For an old hand at CouchSurfing, it’s not remotely strange to set up a meeting with a random stranger based only on a web profile and a few comments exchanged by e-mail.
I met Volodymyr Ignatov, a fellow veteran surfer, at the café by the skating rink in the Obolon neighborhood’s Dream Town – an unusual and hard-to-find place for a newcomer to Kyiv.
That’s the whole point of CouchSurfing – seeing a city through the eyes of a local and getting to places off the well-beaten tourist track.
With more than 200 million users in more than 230 countries, CouchSurfing.com is the most popular of a number of websites that help travelers find couches or beds to sleep on for free, travelling partners, or simply a guide to give them a local experience in an unfamiliar city.
And Kyiv, according to Ignatov, has CouchSurfing fever.
“When I lived in Como [Italy], I would get maybe one or two couch requests per week. When I moved to Milan, [also Italy], I would get around twice as many. But in Kyiv, I can get anything between 10 and 15 per week,” he says.
He’s right. As soon as I changed my current location on the site to Kyiv, I was inundated with offers for tours, chats over coffee and language exchange – pro-activeness I have yet to encounter in any other city.
Evgeniy Suheeh, a couch ambassador for Ukraine, says that many guests are intrigued by Ukraine as the closest post-Soviet state to Europe, and typically head for less well-known sights.
Trips to Chornobyl list highly amongst most popular destinations. However, couch surfers generally seek unplanned, spontaneous or unusual trips – things they wouldn’t find on their own.
Hosts take their surfers to places such as Stalin’s underground tunnels and abandoned water-towers to admire the view. One even admits to taking a guest, who asked to be shown Kyiv’s extreme side, to climb a bridge. Illegal, yes, but also fun, he assured me.
I remember having my own views of the Soviet Union completely reshaped by first-hand experience when I was shown into a communal flat in St. Petersburg and wondered how some people lived like that for years.
CouchSurfing, then, is about much more than just saving money. It’s about the experiences, and the people you meet.
Take Ignatov for example: As well as offering his couch in several different European cities, and benefitting from Couch Surfers’ hospitality in countless countries, he has even ended up becoming business partners with someone he met through the site.
Naturally, some people are nervous about staying with someone they came across over the Internet. But CouchSurfing uses safety checks by users themselves, who are asked to vouch for those they have met in person.
While there are never any guarantees of safety, the system makes it far safer than meeting up with people met through Internet sites or even based on a fleeting impression in a hostel.
Maryna Kumeda, a Ukrainian living in Lyons, France, enthuses about her general CouchSurfing experiences, which have led to her meeting some of the most “inspirational” people in her life, and even taking up hitchhiking.
Nevertheless, she does note that female surfers may have a harder time than male ones.
She recalls staying with a man in Italy, who, it later materialized, seemed only to allow Eastern European girls to stay with him.
“In Italy, five out of 10 people said that they didn’t have a couch, but that I was welcome to sleep in one bed with them. One guy even told me he ‘did not have enough floor’ for me to sleep on. I decided against going to stay with him,” she says.
If she then left these people negative comments on their wall, they would reply saying that she simply didn’t understand “Italian hospitality.”
Some find it hard to understand why someone would invite a complete stranger to come and stay in their home.
Enthusiasts, however, say good experiences have far outweighed bad ones.
Tanya Klepikova, who started using Hospitality Club, a similar website to CouchSurfing, when she was a student in order to practice foreign languages, explains that her friends cannot understand why she would give up her time to show strangers around Kyiv for no financial remuneration.
But for Tanya, the gratification of travelers returning to Ukraine to see her and the chance to learn about other cultures is enough.
