Couch Surfing

Along with just about every other person in my generation (or so it seems) I unsurprisingly list ‘travel’ as a hobby in things that require descriptors of my personality. Whether it be Aussie sites I’m seeing, or struggling through a variation of charades, smiles and goodwill in foreign countries, I don’t care – it all brings me a sense of inner peace that some other people apparently get from (much cheaper) hobbies like yoga, cooking, or taking walks on the beach. I’m not sure where the obsession started, but I suspect it has something to do with coming from a family who knows how to vacation. I don’t think there was a single year when I was a kid that we didn’t pack up the car and temporarily leave our little slice of suburbia for someplace else.

With the advent of the internet, it has become increasingly easy to indulge this obsession with “other places I’d rather be right now,” and one of the ways I do this from time to time is read the Backpacker Blog on the Sydney Morning Herald site. A few months ago while reading through some post or other about how annoyingly pretentious well-traveled people can be “Oh, you liked Paris? I thought it was so, well, so touristy. I much preferred [insert obscure, remote, city name almost no one has ever heard of], it was much more authentic.” I saw a note from the author requesting offers of couches in far off places. Me being the kind of girl who often finds herself putting her hand up for things (like a 12 month stint in Bangladesh, for example) I sent off an e mail offering my couch in Chittagong and then promptly forgot all about it.


Couch surfin', Chittagong style

Until I heard back from Ben who should be arriving on my couch in Chittagong around the end of April. For anyone else as insanely jealous of this idea (him couch surfing around exotic places across the world, that is, not spending the night on my couch) you can satiate your jealousy by reading all about it