The Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome. Completely breathtaking.
Rooting around online in order to plan out my wife’s and my trip to Spain (Madrid, Barcelona & Granada) and Italy (Rome) this past May I bumbled upon the website Couchsurfing.org. After a cursory glance, I determined there were actual human beings the world around who were willing to put up perfect strangers in their homes, in exchange for a bit of conversation, and perhaps a meal or two. Thanking my lucky Internet find, and doing quick calculations in my head of exactly how much money we could save if we did not have to pay for a hotel or hostel (more on that later), I dove into the new Couch Surfing (CS) world.
First off, you must understand that the CS service is completely free, or at least that is what the website tells you until they lay the guilt on thick about “contributing” to the community by “Getting Verified.” Apparently free means $24, but only if you want to be like the rest of the CS kids who are for the most part diligent verified world travelers with nothing to hide. I started using the service without getting verified, but I have nothing to hide, so I suppose that makes me a bit odd. Miraculously I was still able to send out couch requests and eventually locate some potential leads.
The number one strategy I recommend employing when host hunting is to send out a ridiculous amount of requests. I sent a total of 39 requests and only two people offered to host us, but one of these lovelies actually flaked on us one week before our departure. Was spending countless hours (I did lose track) searching for and sending couch requests worth it? No, not really.
Here is where I left off when I started this post about three to four months ago. Let’s just say that my passion for this topic has waned, so allow me to finish off this potentially very long story in a rather abrupt manner.
My wife and I stayed with a lovely gay Italian couple in Rome. They stayed up until almost midnight every night, needed us out of the house by 9am, smoked (we knew this) and only had a pull out sofa bed in the living room (we signed up for this too, well…I signed us up for this). Extremely nice people, full of life and love, but this married couple needed their own room, and more than nine hours to sleep, wake up, shower and stumble out into the Roman mayhem.
Verdict: Couch surfing is for either young or single people and CouchSurfing.org probably works best if you pay the $24, send out tons of requests and have lots of patience.
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