Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Why I am on couchsurfing? ...To explain, I would like to tell the story of my first couchsurfing experience in 2011. I had ended up in Georgia (the country on the eurasian continent, not the American state) where i had volunteered on an organic farm. I was 21 years old and had just graduated from [the German equivalent] of high-school. For sure, Georgia must have changed a lot in the meantime, at least I rember that almost everything was on the run and about to develop really rapidly, at least in the cities. The contrast between the little village where the farm was and the thrill of Tbilissi (Georgia's capital) was absolutely crazy, just as were the contrasts within the city itself... Coming from the plain farm-life into all this hype I also met other travellers from all over the [economically rich parts of] the world in a hostel. This was the first time somebody told me about this website called "couchsurfing" - people just offering their hospitality - because they like to do so. This idea sounded very nice and exciting to me, so of course i followed the suggestion to create my own account. As I had no smartphone or other fancy device with me, I asked somebody to take a picture of me with his camera, that I could use to set up my profile on the hostel's veeery slow computer :-) The photo shows me, wearing a blue sort of sweatshirt and — naturally —standing in a street in Tbilissi. The caption says: "this is me on mt. everest", as was suggested as an example-caption...

Oh by the way, if you need a couch, DONT'T FEEL OBLIGED to read all this stuff, you can simply write me a message/request!! ...I just enjoy reminiscing.

...After some time I decided I would like to travel to Iran, which was sort of nearby, and in order to get the Iranian Visa I was then headed to Turkey first. However, when I explained my wish to the Iranian consulary folks in Trabzon, a black-sea-cost-city in the east of Turkey, I was kindly told, that without a Passport that is not going to expire within the next couple of days, there wouldn't really be a chance to get what I wanted . "You must go Ankara" said a man with the longest beard I had ever seen. Bummer, but okay Turkey interested me, too. So off to Ankara (and the German embassy) it was. But how to get there? I remembered how a Japanese traveller from the hostel had told me that it was "easy and safe to Hitch-Hike in Turkey“ “…I am never scared." ...So, excited by all this new adventure, combined with a feeling of heart-shaking loneliness and yet the energizing sense of freedom I packed my backpack the next morning, walked down to the main road and held out my thumb to the world.
I had not seriously hitch-hiked before, but the Japanese guy was right, Turkey was and probably still is a great country for hitch-hiking [edit: I am aware that I am multiply priviliged here as a white european male...] and it so happened that I really did end up that same night over 700km's further west in the Capital of Turkey. Alone in Ankara with no idea where to go and where to stay. It goes without saying that I did not have all that much money to spend on a real hotel and even if I had had it, everybody was only telling me where to not go, because they considerd this and that area of the city as generally "not really safe" (?). So I was basically hanging out at the central bus-station (which looks more like an airport) and realised how I was eventually getting tired. The like 12 hours of almost straight euphoria, a day that was filled with good chance and charity, the poetic beauty of the road... eventually it all dissolved and gave room to a sense of being lost, very far away from home and anyone I knew. Nobody had answered the couple of couch-requests I had written the night before leaving and I did not really know what to do next. So I just spent my time sitting, whising, waiting and occasionally going to the internet cafe to buy a couple of minutes on the web and check if somebody had written to me, when ...finally, Yes! It felt to me like a miracle. I was saved. I mean, not that I had really been in a bad or dangerous situation, but subjectively it felt so and I was increadably pleased and happy when I got the news that this "couch-surfing"-thing was really about to work.
A friendly young man in about my own age came to pick me up with his little car, that had no passenger-seat. "Why is there no passenger seat?" I asked "there is no need for it, so I just took it off" he said, and so I placed myself in the back-seat (which luckily was considered to be of use) and this is the beginning of how I surfed my first couch... I am by the way still occasionally in touch with A. from Ankara, who also visited me in Germany later.
This story is just one example of how this website can be a part of something big and very beautiful – people just helping each other. Today, many of the experiences I made as a traveller help me to maintain some optimism about us humans.

Interests

• dancing
• politics
• music
• cycling
• mountaineering
• rock climbing
• agriculture
• food
• cinema
• theatre
• climbing
• peace
• backcountry skiing
• behavioural biology
• media-theory

Music, Movies, and Books

Music! wow, what can you say about that...
Frank Zappa once said: "talking about music is like dancing to architecture."
...nice idea.

Countries I’ve Lived In

Germany, Spain

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