Through a series of exceptional coincidences, instead of
going from Malmo to Jonkoping yesterday, we ended up instead at a very
typically Swedish house in Helsingborg, drinking specialty beers, eating cheese,
and talking about life with 5 Swedish window-cleaning-company workers and 5
German girls from Frankfurt.
Oscar, a regional manager for a window-cleaning company, is
the reason we ended up there. He has a very easy-going personality and has
recently gotten actively involved n the couchsurfing community. He has a
fantastic apartment and for his first hosting experience in Sweden, happened to
rescue 3 German girls and the two of us at the Helsingborg train station,
piling into his VW Touareg for the quick drive to his uncle’s house – where we
met two more German girls who were staying there as well.
Marcus, his uncle, who owns the
company, is even more laid-back than Oscar, considering he had about a 20
minute warning that he would be hosting a whole bunch of people for the night. Not
to mention that we crashed a beer-tasting and poker guys’ night – although
nobody seemed to mind too much.
Marcus left university after the
1st year of his PhD program in Chemistry to become an entrepreneur.
He casually talks about the practicalities and moral challenges of octopus
hunting and tells us in passing about recently being on a reality TV show. He has an incredible life and shares it
without a trace of hesitation. He believes that education is the most important
thing in life; he says he will probably soon go back to school to finish his
PhD.
“Education trains you to think
critically… and life – life is about thinking critically. That’s how we
separate humans from other humans – that’s how we go about sorting out right
from wrong.”
Bjorn, an employee of Oscar’s,
who looks like a typical Swedish fisherman, tells me about the regional
differences between the north and the south of Sweden, as well as the
differences between Stockholm and the rest of Sweden. He explains that people
in the north are “strange – they are very quiet because they don’t see as many
people as we do down here”. Not that the south is normal – “we’re seen as
farmers by the rest of Sweden, and in Stockholm nobody understands us because
our accents are so different”. Of course, he thinks that the south is the best
part of Sweden, partially because it’s closer to the rest of Europe – it’s so
easy to travel to a different country. People in Stockholm, according to Bjorn,
are “pretentious without a reason to be. They’re stuck all the way up there
thinking they’re so great, while we’re down here actually interacting with
other people and having a good time.”
Elina from Frankfurt is one of
the other couchsurfers with us. She tells us about how utterly amazed she is by
the idea that so many hosts that she has encountered have incredible
apartments, and lives, and just want to share all of it – for free – with other
people. “How come they want to share everything? They could have it all for
themselves, but they don’t want to – they just want to share it.”
She tells us about a host in Den
Haag who had a huge house with ten bikes in the back yard (for couchsurfers to
pick out one that suited them), and a constant stream of couchsurfers going
through his house. His kids – 16 and 18 – spend half of their time with him,
and more often than not there are couchsurfers around. Elina mentioned that it
must be difficult for them, but also incredibly beneficial – to grow up seeing
so many different cultures passing through their house.
The night – and breakfast the
next morning – passes in a lazy, relaxed atmosphere that gives you the feeling
that time has stopped – that nothing matters in the world at the moment except
good company, some good food, and a roof over your head. This is the real
essence of couchsurfing, and we’ve managed to land ourselves in it without even
knowing we were looking for it. How lucky is that?
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