On the surface, Michael Laudico seems like your average 24-year-old. He has a job, friends, and calls a modest apartment in the Delaware Park area home. But how many 24-year-olds have motorcycled across Central America from the volcanic highlands of Guatemala City to the lush rain forests of Rio Dulce? Laudico lives a unique life, a nomadic life, one of bars, historic monuments, and Balkan Gypsy music, where every day is an adventure. And he does it the way many displaced frat boys do it every weekend: he couch-surfs.
Couchsurfing.com offers a sort of social network for traveling types where one can post a profile and request a place to stay from other users worldwide. The always-growing site currently has 163,337 users in 214 countries and territories, and is only one of a number of similar Internet locales. Conceived about five years ago by Internet consultant Casey Fenton and now known as “The Couch Surfing Project,” the free website has taken on a life of its own.
The site has had its ups and downs. It experienced a major database error on June 30, 2006. Fenton and his colleagues thought that too much information had been lost for the site to continue, and he was thinking about disbanding the site altogether. Couch-surfers all over the world protested and thanks to the help of computer savvy couch-surfing volunteers, the site was up and running again less than ten days later. Now it looks like it’s here to stay.
Fenton first came up with the idea for couch-surfing.com when he was fed up with his 100 hour a week dot-com job. He caught the travel bug and decided to spend a long weekend in Reykjavik, Iceland. Not wanting to spend his time alone in a hotel room, Fenton hacked into the University of Iceland’s website and emailed 1,500 students, telling them that he was coming for the weekend and that he wanted to see the “real Iceland.” Fenton got more than 50 replies, and spent what he calls one of the best weekends of his life with Iceland natives, many of whom he remains friends with today.
According to the website, couch-surfers hope to “contribute greatly to making the world a better, safer, more peaceful place” by opening up their “homes, hearts, and lives.” The website offers them the tools to do so on a global scale. Laudico has visited 17 countries and traveled the U.S. through this program. “The best thing about couch-surfing is the people, and their willingness to take you in and show you their little corner of the globe,” says Laudico.
While you can couch-surf as frequently or infrequently as your schedule allows, Laudico has made it part of his life. He says he has officially surfed via the website over 50 times and has met hundreds, if not thousands of people. Laudico is able to manage this by leading a relatively simple life. “I’ve been working seasonal blue collar jobs for years, but the key is my ability to save very well.” Laudico says he lives a modest life, and hasn’t even owned a car in four years. But his travels have been anything but simplistic.
Laudico spent the summer of 2005 couch-surfing around Europe with a friend. He kept pages of journals as he traveled across Europe from west to east, meeting fellow couch-surfers along the way. While in Barcelona he met beautiful Portuguese and French women, who he then stayed with when he visited Lisbon and Paris, but it was in Budapest that the really exciting events began.
Laudico arrived in Budapest, Hungary on a rainy and cold night, with no real sense of direction and no knowledge of the language. His mission: to find his host Juli’s home. “After some hand gestures and broken English we learned that it was too late in the night to take the metro, which is what we had planned,” says Laudico. “Instead, we had to take two buses to the subway station (to meet Juli) not really sure of where we would be transferring or how to find out such information. We rode into the depths of socialism blindly.” After a long bus ride, and inevitably getting hit with a tidal wave of oily water from a truck barreling through a puddle on the street, Laudico finally made it to the Kalvin Ter metro station, of which he says, “we never would have found without the help of some friendly, English speaking Hungarians.”
While Laudico’s experience in Budapest improved significantly over the next few days, the difficulties he faced in simply locating his host highlight some of the pitfalls of couch-surfing. In the end, travelers are still making arrangements with relative strangers, and unexpected problems sometimes arise. While staying in Vienna, for example, Laudico encountered an anal retentive host who had every second of his stay planned out.
Laudico even admits that he was beginning to question why it “seemed Austrians had such a stick up their asses.” His host and his friends only spoke when spoken to. Luckily, Laudico was able to locate another couch-surfer in Vienna to take him to a more laid-back host. When in an uncomfortable situation, Laudico advises travelers to “use your best judgment, and if a situation doesn’t seem to work, be honest. Honesty, respect, and humility are very important.”
Respect is important, especially since you never know who you’re going to meet on the road. Laudico made contact with a Hungarian named Adam who had previously lived in Buffalo for a year. Adam graduated from City Honors with Laudico’s girlfriend, and lived on the corner of Elmwood and Lafayette, very close to Laudico’s current address. “My father always talks about how you will find a Buffalo connection everywhere, in the most obscure places,” says Laudico, adding that the Buffalonian desperately missed the food at Jim’s Steakout.
Laudico also experienced European nightclubs, historic sights, the famous Turkish baths, and seemingly incomprehensible plumbing in his journeys. All in all, he made it to Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Slovakia after leaving Budapest. More recently, this past weekend, Laudico couch-surfed at a co-op in Philadelphia with a group of musicians, who played traditional Balkan Gypsy music with lyrics in Serbian, Romanian, and Russian. His life experiences and travel stories seem to never end.
It is these experiences that make traveling so valuable, especially for younger people. “I think students are recognizing the importance of getting away from their ‘home base’ and exploring the world,” says UB Assistant Director of International Education Services, Rhona Cadenhead-Hames. She also stresses the importance of seeing the world through your own eyes as opposed to the sometimes muddled media view. Traveling to a foreign place is a great growth opportunity, “not only do students learn about another culture or country, but they also learn a great deal about themselves,” says Cadenhead-Hames. It’s win-win.
Laudico has encountered many of these reasons for travel during his couch-surfing experiences, and he stresses gaining connections to new cultures and new people. Traveling, especially couch-surfing, “brings people together from all different walks of life, people that would never normally meet,” explains Laudico. He says he’s learned, and now highly values, the fact that “people are the same everywhere; everyone is just trying to live their life.”
Despite a world full of good intentions, there is definitely some risk involved with couch-surfing. For a generation that has grown up with the innate belief that picking up a hitchhiker could get you killed, relying on a complete stranger half a world away to house you might seem risky.
“As with any large community you will have a few bad seeds, but if the system of character references and vouching are used properly those bad seeds are easily avoided,” says Laudico. Couch-surfing.com does have a system of verification and what they call “vouching.” They verify your address with your credit card information to be sure you do actually live where you say you do, and once you stay with someone, or someone stays with you, you can “vouch” for each other’s character. On each member’s profile it states their level of verification, how many times they’ve been vouched for, and even includes personal comments from the couch-surfer’s new friends, wherever they may be.
Laudico, who was referred to the program by his cousin, says he was never really concerned about the program’s safety. “I like to think I can handle myself in any situation,” he says. “Most are more apprehensive about letting people into their home than staying at someone else’s, and in that case the most important thing to remember is, it is your home, you make the rules. If everyone practices honesty and respect then we will all enjoy safe travels.”
That doesn’t mean good intentions will get you around the globe and back in one piece. The site’s founder, Casey Fenton, has been questioned about the program’s safety time and time again. While Couchsurfing.com has never had a safety problem, Fenton admits that it may be only a matter of time. He’s been quoted as saying, “this is a slice of the real world, so yes, anything can happen. We ask people to use all the safety features of the site and to take every possible precaution. We’ve been fortunate that nothing bad has happened.” These precautions include meeting your host for coffee first, listening to your gut about a situation, and being set to leave if a problem occurs.
While the low cost hostel has often been a staple of the traveler on a budget, the more intimate experience of couch-surfing is appealing. Combined with the fact the Internet is driving the phenomenon, it makes sense that the average Couch-surfer is only 27. The movement is bigger than one website, too; sites like hospitalityclub.org, globalfreeloaders.com, and place2stay.net offer services similar to Couchsurfing.com. Experienced surfers like Laudico prefer to Couch-surf, however. “It’s a bit more personal then other sites,” he explains. “Couch-surfers seem more interested in the people then just the couch. It’s also a bit more private at the same time, you can choose what information is displayed on your profile.”
Whichever Internet based lodging method you choose, Laudico firmly advocates the once-in-a-lifetime experience of meeting new people wherever your travels may take you. Though the road may not always be a smooth one, between unsuitable hosts, getting lost, and language barriers, the first-hand experiences from actually staying with a native are priceless. In Laudico’s own words, “most Couch-surfers I have met will agree with me in that couch-surfing has changed my life, and my view of the world, for the better.”
