piece o' couch will do.

It's official.

I'm a real couch-surfer now. My new travel friend from work, Amy, and I joined the couch surfing community a few weeks ago in hopes of scoring a place to stay when we flew up to Berlin for Bob Dylan. And after a lot of searching and what felt like endless requests (Berlin has more users on couchsurfing.com than any other city in the world!), we found a place to stay -- and just in the knick of time. The place we found was not your standard house/apartment but really more of an intentional community; intentional in the sense that they want to practice real hospitality. And they really do.

At 'Project Volunteering', it was more like your typical hostel experience where you're sharing living quarters with strangers (but soon strangers turn to friends -- well that's the hope anyway); I think we had about 12 people crammed into every imaginable space on the floor/mattresses/couches in the living room of a Euro-style flat. The photo above is what the living room looks like without anyone in it. So you can use your imagination to creatively fit 12 travelers into that space. : )

As soon as we arrived, we were welcomed in by our contact and literally told to "make ourselves at home". So we tried our best to do just that... The permanent members of the home are friends from various countries who wanted to create a shared space that would always be open to travelers by offering the true gift of hospitality... like 365 days a year. Read all about their efforts and their dreams by going to the Project Volunteering web-site; you'll definitely want to peek at their ideas and practices described on each page. This is a real community of hospitality... I've never seen nor experienced anything quite like it.

Word to Berlin. Word to experiencing hospitality from strangers. And word to couch-surfing (look into it yourself -- no matter what corner of the globe you may find yourself in; of course be wise and be safe, but be adventurous too!)

I can't wait to keep this up in my travels... no hostel fees and new friends in new places... why didn't I use this site before now?!