I want to send half of my clothes back home... do I really need two pairs of yoga pants? Maybe one would work... or maybe I could just use my pirate shorts to practice yoga... or maybe I could get rid of some socks. I hardly ever wear socks. Why do I have socks? Maybe I should just lose my socks. Yes. I'll lose my socks. That is the solution.
Denis had contacted me a couple of weeks earlier, inviting me to stay with him in Vicenza. Vicenza hadn't even been on my original itinerary, but the Italian host Boy and I stayed with in Innsbruck had recommended the city and Denis seemed super, so I penciled in Vicenza.
And now I'm staying here four days. I love it when interesting sounding people totally waylay my itinerary.
Denis' couchsurfing profile made him seem larger than life, and I was really looking forward to meeting him. He said he was a Cook-Surfer, which totally tickled me. Other than cooking, he was interested in spirituality, psychology and vipassana meditation.
We'll be a good match.
When he opened the door to his flat on the second floor, I impetuously decided to be culturally insensitive and offered Denis a hug instead of a kiss. To which I was told that Denis was a professional hugger, and sometimes went into the city with friends wearing t-shirts that said, "FREE HUGS."
Gosh, I love this guy.
We shared pumpkin soup for dinner, and my host offered me a glass of white wine, although he didn't drink with me. He'd spent all of Sunday at a wine festival, where he paid around fifteen euros for the entrance fee and then drank as much wine as he wanted.
"I think I drank three bottles," he explained his lingering hangover.
How have I been to Italy four times and yet never been to a wine festival? That doesn't make any sense at all. It's like visiting Colorado four times and never going on a hike. Next time I come to Italy, I'm going to attend the wine festival in Asti the second weekend of September and then this wine festival near Vicenza after that. Gosh. I will never be done with Italy.
We retired to the couches in a living room decorated with colorful art from floor to ceiling, and Denis told me he hadn't hosted in two years. He'd randomly found himself browsing couchsurfing, saw my profile and open request, thought I looked interesting, and invited me to surf. But he hadn't hosted for the two years prior because he was disappointed with what couchsurfing has turned into. This is a complaint I hear from nearly every host I stay with... potential surfers having the audacity to send messages like, "Hello, I'm coming to Vicenza tomorrow, will you meet me at the train station?" A lot of the messages either have no name or the wrong name at the start. Elisa, my host in Parma, would receive messages addressed to "Alice".
Couchsurfing used to be a platform for people to learn about and fall in love with the world through hosting travelers and through staying with locals. There's still quite a large percentage of the couchsurfing community who use it as such, but there's a growing percentage of people who exploit the system to take advantage of one another. There are many hosts who use couchsurfing as a way to pressure guests into sex and many guests who use couchsurfing to just get a free place to crash. And this percentage can poison the experience for the rest.
I don't know if I could be a host in a place like Prague or London or Paris. I would get so damn fed up with receiving dozens of messages every day addressed to Alice or Francois or Harold or whomever. It would make it more difficult for me to be receptive to the messages addressed to me.
There are new sites popping up for people like Denis and I who are frustrated with couchsurfing. One of the sites is called Trustroots, but Trustroots has so few people on it that it's just not practical. For instance, Trustroots has about twenty hosts in and around London.
Couchsurfing has over 125,000.
I feel like couchsurfing is like facebook. While it exists, other platforms will just be irrelevant. Such a pity.
Denis may have taken a two year break from Couchsurfing, but he certainly didn't seem out of practice. After coffee the next morning, he walked me into Vicenza and gave me one of the nicest, most informative tours in my five years of couchsurfing as a guest. When we walked down the streets, he explained the differences between Venetian architecture and Palladian architecture. When we ambled into churches, he could explain the meanings behind the paintings to me (and not just, "this one is Jesus with his cross". The, "the artist of this painting had issues with another artist, so he gave the subservient character in the painting the face of the artist he didn't like. And put him in a position wherein it looks like he's bowing to the character with his own face." )
After an hour or so of being so thoughtfully led around Vicenza, Denis went home to relax and prepare a lunch, and left me on my own to take photographs of the city.
"Your photographs are interesting," Denis had told me the night before. "You are really able to find the good angles. If teaching yoga stops working out for you, you can always be a photographer."
Gosh, it helps a lot to hear things like that. I put so much time and energy and love and frustration into this blog and my photographs, and don't often receive feedback. Which is fine. I mean, I'm ultimately writing for myself, and if other people enjoy my work, that's great. But sometimes it helps to know that other people are being affected by what I do.
So while Denis made his broccoli pasta that will conquer the world, I took photographs of Vicenza.
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| I've never seen a more morose statue. |
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| I think I found the one wooden building in Vicenza |
We shared lunch, and I told Denis that I was surprised his broccoli pasta hadn't conquered the world already. Then I went to read and he went to watch TV, but we both ended up napping. When we woke, Denis took me out on his motorcycle to visit Vicenza's rabbit park.
Rabbit park wasn't always rabbit park. A couple of years ago, a couple of pet rabbits were released in this green, open space.
Today, there are more than a couple of rabbits.
Rabbit park now boasts chickens, rabbits, turtles, enormous catfish, ducks and geese as its residents.
Then we drove to the Basilica of Saint Mary.
It felt good to be on a motorcycle again.
"I think the last time I was on a motorcycle..." I mused to Denis. "I think the last time was in Sicily. I love motorcycles. Not driving them, but riding on the back."
How is it that I get so terrified in cars, but I'm deliriously happy on a motorcycle? Motorcycles are exponentially more dangerous than cars. *sigh* That's just evidence that my fear of cars is slightly irrational.
We drove to a nearby lake in search of ducks to feed the rest of our breadcrumbs to, but found nary a fowl.
I can't recall the name of our final stop (Denis showed me too many things for my exhausted brain to remember them all), but I do remember that the owner of this mansion had a daughter with dwarfism.
To normalize her condition for her, the father ordered all the statues on the walls to be dwarfs.
After another delicious dinner by Denis, I strolled the the city by myself for an hour, loving the quiet and the dimly lit streets.
"Maybe we'll see each other again, maybe not," Denis said as he hugged me goodbye the next day. "That's just life."
It is "just life," and there are dozens of beautiful people I've met whilst traveling that I'll probably never meet again, but I have a very strong feeling that I'll meet Denis again. Possibly...err.... probably at that wine festival next year.
