Lately I’ve been having a few dealings with something called couchsurfing. For those of you who have not heard of it, a brief guide can be found here.
If you follow that link, you will see that the aim of couchsurfing is to bring together travellers from all over the world, connecting myriad diverse people and cultures, bringing us altogether as one. Of course, that is not the real aim of couchsurfing at all. Only a small number of idealists believe that, the kind of people who refuse to drink any coffee other than decaffeinated, Fairtrade organic (unless they’re in a Parisian or Venetian café where the cappuccino costs more than a Colombian’s monthly salary). Such people, who usually hail by way of south-east Asia, are in many ways the lifeblood of couchsurfing. They are the ones who keep it alive for the likes of me: the leeches. For us, couchsurfing merely represents a great way to travel and see the world, without having to spend any drinking money on such tiresome things as hotels and hostels.
There are also a small minority of people, I suspect, who use couchsurfing to try and hook up with people. Unfortunately, I don’t have any specific information about this. I wish I did.
Anyway, back to us moochers, and leeches, and couchcrashers: the majority, in other words. From our point of view, couchsurfing represents an intriguing challenge: how to maximise the number of fun friends and free beds, without actually having to let anyone stay in our houses. This is inconvenient for a number of reasons. For a start, when this happens, I invariably feel compelled to clean my house prior to any guests arriving. This is an activity I prefer to carry out on a date and time of my own choosing (I usually go for 29 February). Secondly, house guests, whilst of course welcome and even tolerably pleasant sometimes, represent a gross intrusion of my privacy. Not to mention that house guests tend to find my habit of drinking beer in my underwear at 2 in the morning whilst watching Spanish football, or the Test match from New Zealand, on a crackly internet feed, so disconcerting that I am usually made to feel awkward about doing so, and consequently feel compelled to refrain from such activities. Admittedly this generally has a negligible effect on my happiness and well-being, but still. If I wanted to let other people decide what I do in my own house, I’d get married, and at least that way I might be able to shirk more of the cleaning.
So, house guests, especially strangers, = not desirable, in principle. In practice, I should point out, they are invariably polite, charming, delightful and no trouble at all, and it is sad to see them leave. But like the man who does not want to see the beauty and splendour of the sunrise because he would have to get out of bed to do so, I don’t care.
Unfortunately, like many Irish people, I have a peculiar difficulty with saying the word no (this is why an Irishman will never turn down your suggestion of a drink). It is a fact that the Irish language has no exact word for no (or yes, for that matter) and even in English we have a strong aversion to giving direct answers to questions, preferring to answer questions like “Mind if I ride your wife?” with answers like “Ah now, I’m not sure she’d be liking that, and t’wouldn’t be the best time of month for it anyway, like I’d say it’d be grand otherwise but that’s the way it is, so it is.” So even when something as fundamental as my right to peace, dignity and a dirty house is at stake, I feel uncomfortable refusing couchsurfer after couchsurfer after freeloading git*. So I need a strategy to discourage the endless queue of applicants all armed with low funds and long anecdotes. Describing your house in creative ways to discourage people in a non-obvious manner is a must. For example, on my profile I make a point of praising the excellent view from my balcony – one can see almost every square inch of the rendering plant next door. And highlighting its peace and solitude – it is 25 minutes from the nearest bar, restaurant or bus stop. That way, I can go overboard in presenting myself as the sort of dashing, suave raconteur that everyone would like to meet and would even tolerate kipping on their couch, safe in the knowledge that no-one will want to kip on mine.
Sadly, however, one meets even more skilled exponents of the couchsurfing game. Last weekend, in fact, I had a couchsurfing weekend. It started the previous Monday morning at work, when I found in my inbox a request from someone in Plovdiv. They were three girls, they said, and needed a place to stay in Veliko Tarnovo for the weekend. I did the usual thing: gave a non-committal answer, neither yes nor no, tried to palm them off on a friend, and pointed out all the many flaws and drawbacks of my apartment. It was small, the three of them would have to share one bed, there was no hot water (there is, in fact, but these things can be fixed…). They weren’t swayed, or else they were desperate, because they replied the next day, reaffirming their request.
Never, ever, reply to email when you’re drunk!
After celebrating another glorious win for Manchester United, 1-0 against some much smaller club without even a referee of their own, I came home, head swirling, happy. I checked my email. It read:
‘We don’t mind sharing. We’re very close, and we like each other 
so, we’d really like to stay with you’
Temporarily convinced by their words and by my beer that I was now accepting three Bulgarian lesbian nymphomaniacs into my home, I clicked ‘accept’, and went to play online sudoku.
Of course, they turned out to be nothing of the sort. For a start, they weren’t even from Plovdiv. For a site presumably aimed at travellers, Couchsurfing has some problems with geography. Though maybe that’s part of the idea… getting you to go to places you wouldn’t go otherwise.
Anyway, my guests were three charming members of the European Volunteer Scheme. If you are not familiar with this, it is a scheme where people volunteer to go and work in other European countries. Much like what I do, only for much less money.
They wanted to know where to go in Tarnovo, so after a perfunctory stroll down to the fortress at Tsaravets (we didn’t go in, it was too late in the evening) we went out for food, beer and merriment. They told me all about their volunteering. I was about to ask them about the nymphotic lesbianism when Judith, their ringleader (being German, she is very comfortable with organising stuff, so she was the ringleader. I, being Irish, just wanted to shepherd everyone towards the nearest pub. And Anna and Dorota, being Polish, were happy to oblige), Judith explained to me how they had decided to stay with me because I came across on my profile as ‘a bit shy’. Abashed, I changed my question, and enquired about the weather instead. Which sort of proved Judith’s point, I suppose.
The weather was glorious actually, that weekend. And to my shame, I spent most of the afternoon, instead of guiding my guests around the delights of Tarnovo, watching football. In my defence, I originally went home for a nap after work, but the football was so exciting, it had to be watched. Anyway the girls came home from sightseeing, waited patiently for the football to finish whilst drinking all my wine, before telling me about their day. Veliko Tarnovo, they were unanimous, was beautiful, and they would most certainly be back. Though they all live around Kazanlak, so their standard of beauty is perhaps not the highest. The only time I’ve ever heard anyone say a good word about Kazanlak was when my boss managed to play it on a triple word score in Scrabble. Still, Tarnovo is genuinely nice, and is full of great restaurants, bars and clubs. So needless to say, we stayed in, playing cards whilst drinking all my beer, and chatting away amicably. We got to see Tarnovo’s famous light show from my balcony, which with the spring was the first time it was on in a while, and we sang songs whilst drinking all my vodka, and generally a great night was had by all, even if I cannot remember clearly everything that happened, particularly after we finished off my Bailey’s.
The next day, sad to say, I kicked my guests out early, before they’d really woken up properly, so that I could catch the train to Ruse, to visit some more couchsurfing buddies.
The train to Ruse is one of the slowest in Europe, though not quite the slowest; however, peeved at missing out on the record, they like to prove a point by having regular delays and hold-ups on the service. Thus, after a pleasant couple of hours meandering through bucolic fields and sleepy villages full of British-owned second homes, while trucks, cars, bicycles and the occasional pedestrian whizzed past us on the adjacent road, we eventually reached a place called Borovo where the train adjourned for an hour, as far as I can make out to enable the entire train crew to nip over the road for a coffee, before standing on the platform talking at intervals and gesticulating vaguely. Borovo looked like the kind of Bulgarian village with more stray dogs than people, and in truth, I don’t think the train could have picked a better place to wait, as we were able to go sightseeing and view most of what Borovo has to offer from the comfort of our own carriage.
Eventually the train slowly clanked into motion again, and we wound our way through fields, snaked around hills and twisted through the occasional valley. It is a noticeable characteristic of Bulgarian railway engineers that they have a singular distaste for anything that goes in a straight line. There is a good reason for this. Many of the early railways in Europe were built, at least in part, to serve military purposes, by allowing troops to be moved to the front line as quickly as possible. Bulgarians, being natural pacifists, thus decided against the construction of straight, fast, efficient railways in order to frustrate these unpleasant militaristic goals, instead trying to build a line with as many curves, bends and detours as possible. This has left its mark on Bulgaria’s infrastructure even today, as well as in history: in early 1941, Hitler decided it was time to kill some Greeks, took one look at the Bulgarian railway map and decided to invade through Yugoslavia instead. The consequent delay to the invasion of Russia ultimately, according to many historians, cost Germany the war.
Ruse has several different spellings in English, some of which look like Russia. It is an interesting place, because of its location on the Danube, which dominates the town: it tends to look towards the river and define itself accordingly. In some ways, it feels like a frontier town, with the whole of Bulgaria behind it, Romania across the river, Europe upstream, the ocean downstream. It feels a bit more cosmopolitan than your average Bulgarian city – the people, if not exactly fluent in English and well-versed in different cultures, are at least open to the idea of there being different cultures, and prepared to make the effort to speak English, something frequently absent in restaurants, cafés and ticket offices up and down the country.
I was met at the station by Berkay and Neshka, my hosts for the day. They aren’t a couple though, but Neshka had stayed at Berkay’s place because she had arrived home at drunk o’clock the previous night unable to find her keys. Anyway, she was an excellent host, brimming with a personality so infectious that, no word of a lie, I’ve managed to arrive home without my keys twice in the last week.
Anyway, first thing we did was to go to Neshka’s flat to get her key off her boyfriend. Her flat was near the river, with a grand sweeping view of some trees framing a river vista, until they cut down the trees three years ago and built a big ugly apartment block across the road, Neshka tells me. It has to be said, the apartment block they built was not really in keeping with the general architectural tone of the street. So, to rectify this, they built another, equally ugly apartment block, next to it. Now it looks much less out of place.
We spent a typically energetic Sunday afternoon – pizza, ice cream, coffee, cake, more coffee… just finding anything to consume until it reached an hour when we could decently drink beer. One thing about Bulgarians: they don’t go in for daytime sessions much, the way Irish do. Although they do apparently use beer as a hangover cure, something I tried last St. Patrick’s Day… and it sort of works actually. As far as I remember, anyway.
Finally it was beer o’clock, and we went to the supermarket, got a couple of cans in and strolled down to the riverside to enjoy them. Ruse has, in the past, had occasional problems with the Danube flooding, so in a rare fit of dynamic organisation, the city government has actually done something about this. They have secured special funding to build a flood defence scheme (why they didn’t follow Bray’s idea of only allowing golf courses and working class people on the flood plain, I don’t know…). This scheme consists of building a big concrete wall all along the bank of the Danube as it flows past Ruse. In fact, it is just concrete piled on ugly grey concrete, so much so that one could almost be forgiven for assuming that the city mayor, or a close associate of his, had interests in a concrete company. It’s a pity really, as what Ruse could really do with is a lovely riverside marina, maybe with some cafés, bars and restaurants, where one could stroll, or simply enjoy a nice meal whilst watching the sun set over the river waters. Instead, there’s just a big mass of concrete, and as mentioned, it’s strictly bring-your-own-beer. Still, after we’d finished the beers Neshka knew a cafe within easy distance which specialised in the catch of the day, and unhealthily addictive garlic chips, good enough to ensure that I’ll be returning to Ruse.
There were more beers, needless to say, and a couple of whiskeys (half price on Sunday nights at Ruse’s official Greatest Bar!) and a film at Berkay’s – Snatch, for which they insisted on English subtitles. Of that I had only scornful thoughts, until Brad Pitt’s character appeared, after which, I had to admit, the subtitles served a valid purpose. I won’t ruin the ending of Snatch for you, if you haven’t seen it, so I’ll skip forward to the end of the weekend, and the blog: the following morning, up at an ungodly hour, to catch a train to Pleven, off to work, bleary-eyed and hungover. And that last line, I think, captures the couchsurfing experience better than anything.
*In the interests of accuracy and staying friends with some rather cool people, I should point out here that every couchsurfer I have hosted, without exception, has brought me a gift for my troubles, such as they were.
