A Final...

...Look Back.

(The last in a series of installments written sin internet and saved to Microsoft Word)

I am writing this from Dublin. I have been here for 3 days. It is a dirty city, I think there is a lot of art here. I don’t think I got a full impression of what it is like, but I have seen castles, art, and books. I also met people. I think it is less interesting to talk about the sights and how I walked around that it is to talk about something that struck me about the trip.

So I’ll talk about people.

For accommodations here, I tried “couch surfing”. I had tentative plans to attempt this in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, but I no one was willing to take me in at the first two locations, and I have been left keys to a house in Glasgow by a nice man I met at the summer school. My second to last night in London, I sent out 4 messages to random people, praying to get a response. Within 20 minutes, a person named “Hal” had told me that he had other people over, but that if I didn’t mind staying around others, he would be willing to take me in. I told him that I would be ok with that, as long as I had a place to stay.

Fast forward through another night at the Hostel California and a long bus ride to Gatwick where mean airport security made me throw away my contact solution because I didn’t have a prescription for it. Then a flight to Dublin. Then a bus ride in Dublin that was very long and went through “suburbs” that reminded me of Guatemala more than anything else. Then I got to Dublin. 7 pm, plenty of time to find my host. I walked by a crowded event that was apparently U2’s triumphant return to Ireland, sold out three nights in a row. Then I tried to find the apartment where I would be sleeping. Couldn’t. Got propositioned by a prostitute. Went to an internet café, mapped the city, was no closer to finding it. Got pointed in the wrong direction to Rathmines (the neighborhood) 6 times, including once by a pair of police. It got dark. I took a cab. Drank in the bar below Hal’s apartment, couldn’t get in. Went to a late night internet café and made a call to the number I had. The reception was terrible, but I got someone. They said they’d be meeting me halfway between where I was and the apartment.

The person who arrived to meet me was not Hal. He said his name was Roger and that he was from Houston, Texas. This was certainly not where I expected my host in Dublin to live. When I asked about Hal, he told me that Hal had gone to sleep because he had to be awake early for his accounting internship. This was certainly not what I expected my free-spirited student of astrophysics to be doing. We arrived. I met Hal’s friend Steve and Steve’s girlfriend Jess. The two had been kicked out of their uncle’s house for sleeping in the same room. I asked if anyone else was in the house. Apparently, there were 2 Germans (I never met them) staying in a room down the hall. They were out seeing U2. Roger offered me some of Hal’s tea. He also offered it to Steve and Jess. We all had some. And stayed up talking, waiting for yet another pair of people, a pair of brothers from New Hampshire. 8 guests stayed in the house that night, none of them paid save for a few groceries or the odd bottle of wine (I brought some Spanish tempranillo from a grocery store).

I slept on a couch with no blanket, until someone (Hal) dropped on onto me at 6 in the morning. When I woke up, Roger offered me more of Hal’s tea, and some of his toast. I worried about it, but couldn’t say no. I was hungry. Roger asked if I’d like to explore with him for the day. So I did. And exploring with another person is more fun than exploring alone. But I couldn’t shake the strange feeling of palling around with someone whom I’d never met before. We talked like old friends, but consistently asked about details of the other’s life. We discussed home life, aspirations, relationships, other things. Roger was on the last leg of his European trip, where he started in Istanbul and ended in Dublin, without once staying in hostels or hotels. His accommodations were comprised entirely of couch-surfer hosts and We compromised on what sights to see and which ones we could skip. We also compromised on topics of conversation (Ireland and Texas are apparently similarly progressive regarding homosexuals (read: not at all), which made for a few uncomfortable silences when I was in groups). And I still had not met my host. Instead, I was shown the city by a fellow “surfer” who had also fed me, showed me where the bathroom was, and where I would be sleeping. Roger lost Hal’s keys and he and I drank beer while we waited for someone to get to the house. Upon hearing about his keys, Hal shrugged. He didn’t mention them again.

I met Hal that evening. He is 21 years old, brawny (he plays quarterback for the Trinity College American Football Team) and exceedingly friendly. He began hosting in August of 2008 and has hosted 50 people in his flat in the last month. He gets about 20 requests a day. Some says, he rejects them all, indiscriminately. Other days, he picks based on who he’d like to meet or who has read his profile (he picked me because I had my dog in my picture on the website). He prefers last minute, desperation messages, because he likes to feel like he’s helping someone who really needs it.

To this point, I have spent a grand total of 2.5 hours with Hal, who allowed me to sleep in his home for two nights. Yesterday, our time in the evening was cut short because he needed to call his girlfriend, who lives in Quebec (they began dating last month, when he let her stay at his house). This afternoon, we went to lunch. We graced the same topics that Roger and I had a day earlier, but then we arrived at the topic of couch-surfing. He described it as being a bit like a cult, which seems to be the general opinion of the enthusiastic. What I found most notable was his uncompromising belief that couch-surfing represents a long lost sense of community, where friendships can be forged and karma practiced in earnest. He told me that he has never had a horrible experience while hosting or being hosted. We discussed the horror stories that he has heard about and that I have read about, agreeing that it is much more difficult for a woman traveling alone than a man. Nonetheless, we marveled at the sense of familiarity (false or not) that the practice forces upon its participants. I left him at his internship, shook his hand, and assured him that if he ever needed a place in Athens, Georgia, I have him covered. That seems rather unlikely ever to happen.

teh confused.

-kevsurfer