Tag Archives: sports

Wiederseh in New York

by ladina

Wär hätti je dänggt, wo mir uns vor über mne Johr in Basel verabschiedet hän, dass mir uns in New York wieder träffe würde?

Damals sin d USA nid mol uf unserer Reiseroute gstande. Won ich allerdings ghört ha, dass dr Kaspar und d Fabienne im April uf New York göhn und d Salome au in däm Monet uf ere Studiereis dört verbigo wird, han ich plötzlich afo Plän schmiede. Worum au nid uf New York — e Wältstadt wo mich scho immer greizt het — wenn mir das au no mit mne Träffe vo däne liebe Lüt verbinde könnte? S Flugticket nach San Francisco hän mir jo scho ka und vo dört an d Ostküste isch es fascht e Katzesprung.

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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.

Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.

I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.

I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.

This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.

After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.

Maybe such a thing is impossible.

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