people heading to a Sunday pic nic at the beach?), but the moment I walked in through the gate to the Nitobe garden, it was as if the rest of the world disappeared.

The cherry trees were blooming and the newly opened leaves were bright green. In the middle of the garden, there was a pond and the shelter of the trees blocked out all the noise and the wind, so that the surface of the water was calm and bright as a mirror.

And just then, the sun broke through the clouds and made the fresh leaves of the trees shine. Oh, it was magical.

There was a short guide to the garden that was included in the entrance fee, where they explained the symbology of the Japanese garden and how different features of it might be interpreted. This particular garden could be seen as a symolical walk through life, with childhood, adolescence, marriage, adulthood and old age. Every plant, every tree and stone and piece of lawn, was meticulously pruned and cut and placed with extreme care and thought, and I guess that was why it was such a calming place. It was as if the trees themselves got my heartbeat to slow down and my breathing to become deeper.

But, unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for very long. I would have liked to sit down on the bridge and look at the reflections in the pond and let the hours slowly flow by, but that’s not the kind of thing you can do as a tourist. Atleast if you’re as inquisitive as I am. So I had to leave the peace behind me, walk past the giant firs and cross the street. My next destination was the Museum of Anthropology.

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia is in this massive concrete building, which was designed by a famous architect that I can’t remember the name of and has, according to the museum tour guide, won several prices. And sure, I guess I could see that. But for me, it wasn’t the building in itself that amazed me, but the way it exhibited the objects within it. And especially fascinating were the objects themselves.

The museum offers free of charge guided tours in the museum. The extremely well articulated guide told us about the use for totem poles. They were carved in different styles by the different nations, and were made for families. They always told a story about the family, something important in their heritage. For most of the poles, the researchers of today can only guess what these stories were. Most of them are secerets of the remaining family members, or forgotten. This totem depicts a bear, a frog and a wolf, all very important, symbolical animals of the west coast First Nations.

The museum was full of totem poles and masks and other carvings, mainly from the First Nations in British Columbia, but also quite a few things from other parts of the world. The museum was actually the archive of artifacts collected by the Department of Anthropology at UBC. The things that didn’t fit onto the shelves in the glass monters, were stored in chests of drawers that were open for the museum visitors to open and look at. There were an incredible amount of artifacts there, from baskets to cooking utensils. I could have spent days there, looking at all the handicraft, and still not seen everything. It’s really an incredible museum. Atleast if you’re into history or art or culture in general. I like carvings in wood. And imagining the lives of the people who made and used them.

Just when I was about to leave the museum, I got a text from Scott. He was on his way to UBC with his beautiful old school Lumix camera. Together, we walked down to Wreck Beach – Vancouver’s best, according to both Elise, Jeremy and Scott. Turns out, it’s also Vancouver’s nudist beach. And there were actually a couple of them there. This afternoon. Completely naked. I was wearing my alpaca sweater, rain jacket and a scaf, and I wasn’t hot. And this guy was walking around completely naked down by the water. I’ve got nothing against nude people, gosh, I’m Swedish, but there must have been something wrong with the temperature feeling nerves in his skin.

Well, excepting the naked guy, the beach was really beautiful. I can really see how it can be packed with people on a sunny summer’s day.

Over all, UBC was a nice place. I would gladly study there, if I got the chance. Maybe I should keep my eyes open for a position at the Ph.D programme when the time comes and I’m qualified. If I ever will be.

Or maybe not. Stockholm University is still where I like it best.

Well, there is this movie called Juno. And right in the beginning of that, the main character, Juno, walks into a convenient store with an empty jug of Sunny D. She asks for a pregnancy test and the keys to the bathroom. When she walks to the back of the store without paying, the man behind the counter shouts: “Don’t think it’s yours just because you’ve marked it with your urin!”.

I saw Juno at the theater with Natalia and Frida and a couple of other friends. I saw it again with Natalia and the gang when we’d just arrived in La Paz. And after that, quotes from the film became frequently used at more or less appropriate situations during our travels through the Andes to the deep Amazon rainforest.

So, you can understand why me and Mr. P had to try this infamous juice from this cult movie when we saw the jugs on the supermarket shelf. If only just to be able to tell Natalia when we came back home. I thought it tasted like juice that doesn’t really even try to resemble real orange juice. Mr. P found the mix of sweet and sour to go perfectly with his breakfast cream cheese blueberry bagel.

28/4: While walking along Main Street on Saturday, it started raining. So I went into a coffee shop and bought a long ‘Death by Hot Chocolate’ with whipped cream. I probably seemed a little bit confused, as I usually do over here, so as an explanation for my strange behaviour I said that I wasn’t from around here. When I said I was from Sweden, the guy making my hot chocolate became all excited and started name dropping in super speed: Robyn, Lykke Li, The Hives, Peter Bjorn and John, ABBA, Fjällräven Kånken.

So nice, for a change, not to have to discuss IKEA or explain the difference between Sweden and Switzerland for once.

Saturday (28/4), I walked to Commercial Drive. According to the guidebook, that’s where all the bohemians and hipster kids hang out and shop. It’s a little bit off, not really close to Downtown and even further away from Kitsilano. Conveniently enough, though, Scott lives just a healthily brisk walk from the Drive. So, after breakfast tea at the coffee shop downstairs from Scott’s apartment (where they made both coffee and tea in measuring cups and on scales – like a chemistry experiment, so fascinating), I set out for another day of sightseeing.

Commercial Drive is this kind of narrow street, lined with small coffee shops and one-of-a-kind boutiques. To be honest, I went into quite a few of them and ended up buying a marine blue dress and a pair of earrings with trees on them. And they were not cheap. But, oh, so pretty, both dress and earrings. I might have to regret this impulse shopping later, when I need gas money to get from San Francisco to Grand Canyon, but now I’m happy.

I also happened upon a used bike market in a park by Commercial Drive. It was so cozy, and I bought a t-shirt with a screen printed tree on. That one was cheap. And I was also running out of clean t-shirts (for some reason I sweat like a pig while traveling – not because I’m hot, but due to some kind of excitement/stress/concentration. It’s strange). It was a cool shirt. That, I won’t regret.

There was a lot of paintings on the houses of Commercial Drive. And I guess you know by now, how I feel about street art.

When I had walked enough on the Drive, I continued west towards Main Street. That’s the other ‘hip’ shopping street in town, apparently, so I felt that it would make a good combination for the day. So I walked through the industrial areas along First Avenue to Main Street, or Soma (South Main) as the guidebook claims that the Vancouverites call it (which is kind of not-cool, since it’s so obviously an imitation of Soho, and furthermore, the name of the pacifying drug that keeps the masses in place in the classic but scary “Brave New World”. And actually, I didn’t hear a single Vancouverite call it that, so the guidebook must be wrong).

Main reminded alot of the Drive. They had some really nice messages on walls and outside stores. And the blossoming cherry trees made the whole place seem kind of romantic and charmingly run down at the same time.

And on a street just off Main and Broadway, I found this wall. Really, Vancouver is a cool city. And a lot more than the glass skyscrapers that make up the Downtown skyline. I really liked Commercial Drive and Main Street.

27-29/4: What I realised when I started to look for Couchsurfing hosts in Vancouver, is that it requires a lot of planning and fixing and scheduling. It’s not as easy as just sending a message to someone, asking if you can crash on their coach for a couple of nights. Especially in Vancouver, the hosts get a lot of requests and you have to really put thought into your request message. Which means that you have to go through the list and find people that you actually really want to meet. And then, even though you’ve written the perfect, personal request, it might not work out anyway. Couchsurfing hosts have busy lives too, as most people do, and might not be able to host for more than a night or maybe not all the nights you requested or maybe not at all. Which is quite obvious, once you think of it, but since the couchsurfing thing was kind of a spur of the moment thing for me, I hadn’t thought at all before I decided that I desperately needed a place to stay in Vancouver.

Well, as I already wrote before I left Time Out Farms, I kind of panicked and wrote long messages to a whole bunch of people and in the end even managed to double-book myself. But it was kind of good, because there were some last minute changes and then I had a backup plan and ended up confirming stays at three hosts in five nights. The first night was spent at Elise’s and Jeremy’s house. The second and third night was spent with Scott.

Scott is a guy from England, but he’s been living and working in Vancouver for one and a half years now. And he really loves it here. We talked alot about that, the difference between England and British Columbia. He said, that if an Englishman and a Canadian were doing the same dead-end job, the Englishman would be bitter and depressed, while the Canadian would still be happy and generally positive about life. I don’t know enough Canadians nor Englishmen, but it sure seems like Canadians are generally happy and good-natured and extremely polite.

And I do understand why one would want to live in Vancouver. You’ll see my pictures and read my descriptions, it is beautiful – but what I learnt from Scott is that demographically, Vancouver is also a city with many immigrants. The Chinese, of course, and other Asians to a large extent keeping to themselves, but also a lot of people from other Western countries. And really, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most of the people I met in Vancouver weren’t actually born there, and atleast half of them weren’t even Canadians. Elise and Jeremy were students from the States, as were many of their friends. There were also a few Turks and a Colombian frequently visiting. Scott had several English friends, and with him I also met a Scottish couple and two Mexicans.

Vancouver is a city of fusion and many of it’s inhabitants live far away from their blood families. We talked about that, Scott and I, that one of the reasons why he actually would like to stay in Vancouver (if he could only manage to get the permanent visa) is because people are so open and avaliable here. Many of them have left everything behind and here, in this new place, they are free to make new connections, create their own families by choice, and not by blood. There is a freedom in that, and I understand why he likes it. I was only here for five days, but even I managed to make friends – and I’m not the quickest person when it comes to social interactions. If I wasn’t so fond of my family and felt that we actually (mostly) have a constructive relationship to one another, me and my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins – if I felt I needed an ocean between me and them, Vancouver is definitely a place I would consider moving to. To a large extent because of the people.

Scott lives in East Vancouver, in an apartment together with a room mate. I slept on the pull-out bed/couch in the combined kitchen and livingroom. The first night, Friday, Scott cooked me a Mexican dinner (because he’s traveled there, and more or less in every other part of the world) with beans, meat and guacamole. On Saturday, Scott invited me to a BBQ at his friends’ house, just like that, and I got to meet lots of great people and a supercute dog. But I also realised how utterly exhausting it is to talk English for an entire day, non stop, and still manage to be interesting and smart and funny in the evening. I probably seemed distracted and a bit slow. But it was okay, everyone were so nice anyway and I had a great time.

On Sunday, after I was done with the Museum of Anthropology, he came out to UBC and took me to Wreck Beach, apparently Vancouver’s best (and nudest) beach. He said that he wanted to give me the whole Vancouver experience, and considering all the sight seeing advise and the discussions and the BBQ, I must say he did an excellent job. I was expecting a couch to sleep on, but I got two days of intense all-included Vancouver experience. I was so lucky. Scott was an amazing host.

Scotts house from the front.

From the back, the house was right next to these two amazing houses. To have the nerve to paint your house in that colour. I love it!

Friday (27/4), I walked all the way from Kitsilano, through Granville Island to Canada Place and Gastown, which is downtown. And for all of you who are not acquainted with the geography of Vancouver, that’s quite a walk. But it was beautiful, too, and totally worth the sore feet. Because Vancouver is a city where they have thought about aesthetics.

The walk started in Kitsilano, or Kits as the locals call it, where the magnolia trees and cherries and lilacs were blooming.

I continued down to Kitsilano Beach, to the lovely shoreline trail that goes all the way from Kits to Granville Island.

It was low tide, so the smell of sea weed was strong in the air. I love the ocean creatures and the smell of them. I know that for some people, the smell is disagreeable, but for me it brings back memories of long, sunny childhood summers in the Stockholm archipelago and the Swedish west coast. It’s one of my favourite smells.

Closer to Granville Island, you can see Downtown across the water. It’s easy to understand why I was told by another wwoofer that downtown Vancouver is built on a separate island, because there is water everywhere. But, the island is actually much bigger than that. The whole of central Vancouver is built on the island between the two arms of the Fraser river, while Downtown is on a long strip of land, divided from Kitsilano by a narrow but very long creek. That gives the city a lot of shoreline and the possibility to watch the buildings from across water. Quite similar to Stockholm. It gives the feeling of space and freshness, which I think might be the one single biggest reason why atleast I find Vancouver to be such a pleasant city. That is, if we’re only talking about physical, superficial qualities.

By the water, they have these super cool, but probably extremely expensive houses with a view of the ocean. But still, closest to the water, there are small parks, lawns and trails where people run, bike and walk their dogs. Everyone is allowed to enjoy the freshness of the water.

In the middle of the long creek that separates Kitsilano from Downtown, is Granville Island. There is an arts university there, but the main attraction for tourists is the Public Market. Is is basically a huge indoor hall with stalls and counters where you can buy everything from organic apples from the Okanagan valley to jewellery from the artist herself. I bought a bag of organic chocolate chips and three guavas and went out to sit by the water to eat my lunch and watch the water taxis taking tourists Downtown.

From Granville Island, I walked over one of all the Vancouver bridges, and walked right across Downtown on the very straight streets to Canada Place, a cruiseshiplike building by the water.

Here, the buildings are all skyscrapers made out of glass. It’s cool, when the clouds are reflected in all the buildngs, but it also feels kind of sterile. From there, walking into Gastown, just a couple of blocks away, creates a totally different feeling.

This is the oldest part of Vancouver, the buildings are lower and many of them are made out of red brick (which I’m strangely partial to). On this street, there are tons of tourists taking pictures of the steam clock (whick nowadays is actually run by electricity) and it looks very clean and cute, but only one block up, I walked past narrow alleys with grafitti on the walls and a group of middleaged men sitting on a stair smoking weed. The smell was heavy in the air. (Later, Scott, my second host, told me that at night, there are people doing a lot heavier stuff in Gastown. Vancouver is a safe city, but Gastown is one of the few places where you don’t want to go alone at night. It’s the decadent part of the city, with the artists and drug addicts.)

Well, funnily enough, I happened upon this building just a couple of blocks later. Vancouver really is a weedy city.

So, that was my first day of sight seeing in Vancouver. From Yaletown, where the rich and fancy live and shop, I walked over another bridge and continued all the way up to Broadway, where I caught the 99 back to 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.