Opening doors.

With my impending vacation drawing close I have taken my couch off the market. I have a German guy for the next weekend and then nothing.
Its a strange feeling being surfer free. I need to go back and calculate the amount of travellers that passed through my house since I started hosting in July 2010 its easily over 60. Maybe even closer to 80. With 50% being either french or german.

Perhaps that was a little overboard I realise now how much I love the downtime. Being constantly social puts a drain on my personality and cuts into my gaming time. Not to mention I have a hard enough time maintaining my real life friends without adding bulk couchsurfers to the list. Heaven forbid I should try and fit a relationship in there. Thank fuck for facebook though despite the intense whirlwind connections we had for a few days, will I really ever see a lot of them again? I wish someone would invent teleportation technology so I could just jump over to a new country and see my friends for a coffee or something then jump back home to reality. I also wish they would never leave me.

Still you need to be happy that these people were in your life, even if it was just for one day. It helps to change my opinion of the world as well. We are so easily influenced by a minority of people we forget to look as a whole. Take Americans for example, for so long they have battled with this persona of being obnoxious, self-absorbed, rude, simple-minded etc. Yet what I realise every time I host or be hosted by an American how many bloody awesome ones there are. I have to admit my opinion of the French was a little bias as well, I thought they were elitist moochers and then I started opening my home and met some of the most amazing, generous French people I wonder how I would ever have met them without couchsurfing! Imagine if these French people had never come into my life for those few days I would still think of them in a slightly negative light.

So here is to couchsurfing and shedding the skin of generalisation.