Couchsurfing

There is a website, called couchsurfing, where you can have a personal profile and offer to host or look for a couch to stay on across the globe. I had heard about this on my last travels in Greece, and ended up staying with a couchsurfing host by mere coincidence. But seeing as Paris is so expensive, I decided to try my hand at it and found a wonderful woman named Geraldine to host me for 3 days over the weekend here.

The experience was honestly quite interesting. Geraldine is an incredibly nice lady. She works as a high school english teacher in the southern area of Paris (a really rough area full of gangs), so she is definitely a tough cookie. But from the moment I met her to the moment I left, she shared her entire life with me. She shared her couch, her food, her friends, she showed me around on her day off. It was like having an instant best friend. I got to see the real side of Paris, as she lives in one of the more grittier neighborhoods, and went to places that I would never have had the balls to go to myself. It was an absolutely wonderful experience, but it definitely was a completely foreign experience to me. It is hard for me to imagine the openess you must have, not to mention the generosity, to treat all your guests as if they're family, and it was really inspiring to see someone act that way.

The only problem is this feeling of not having contributed back to her life as much as she has to mine. Whereas in wwoof, you work for your meals and accomodation so you don't feel as indebted to the people, there really isnt much you can do other than clean the dishes or buy some beer before you leave. I know she doesn't host people in order to get something material out of it, but it's really engrained in the way 'we' (perhaps Americans, perhaps it's just me) think that you don't give things out for free. So having this overwhelming sense of being in debt to your host can be quite tiring. You are always on your best behavior, constantly trying to help out, and to be the least amount of hassle as possible. It's an interesting conundrum. You get to stay for free, and have a much more indepth experience of the city, plus make a new friend - but you lose a lot of freedom and autonomy. Overall though, I think I much prefer this method of travel than staying in hostels, especially in non-english speaking countries, as now, having been in Paris for 6 days, I feel completely confident on my own, like I'm a native here already.

I've written some more hosts along the way on my future travels, so we'll see who I get to stay with next! Hopefully it will take some of the overhead off the rest of this trip, as I'm having absolutely no luck finding another farm to stay at for a few weeks. I think I might be on my own for the remainder of this trip, but we shall see! I decided to stay at least another night in Paris at a hostel, just so I could figure out my schedule. So hopefully by the end of the day I will have a better idea of where I will be heading next!