What I Wish I’d Known Before I Decided to Sleep at a Stranger’s House
When you hear about couch-surfing you think about meeting some nice open-minded locals, with whom you spend a good time in a foreign city. At least I thought so. But it is not always like that.
It all began with three Erasmus girls who wanted to visit a nice English city on a weekend. We decided to do couch-surfing to save money and to get to know some people. However, it was more difficult than expected to find a host who was willing to open his house for three people. Finally, we only found one person. An elderly man. To be honest, he looked kind of strange on his pictures. But we decided to go there anyway. We could still have left if we did not feel comfortable.
When we arrived there, our host looked even more strange than he did on his profile picture: he had some long beard, felted hair and perforated clothes. In fact, he looked like a homeless person. Unfortunately, the house wasn’t in a better condition either. Anyway, it’ll be fine, I told myself. We went to the living room and had some awkward conversation about politics and the Brexit. Then he offered us some food. Although we were extremely disgusted by the house we were too polite refuse his offer. Of course, we did not eat at a table: our host lay a dirty blanket on the floor and prepared something like an indoor picnic for us. Then. again, there were some awkward conversations. Looking forward to finally leaving, my hopes got dashed when he asked if he could join us for the afternoon. How do you say no to a question like that? To a person who offers you a bed and has just prepared food for you? Exactly: you just don’t. Together we walked to the sea side and afterwards to a pub. Again, there were these awkward, tedious conversations. When I realized that he hadn’t finished his drink after more than one hour, I began to understand that he was trying to spend as much time with us as possible. Probably he was probably lonely, I thought.
Finally, we pretended that we wanted to go shopping in the city center (we knew that he wouldn’t have joined us, since he had already made many comments on how stupid shopping is). We spent the evening in the city, although most of the shops were already closed. At least we could buy some garbage bags, with which we wanted to cover our host’s mattresses later (I still wonder why this wasn’t the point where we finally decided to look for a hostel or something). Anyway, the time without our host was the best part of the day. But we knew that we had to go back. Arriving at his house, the front door was open and it was dark everywhere. He had obviously gone to bed already. The atmosphere in the house was really creepy. When we looked in one of the rooms, we saw a complete mess. It looked exactly like a room from a compulsive hoarders episode you would see on TV. This was the point when we decided to leave… in the middle of the night… without any accommodation… in a foreign city. Since we were feeling a little bit bad about shrinking away without saying anything, we decided to leave a note. Although we tried to be as quiet as possible, our host woke up. When we heard him coming down we started to panic. Then he entered the room…completely naked. As if not wearing anything in front of three young girls were perfectly normal to him, he told us that our beds are prepared upstairs. We just nodded, still in shock and said, that we would have gone to bed soon. When he went back upstairs we waited a few more minutes and rushed to the front door. We just ran away like some teenagers who are chased by a killer in a horror movie until we felt safe again.
What I learned on this weekend? Well, at first don’t stay with 60 years old guys with strange profile pictures. Always trust your gut. It is totally okay to say no and just leave when you don’t feel comfortable with someone. At the end of the day, your safety is much more important than being polite.
With thanks to Lauren Wylie
With thanks to Elena Iodice
