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| Lyon |
This weekend I went to Lyon for the Festival of Lights. Artists do gigantic installation lighting up the entire city and millions of people come from all over the world to attend. It was pretty cool, but the real story here is that I CouchSurfed for the first time.
When I originally heard about CouchSurfing, the reaction I had was similar to the one my mom is probably having now as she reads this. What? Stay in some random stranger's house? I'll be murdered, or worse.
Of course you have to be smart about it; you need to look over people's profiles carefully and if anything seems off at all run away. But there's a good system in place for checking for creepers (it's all reputation-based; hello gigantic Game Theory experiment!) and for the most part the people are good people, who just want to share their stories. And as either a host or a surfer, you get to meet such interesting and different people!
For instance, my host Corinne had another surfer from Estonia of all places, Dmitri, who was studying in Grenoble on an Erasmus grant. Dmitri knew an Australian named Rowan also studying in Grenoble, who came to Lyon with his Italian girlfriend Antoinetta, whom he met while visiting a friend in Paris who was hosting her at the time. We also added to our group another Italian named Alexander, who was surfing with Corinne's friend. Later when I was touring the lights with my friends from Toulon, Dmitri came too so he met my friends Greg and Vanessa. I mean, I was just blown away thinking about how CouchSurfing brings people together, from literally all over the world.
And honestly I felt safer than I do at hostels. It felt like staying with a friend. Corinne took me in last-minute even though she already had a guest, and lives in a really small apartment. She picked me up from the metro station, had bought another mattress so she could host me, and took us all around Lyon. She even rented a bike for me and fed us breakfast! Without her, the native Lyonnaise, we never would have found all the passageways and staircases typical of Vieux Lyon, or gotten the same history. And she was happy to do it! She told me that she prefers hosting when she can give a tour, as opposed to being just a place to crash.
In return, I cooked her a dinner, but she wouldn't even let me wash the dishes, and I definitely don't think I did enough to thank her. The only choice then, is to pay it forward!
