Empty Nest

What a difference having guests in your home, even for a short while, can make. Who came all the way to Australia just to visit us you ask??? Well, no one *ahem*, let me back up a bit…

Once upon a time a little website called couchsurfing was created with the intention to make the world more accessible by having a worldwide community of people willing to let others stay in their homes during their stay in your neck of the woods. It’s really a great concept with options ranging from just staying the night on someone’s couch, meeting up for drinks, or creating open events to anyone who happens to be in your area to stop by. We have participated by meeting up with a woman in Venice for dinner and drinks and greatly enjoyed that experience and wanted to have more opportunities to use this great tool.

Fast forward to present day and we realized that we had a golden opportunity. As shocking as this may seem, no one was really biting at the bit to stay with us in Charlotte – we knew Melbourne would be different. So we updated our status to say that we did have a ‘couch’ and were open to hosting some surfers for a couple of nights.

Cue the onslaught of requests. Within an hour we had nine different requests…Melbourne may be a slightly more popular destination than Charlotte…just a guess. We thought it over for a night to really consider if we were okay with perfect strangers sleeping under the same roof, and decided that yes we would open up our home (and ourselves!) to the world.

The world ended up being two women from Germany who had been backpacking all over Australia for the past three months. We agreed to host for one weekend thinking to ourselves that two nights would be the most we would want anyone to stay. They showed up and our first experience as hosts started.

We commenced with the typical meet and greet awkwardness associated with embarking on new experiences. As it turns out, they too had never couchsurfed before and were just as relieved as we were to discover that no one was a three headed mouth-breather. We all went out for dinner at a local pho restaurant right around the corner and swapped traveling stories.

Long long long story short this was an awesome experience; our surfers ended up staying with us for the remainder of their time in Melbourne, we cooked a typical American dinner for them and enjoyed two delicious traditional German dinners cooked by them (Spaetzle from the south of Germany and Flammkuchen from the North). We saw sights together, shopped together, shared laughs and had deep conversations about politics, culture, and life in general. Now that they both have left, our little apartment in the sky feels a bit lonely…

*Corniness disclaimer* How amazing is it that in this big big world you run into situations that give you opportunities to connect with people you otherwise would never have met. What started out as a meeting of strangers ended as a parting of friends. And we now have two more reasons to go back and visit Germany…with a couch to sleep on.

p.s. I have intentionally not posted pictures or the names of our new friends out of respect for their privacy (because this blog gets SO. MUCH. TRAFFIC.) Yay for responsible blogger points!