Introducing my fabulous, wonderful, amazing couchsurfing hosts
I heard about CS in early 2008. I joined CS on June 22, 2009. I waited an entire year before becoming comfortable enough with the idea to actually try couchsurfing. 99% of the people I talked to about doing it pooh-poohed it, with the exception of Chuck. Some of them explicitly tried to talk me out of it (citing safety reasons, offering to help pay for hotels, etc), and others just gave me this LOOK. Like, it was nice knowing you! if I don’t see you again, I’ll know why!
I’m really very thankful that I didn’t listen to these people because I had one of the best experiences of my life. I went in with no expectations, and from the very beginning, I was swept up by the kindness and trust of people with whom I had only ever talked to via the internet.
Let’s start with Sylvie.
Sylvie loves organic stuff. She’s an artist, a dancer, a musician (plays the djembe!), and works with troubled children as an educatrice spécialisée. She stops to take a look at every jewelry stand at the markets in Antibes and Nice. She is the kind of girl who, when it gets insufferably hot, takes showers with her dress on at the public beach showers. In short, she’s quite lovely.
While she is renovating her new apartment in Nice, I stayed at her little flat in Roquebrune. Her parents built it right next to their house when she was 18. I think I probably took over a hundred photos of their garden, terrace, and views. Some afternoons I didn’t even want to go anywhere, so perfectly content was i just sitting on this bench table and reading and writing and taking photos.
Of course, we still made it to the beach. A note about this beach: It was the very same one CD and I went to in 2007 on our magical beach day so you can imagine how happy I was to rediscover it.
Sylvie’s English is excellent, the kind of excellent you don’t expect from someone who hasn’t lived in an English-speaking country for a while. I love polyglots, mainly because I am very jealous of them, and it turns out that Sylvie is Italian and speaks that language too. Her father hails from northern Italy, and he kind of reminded me of Marcello Mastroianni. Her mother comes from southern Italy, and I pretty much gobbled up everything she made for lunch one afternoon. It included squash flower beignets and homemade melon sorbet.
We spent so much time together talking, eating, swimming, walking that I felt like I was visiting an old friend instead of making a new one. I knew she was my kind of person when we spent an hour grocery shopping at Carrefour (true fact: Carrefour is one of my favorite places in France). I was sad to leave her at the end of our 4 days together, but very excited to mosey on over to Menton and meet my next host, Catherine.
Right off the bat, Catherine is super chatty and laughs a lot. Plus she has great legs and is seemingly indefatigable. I wanted to hug her for tolerating my French for two days and for teaching me a new way to say something sucks, “c’est de la daube!”
Catherine lives in a spic and span apartment in the very middle of Menton. As with my previous host, I was in a superb location with her. One morning, we took a walk to the food market and brought home an amazing assortment of treats for lunch, and I loved trying each and every single one of them: Socca, anchovy pizza, pichade (a french tomato tart and a specialty of Menton, acc. to wikipedia), Swiss chard beignets, and pissaladiere (a white pizza with caramelized onions). Dessert was fresh figs.
She also let me raid the olive collection in her refrigerator.
We went to the Friday market in Ventimiglia, Italy, where I swore to buy nothing but ended up borrowing money from her to buy gloves! She is like me in that we are not the kind of person you want to go shopping with when you’re on a budget. However, they were very pretty brown leather gloves with rabbit fur lining inside. I don’t feel so guilty about rabbit fur because I eat them too. Mentally, I couldn’t handle fur from foxes, beavers, raccoons.
I am indebted to Catherine for taking me to a parapharmacie and going through each French beauty brand with me. NO JOKE, I have been wanting to do that for the last two years. I left with a Cattier toothpaste containing clay and propolis for my dad and plans to stock up on Nuxe products in Paris.
There is something about traveling that makes people sappy, and so here it goes: Sylvie and Catherine, thank you for your time and generosity. Thank you to Heidi, for treating me to tea and fabulous views of London at the Tate; and Kelly, the stranger who gave me a ride at midnight on a creepy country road outside of London; and to you, the guy in Nice who bought my train ticket because my credit card wouldn’t work in the machine and let me pay pay you back in coins.**
It’s hard to muster the courage to travel alone without a purpose and to trust that good will come of it, but I think it always does.
**But no thanks to you, the bus driver who left me on the road somewhere between Eze and Beaulieu because I only had 70 centimes instead of 1 Euro.
I haven’t seen something like that in 20 years.
I’ve had my share of truly horrible airport and airline stories, including one that involved lighting striking an air tower, sleeping in the airport lounge, paying $100 for a cab ride to some podunk North Carolina city, and walking into a conference room with my suitcase rolling behind me.
This one is not that bad, not even close. In fact, it has a happy ending. Not SUPER happy, since I would have liked a nonstop flight to London instead of that layover in Boston, but easy come easy go, or something like that.
So anyway, I had just boarded my plane at LAX. The minute I sat down, the captain announces that because of weather problems near the Great Lakes area, they were being asked to delay our flight by an hour.
I panicked. My connecting flight to London was supposed to depart from Boston exactly 65 minutes after my flight to Boston landed, which meant that I would have to spend a night there.
I immediately got on the phone to American Airlines, and I have to say that of the three different times I called them in a span of 10 minutes, two of the customer service agents were super duper helpful. Understood my urgency but were really calm. Not like the dimwitted person I got the first time I called.
After I explained the situation, I was on the verge of getting transferred to a nonstop flight from LAX to London leaving that same day. PERFECT. I was already imagining taking the shuttle back to Hollywood and having lunch with CD before the new flight.
Just when the kind woman put me on hold for a moment, the captain announced that we could still use our cellphones but we would be going to the tarmac to wait out the delay. And then the plane started rolling, taking with it my dream of making it to London on time.
That is when I propelled myself out of my window seat and ran past my bewildered neighbors and first class to the captain’s cockpit, all the while shouting desperately, “CAN I GET OFF THE PLANE? I NEED TO GET OFF THE PLANE!”
After a really dramatized explanation from me, the captain agreed to open the doors again, and suddenly there were four flight attendants all shooing me out.
EXCEPT. Just as I took one step out the plane, the customer service angel who I was prepared to hug if she had been in front of me came back from hold and asked, “Wait, you’re already on the plane?”
“There’s nothing I can do if you’re already checked in and your baggage is on the plane. You have to just take it.”
When she said that, I immediately scooted back into the plane, much to the confusion of the flight attendants and captain, who, mind you, I had just convinced to reopen the doors by describing in utter urgency the NEED for me to catch this other flight to London.
Because I could not accept the agent’s answer just like that, I started to do the super annoying thing of trying to communicate verbally with the person on the phone while simultaneously trying to demonstrate through facial expressions what I was hearing to the FOUR people looking at me with quizzical and slightly irritated looks.
In the end, I slinked back to my seat.
I was so busy being embarrassed that I did not expect how many people were concerned about me missing that flight.
Towards the end of the ride, a flight attendant came to tell me personally that we would arrive on time to catch my next flight. Then later, they asked over the loudspeaker for passengers to let people with connecting flights to London leave the plane first. A little bit later, they announced that the flight to London was leaving at a gate next door to the one we would be landing at.
When people around me heard that, they cheered. Seriously. “It turned out perfectly! We were all worried about you,” one woman said.
About my earlier attempt to eject myself from the plane, one man added gleefully, “I haven’t seen something like that in 20 years. It was great.”
