I decided to go to the CouchSurfing event "Vienna Calling" at 7am on the very day I left. I had mixed feelings about it mainly because I have mixed feelings about CouchSurfing.
CouchSurfing is a website that networks travellers and locals for exchange of hospitality. The concept is called "hospex", for "hospitality exchange". CouchSurfing is by far the website with the most members (more than one million) but it is managed in a really autistic way and, as soon as you try to get involved a bit more than by hosting or travelling, you hit the Great Wall of Stupidity.
In addition to that, I dislike the "Facebook-like" general philosophy of the website and prefer to use a smaller network called BeWelcome for my own travels. There, I have more guaranty to avoid the McDonalds, Apple and Mtv customer. But I went anyway because
I set off to Vienna, from Hamburg, at 10am with a rather small backpack and 1000km of hitchhiking ahead of me. That I completed in an astoundingly short 12h time and thus arrived in time for the first event of the gathering: a warmup party. We were Wednesday, around 10:30pm.
I was really surprised to find already around 50 people there. It was set up in the Museumquartier, in the centre of Vienna. A sort of big paved court surrounded by museums. Probably swarming with tourists at day.
The weather was uncertain but it didn't rain, which is a good thing for an outdoor party.
I walked through the little crowd to put down my bag when a guy that I didn't recognise immediately waived at me. I joined his little group and gave him a hug, since he seemed friendly. Then I turned to the group and introduced myself as noisily as usual. There was a short guy that I recognised instantly for the founder, owner and visionary (that's ironic) leader of the CouchSurfing company.
A friend of mine that is a former volunteer for the website and heard that I was going down to Vienna asked me to kick him in the balls for her. I told her that I would do my best, but he was smiling in such a friendly way that I just had to shake his hand. I finally put down my bag and started looking for my buddies. I found one of them in the person of Ulf, one of the most outrageous CouchSurfing whores that I ever met. Another hug later, I found myself hoping around from group to group, doing some basic socializing.
Somehow I was a bit disappointed by that. One particular thing that I used as an ice-breaker failed lamentably. I went around with a little vial of cognac, walking into random groups and asking loud enough for everyone to hear: "Hey! Who wants some love?". My intention was to give the drink or the food to the first one to scream: "me me me!". But so far, no one did. They just looked at me like if I was from Mars and I had just spoken Martian to them. At the 3rd group, a girl shyly raised her hand. I passed the vial over to her and she looked at it like an hen would look at a swiss army knife. The fifth group had one guy that was unautistic enough to want some love and actually drink it. Couchsurfers suck...
Then arrived some friends from Berlin beach camp. They were at the end of an apparently exhausting hitch-hiking journey and were yearning for a bed. They were staying at the same place as Ulf. I had no host but Ulf had told me that there was enough space where he was staying for me as well. We set off with another girl as well to that prodigy host, at whom's they told me more people were already sleeping and even more were due. The name is Fabian, but it sounded unfinished. We'll call him Fabian-the-Great if that's ok with you.
I took a much deserved shower and went to sleep on a camping mattress under the table-soccer table.
In the morning, by the time everyone had woken up, a lousy roommate of Fabian-the-Great told us that he was leaving the flat, and so must we. I had millions of things to do in Internet. I packed all my stuff (unsure if I could sleep there again), went out, sat down on the sidewalk with my laptop and worked 2 hours from the wifi until my laptop batteries were flat. That happened around 13:30.
I had then planned to go to a big meeting held by the owners of couchsurfing.org but realised I had mixed up the dates and that the meeting was the day after.
That happens to me all the time, and like always, I was really pissed off after myself. There I was, with one full empty afternoon ahead of me. I tried calling Ulf that did not answer (he had forgotten his mobile at the flat) and obviously, he was the only one I had the phone number of.
I remembered that some of the kids were joining a "Free hugs" action in the afternoon, and though I dislike this activity, it was my only way to get to the group again.
Free-hugging is a hippie activity that consists into hugging total strangers like if they were your best friend, giving them a big dose of fake love and forgetting about them subsequently. I consider it the climax of hypocrisy, along with an intolerable intrusion in the intimacy of strangers. I went there on foot, to save cash.
The free hugs campaign (yeah, "campaign" ; free-huggers are activists) was set up on Stephensplatz, THE tourist hotspot of Vienna. When I got there, I walked straight to a girl that I had met the night before. She didn't recognise me and tried to hug me. I dodged just in time.
That's when a huge rainstorm dispersed the already moribund love-mujahidins and they passed to plan B.
Plan B was to go and have a drink together in a pub not too far from there. It must have been on the official program since there were much much more people there than on Stephensplatz. Around 40 I'd say.
It was a really carefully decorated bar that would score "not too expensive" in the scale of value of a middle class Austrian. Nothing a low-budget nomad would ever push the door of. I sat down with one of my friends called "Dingo", a street artist.
He had spent the day "statueing" in various tourist places. That is to say: standing motionless and in full costume on a pedestal above a donation basket. He had made the tremendous jackpot of 3€ but was still in good mood... as I had always seen him.
I swapped tables quite often, trying to get to meet as many people as possible. I was a bit appalled that the couchsurfing.com website was the centre of pretty much all conversations. It being a traveller's website, I was expecting that people would be talking more about travels than about profile-optimisation and forum-reputation.
After a while, we all left. Next point on the program was to get everyone to a barbecue place on an island on the river. The group moved towards the underground station. I was on too tight a budget so I decided to go on foot. You should have seen the shocked looks when I told them!
I plugged earphones into my mobile on one side and into myself on the other, started a good playlist and off I went for two hours of a half-visiting, half-getting-lost walk through Vienna.
I got really out of my way and tried to hitchhike a kilometre on a big boulevard without success. In the end, I managed to get to the island where the barbecue was set up. But was a long island so I still had quite a bit to walk.
After some distance, a voice called my name behind me. It was Michael from Munich, that was my host when I had gone to Octoberfest 6 month before...
There are many levels of membership in couchsurfing.org. Everyone starts as "standard member". After having gained some recorded experience, a standard member can ask to be promoted to the status of "couchsurfing ambassador". As an "ambassador", the member receives a little yellow flag on his profile (a sort of medal), a better placement in the search results and a couple of other candies. There are many levels of ambassadorship. City ambassadors are below country ambassadors that are below continental ambassadors that themselves respond to global ambassadors. None of those levels actually give more power (unless purely psychological), they just structurate the memberbase according to a hierarchical scheme based on a "first there first served" scheme.
I find it lamentable, but ambassadors love it, and standard members usually don't care.
Well, Michael from Munich is actually a global ambassador AND one of the website administrator. He was walking amoung a group of people that I did not recognise, though one of the girls said she had met me at the Oktoberfest thing. I joined their group.
It turned out that the little group was full of CouchSurfing celebrities. And since I'm an active participant in the forums that let standard members talk (I'm no ambassador), they ended up recognising me. One of the guys in the group in particular was the founder of a "new-features-ideas-for-the-website" forum where I was bound to take root in, being a bit restless in my brain. The original purpose of the forum was defiled some years ago and the administrators of the website do not even read the "new features" discussions for their website that are permanently going on there. So basically, everyone that invested some energy in discussing improvements in order to serve a website that they like found out that all of it was inevitably going to end up wasted.
I can assure you they turned pretty sour against the website's administration. The discussions on the forum included a significant percentage of very vocal uneasiness with the way the website is managed. And a few days before the Vienna calling event, it was shutdown without warning by the said founder. From whom in two years of activity on the forum, I had never seen a single post. I was indeed very curious on the motivations behind his blockade.
But the last thing I wanted is to waste a good party. And there was no reason it was going to be a bad one. There were quite a crowd when we got there. It must have been around 8pm. One really loud Austrian guy walked toward us to sell us bracelets. It was 2€ for the night or 6€ for the whole week-end. I thought it was to pay for the barbecue coals, and since I had only raw food to eat, I dodged. I realised later that there were some other expenses involved, and felt a bit bad for it.
One thing that I noticed very quickly was the prevalence of CouchSurfing t-shirts around me. Some of those kids were clearly using the website as a surrogate for spirituality. They woke up in a couchsurfing sort of mood, wore couchsurfing items, met up with their "couchsurfer" (yep, there is a word for it) friends, and chatted online on CouchSurfing (until the chat was recently shutdown for obscure reasons).
I am pretty strict on the values of hospitality, but I don't go as far as endorsing it through a trademark.
I wanted to have some fun so I tried ignoring it, with lukewarm success. I sat down with a friend to have dinner. Some spread on some bread. As a survival necessity rather than for the pleasure of it. Then I gave a massage to him (he complained about his back). I asked someone to work on me, and soon we had a massaging caterpillar on the grass.
Some kids had started playing frisbee. I joined them in the intention of organizing an "ultimate frisbee" game. It's a sort of team game that rules are similar to that of rugby, but more peaceful and with a disc. It worked.
During a break, the screaming Austrian guy came with an icebox full of beer, a girl was walking behind him with a box labelled "DONATIONS". Great! I got one beer and dropped 50c in the donation box. I did it rather quickly, as I was very thirsty, and sort of overtook the girl that meant to take my coin. It turned out that they were actually selling the beer for 1€50, and that the donation box was in fact a cash register.
Which is so, oh so reminiscent of the way the couchsurfing website is funded. They don't advertise on the website and fuel themselves only through member-cash-flow. But instead of calling for donation, they sell a profile-upgrade for 25€ that they call "verification" instead of "donation" and try to make it look like they are just covering the costs of the operation, while 90% of the income of the website relies on it.
We played until dark. When the game ended, I ran to the Danube, hoping that the warmth of the physical effort would save me from certain death in the cold water. I shed my clothe very quickly, entered the water screaming, swam a couple of strokes, came back, jumped out of it and dried my shivering body as quick as possible. On the side of the lawn, the massage caterpillar was still going.
And, all stoned that I was from the frisbee match and the cold water bath, I sat down on a bench, facing the crowd and the sunset, and watched the black silhouettes of the people cut out on the bright violet sky.
I let my thoughts run for a while on the fact that, when reduced to 2D, people are much more interesting: The 3D physical image of someone doesn't change much and when you've seen it once, you've seen it all, but flattened to 2D, people constantly morph into an infinite panel of shades, merging with the background, or with each other, without even knowing about it.
A group of people on the nearest bench distracted me, as I heard them try to speak in French. I turned to them and tried to join the conversation. It was a conversation about languages. I have heard variations of this topic being discussed a million times. And somehow, I still alway participate to the topic, while telling myself: "not again!": "So you see, in German, the sentence is structured differently" / "But in French, we use gender for everything" / "You know in Finnish, there are no genders?" / "I prefer the way italian grammar is set up" / "Composed verbs in English make it so hard, but so subtle".......... This is the second most common topic in a traveller's meeting. After "where is everybody from" and before "sex" or "politics".
In spite of my very tight budget, I got myself another beer. And doing so, I noticed that the loud Austrian that was there to take my order had spent the whole evening siting on the "donation" chest near the icebox, and was going to spend it all there. I felt really sorry for him, but he seemed content of his lot. And I can't help remembering...
I took part in a sort of "artistic experiment" called SPROUTBAU in Bremen in 2007. 60 artists from all around the world living and working together in the same facility.
On the 7th floor, there was a sort of "lounge", where most of the social interactions were going on. It had a fridge just for beer. On top of that fridge was an open shoebox and, on the fridge, a little sign: "Becks 1€50 | Hemelinger 1€". People would help themselves to the fridge, and throw a coin in the box, or not.
Many times a took beer without paying, and then threw a banknote in the box when I had my wallet on me. The donation box was getting enough cash to replenish the fridge day after day. And I believe that it is the way to go. A community that doesn't trust its own members is not really sustainable.
So I bought myself a beer, and went around talking to people. Some of them I knew, some of them I got to know.
People were leaving by waves. Fabian-the-Great offered me a place to sleep under his table soccer again, but the sky was clear, the temperature bearable so I decided to sleep right where we were, on a bench under the stars. So he left with his crowd of guests.
The last people to leave tried to really make the point that it would not bother them at all if I came to sleep at their place, that was only 1h of night bus away, and that I didn't have to sleep outside. They were clearly not computing the thought of someone wilfully choosing to sleep in a park. And they were also very very hospitable people that probably feel all the better when travellers are piling up to the ceiling of their flat. I'm very much like that too. Once I hosted 8 people in my 20 m² studio and I still feel very proud about it.
In the end, one of them decided to stay with me. After they had left, we walked to the Danube and sat on the grass for a last cigarette. I do not remember the content of our surely deep conversation. We went to bed then.
I slept on a bench very comfortably until 7am, when the hot sun woke me up ; and then I slept very comfortably again on the grass under the trees until 10am.
When I woke up, the guy that was with me the night before was gone, and instead was another one from the party. His name was Danny, and he had gotten so drunk at the barbecue that he failed to find the group of people he was supposed to be with, and then failed to find the exit of the park.
But he had managed to come back to the barbecue spot and had slept there. He went off in the opposite direction from mine.
The crowd was supposed to use a park not far from the centre of Vienna as a base camp. I headed there. It seemed within reach on foot. It took me one hour.
A very pleasant hour, that I walked with some good old heavy metal ringing in my ears, through some green parts of the city.
When I got there, I found out that the park where it was set up was huge and the explanations to find the exact spot that were on the website truly sucked. It took me really long to find them. Actually, I never found them, they saw me and waived at me. There was nothing particular to distinguish them from other groups of park goers. I was looking for a big group but they were only 5.
We played a game of poker that would have made a rich man out of me, had we played for money. And then I left them to go to a big-official-important meeting between the owners of the website and their loving ambassador-slaves. I really wanted to see that.
If you remember the way-above-mentioned Ulf, he was the one that got me in there. He is an ambassador himself and put my name on the list as a "guest" when I was already on my way hitchhiking to Vienna.
I got there right in time for the beginning, and it was a long ass day of listening to presentations, politely asking questions, listening to bogus-answers and saying thank you. Full report here.
Then, the participants of the conference were invited by the "Leadership Team" (that's how the owners call themselves) to a dinner in a nearby restaurant, paid by the profile upgrades of standard members. It was rather quick as there was not much to eat.
I sat randomly and found myself in the company of utterly boring italian "ambassadors". Ulf came to my table and asked me what I had thought of the conference. I didn't want to sound ungrateful for his invitation, but I couldn't lie to him. Actually he expected my answer about the leadership people being at the same time full of themselves and ass-licking. He told me that their originally planned performance was even more full of emptiness and that he had hacked into it greatly. In facts, to all the "ambassadors" that I asked about, I got more or less the same answer: "It was a waste of our time and theirs".
After the restaurant, there was a party planned in a nightclub somewhere in the neighborhood. They had reserved the whole thing just for us. I was really looking forward to this one.
On my way there I ran into my friends Trevor and Massimo. They had a bottle of something with alcohol in it that I helped them drink. And by the time it was finished, we were there.
The club was just the right size for our group. It felt full but not too crowded. The music was truly horrible. Very very very bad, but somehow I was expecting it. I danced to the beat, unless it was too unlistenable.
I flirted with a couple of girls, talked to many friends over the loud music, bounced between the bar, the toilets and the dance-floor ; bounced on the dancefloor.
And around 4am, I felt like leaving. I picked up my backpack from under the table I had left it and walked outside. And I started looking for a nice place to sleep.
It's funny that, coming to the grand meeting of an hospex network, I spent half the nights outside. I suppose I could have found myself loads of hosts, but I left home a bit on impulse, and I wanted to stay free. What if one of the girls I flirted with had wanted to bring me back home? Was I to say no because I already arranged to sleep at another guy's place? Nonsense.
I found myself a bush in a park. The sun was not out yet but it was already very bright. I crawled in my sleeping bag and very soon I was off to a better place.
When I woke up, a few hours later, I found out there were dryed dog shit all around me.
Where I was, it was too long a walk back to the base. I took a train. Then I walked back to the same place I had found the others the day before and there, I found nobody. I was 5 minutes early...
The reason why I was so punctual is that there was supposed to be a workshop on hitchhiking right at the begining, and I wanted to participate.
I put down my bag, got my computer out and that's where I started typing this story. After a while, a swiss guy showed up. We waited together. The guy was this typical frustrated kid on an ego trip that makes the raw material of all "ambassadors". Sure enough, he was one of the superior kind. A "country ambassador", supervising many less important "city ambassadors".
But it was still interesting to talk to him. Frustrated kids are not necessarily boring. After a while, I started to wonder if we were the only ones that found the place. And I knew it was the place because I had been there the day before.
I went off for a walk around the gigantic park to try to find lost-looking people. And when I came back, I decided to go to Bratislava. It suddenly came to me that I wasn't enjoying it at all, that this saturday was going to be just as boring as the days before, and that I could always come back for the second big important-people meeting on Sunday. Bratislava is just 100 km from Vienna.
So I walked out of the park and into a cybercafe, and connected to both BeWelcome and HospitalityClub, two other hospex networks that have a dedicated "phone number" field on the profiles.
I harvested 10 phone numbers from people in Bratislava and went off to a public phone to serial-call them. Half never answered, the other half wasn't available. I hang up the phone feeling a bit empty.
I walked out the the booth, looking at the crossroad. Left? Right? Straight? I pondered for a while and went back.
In the park, at the base, there were still nobody. So I went out of it again, plugged myself on some more heavy-metal, and walked back to the centre, not too fast, trying to stop at each cute building or nice little street.
I found out later that the base was actually at another place, though it was written in the program that the base on Friday and Saturday would be at the same spot. I suspect that the kids I had found the day before were actually the mistaken ones and later moved to the "real" base, that I couldn't know about because I had left very early to the ambassador-leaders meeting. I suppose I should just blame myself to have had only one phone number of someone else.
In the evening, the participants were invited to come together at a restaurant. I thought it was my last chance to join up with them. But I stopped in a park before and ate my lot of bread and jam, as it was unlikely the restaurant would be within my budget limits.
It turned out it was way above my budget limits. It was one of those really "typical" viennese restaurant that no sane viennese would ever go to. It was loaded with tourists.
They had booked the basement for us. We had to walk through the main room to get there, there was a violin player going from table to table, playing romantic music to couple in exchange of offending tips.
The waiters were as impolite as in Paris, the food was eatable... Have the couchsurfing people ever heard of a freaking Vokü?
I sat down near a british guy that I had made friend with at the barbecue. I said hello to everyone at the table. One of the girls turned to me: "Hello, I'm Kerstin, are you an ambassador?". Here we go... And it was pretty much like that all through it. "Hi, I'm the ambassador of Marseille.", "Oh... he's an ambassador too?"... I think that this (relatively) posh restaurant was the most awkward moment for me. I felt like a tramp at a royal ball.
The good part is that a lot of people ordered more food than they could eat so, even though I didn't buy anything, I still walked out fed.
There was a going-out-in-a-bar meet-up planned after. I found some kids that wanted to go there at the restaurant and we all went together. It was a walkable distance but they wanted to ride the train. I told them I didn't have money to pay for the ticket. To which they replied that they were not going to pay for it.
Walking out of a 15€-a-dish restaurant, to use the public transportation network without paying... That was a bit too much for me. But I really wanted to meet up with the others and I didn't know where the place was (and was too stupid to collect phone numbers...), so I followed.
One of them even tried to make the point to me that riding the mass transit without paying was absolutely sustainable and that paying for the ticket was actually a bad thing to do. There was even that Unitedstater guy that I had heard talking up the wonderful public transportation in Europe, lamenting about the evil Babylonic system in his own country... My mood was degrading by the minute.
But when I arrived, Dingo and Anne-Sophie and Aine were there and I could be myself again without being afraid of hurting the stupidity of someone. The place was very cute indeed. With light shows, and stuff hanging from the ceiling and... guess what... expensive drinks, and well dressed hip youth going to and fro. After a too short while, the two above mentioned girls wanted to go home, and I felt the cruel dilemma of going home early with my friends or staying at the party, alone in the barnyard.
Had I stayed, I might have had a smashing time with the couple of nice people that were probably somewhere to be found in the crowd of assholes, but I chickened out. I was a bit tired too. You don't sleep so well in dog shit.
They brought me back to Fabian-the-Great. I taught them to play Caps. And while I was watching a game, I fell asleep with a beer on my stomach that ended up spilling on me. I woke up when Ulf came back.
On Sunday, the Leadership Team had planned another afternoon of presentations and buttering up. I sat painfully through it and then, we all went again to the barbecue place where I had slept friday evening.
With one of the ultimate-frisbee players, we set up another match, that ended with another bath in the river. The Loud-Austrian-beer-keeper was faithful to his duty, I invested in a couple of beers.
I spent a lot of time in a conversation with Nonesee and Sarah, two really nice persons. As it was really hard for me to eat peanut-butter-on-bread (my exclusive diet since Wednesday), I managed to feed from the leftover food on the barbecue (but a lot got thrown away, as one can expect in a 50 people barbecue).
And when night had crept on us, we moved it to the next chapter. That was a nightclub in downtown-Vienna, right in the super-touristic area near Stephensplatz. I was dreading it a bit.
Instead of sticking with my team, I took the train (it was 1h walking) with a group of strangers. One of them was carrying a drum. One of those african design called "jembe" in Europe that white kids of my generation are very fond of. It took me quite some time to make them accept the idea of an improvised tram party.
The drummer was really hot for it, but the other were all like: "now come on... / You can't be serious... / Is he kidding us?". In the end, it was just him playing and me improvising a dance and chant. Sure enough, it was way below the critical mass for it to pick up.
The question holds: Is it a fucking stupid idea to play drums and sing and dance in the tram instead of sitting and looking out the window? Whatever the way I distort the question, I reach the same answer. What am I missing? In case I hadn't already lost all faith in humanity, on the way out of the subway, one of the girls found out she still had two cans of beer in her bag. She asked if someone wanted to help her, as it was likely the door-apes of the nightclub would not let them through. I was really quick to volunteer. She asked me 1€ for it.
I stopped talking to her and she ended up giving it away for free to someone else.
Anyway... The club was not just for us. It was Sunday, there wasn't so many left. Most people left during the day in order to be ready to serve Babylon Monday first thing in the morning. But we still got in for free.
The price of drinks was prohibitive, but I harvested many forgotten half full glasses. The music was pathetic when we got in but became better and better, song after song. One of the "Leaders" of the website was outrageously drunk and was embarrassing every single half-pretty to pretty girl on the dance-floor.
My friends were a bit scattered but it mattered little, as the music was too loud to talk. I stayed really late, dancing with myself and with others. I left when the club closed, with a very drunk-loud-and-awkward Fabian-the-Great. I slept a couple of hours and hitch-hiked back home via Prague and Berlin. Another story.