Go Couchsurfing:Instead of paying thousands for a holiday, couchsurfers sleep on strangers' sofas. But will your girlfriend still be speaking to you afterwards, asks Peter Geoghegan
FOUR-THIRTY AM. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I’m cold, jet-lagged and lying beside my girlfriend, Ealasaid, on a half-inflated air mattress. Across the room, barely three metres away, a couple we’ve never met before tonight are bickering in bed. “You said you’d take the trash out.” “I’ll do it in the morning.” It’s like a scene from The King of Queens. She’s nagging in whiny, nasal tones; he’s muttering just enough to keep the argument going. Welcome to sharing a studio apartment with complete strangers. Welcome to couchsurfing New York City.
It may not seem like it, but Lisa and Jim, as we shall call the quarrelling strangers, are our hosts for a three-day weekend getaway to New York. Both graduate students in their early 20s, they are just two of the hundreds of thousands across the globe who have embraced a new, and rather unorthodox, way of seeing the world.
Started by Casey Fenton, a 27-year-old from Hawaii, in January 2004, couchsurfing has a simple concept: instead of paying a packet for holiday lodgings, enjoy free hospitality from one of the 780,000 couchsurfers registered in more than 180 countries.
Joining is straightforward. Sign up at www.couchsurfing.com, create a profile, populate it with witty aphorisms and photographs of yourself looking friendly and you're ready to begin contacting members in places you want to visit.
The basic house rules are easy, too. Be a respectful guest (a gift often goes down well but is not obligatory), clean up after yourself and, if other couchsurfers are coming to your area, and it suits you, reciprocate.
It might all sound a bit too rough and ready, but if you don’t have a phobia about staying with strangers, then couchsurfing can be a great way to travel – and to save money. In the past year I’ve slept on floors and couches and made friends in Germany, Spain and the UK.
But as Lisa and Jim start to debate the merits of joining a local paper-recycling scheme I’m starting to wonder if couchsurfing New York – and bringing along my girlfriend, a couchsurfing virgin – was such a good idea.
Next morning Lisa kicks us out. Jim has already left for his part-time job, and she is on the way out to hers. She forgot to mention it last night, but we have to leave the apartment while they are at work. “Sorry, but you guys had better be making tracks.” This is not typical host behaviour. Generally, couchsurfers are given keys and allowed to come and go as they please. Instead, with barely time for a wash, we are unceremoniously shunted on to a nondescript Brooklyn street on a wet, blustery winter morning.
It’s not all bad, though. One of the attractions of couchsurfing is the opportunity it gives to experience neighbourhoods you otherwise might miss. Williamsburg is not exactly remote – Manhattan is clearly visible across the East River, and the area is extremely popular with New York’s arty crowd – but nor is it a popular tourist spot.
Just around the corner we find Kasia’s Restaurant (146 Bedford Avenue, 00-1-718- 3878780), one of the area’s many excellent (and cheap) place to eat. Two cold, hungry, sleep-deprived couchsurfers could not ask for more: generous portions of Polish pierogi (boiled dumplings stuffed with everything from apple to cheese) and bottomless cups of filter coffee.
Refreshed and with thoughts of the air mattress behind us, we set off to explore one of New York’s most diverse boroughs. Traditionally home to Orthodox Hassidic Jews in the south and Polish immigrants to the north, Williamsburg today is a bustling mix of Spanish speakers, hip graduates and, in the upmarket warehouse loft apartments on the waterfront, businesspeople who work in Manhattan.
Williamsburg has attractions for shoppers as well as estate agents, such as Beacon’s Closet (88 North 11th Street, 00-1-718- 4860816, www.beaconscloset.com), a vintage emporium full of everything from 1950s cocktail dresses to the latest Dolce Gabbana. This dimly lit cut-price store is a must for fashionistas on tight budgets. Book- lovers should make a beeline for Bedford Avenue, where, laden down with bags, we pass the afternoon perusing the many new and used bookstores.
As night draws in it looks as if we are stranded in Williamsburg. Our hosts aren’t picking up the phone, and we have no idea when they’ll be back. Nothing for it, then, but to kick back and enjoy the area’s fabled nightlife. Luckily, the first bar we stumble across is a gem. Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern (188 Bedford Avenue, 00-1-718- 3849539) is an old-school dive bar: the jukebox plays country standards while workmen drink Budweiser from enormous foam cups and discuss baseball, Barack Obama and the weather. Next stop is the critically lauded (and free) weekly alternative-comedy show at Sound Fix (110 Bedford Avenue, 00-1-718- 3888090, www.soundfix records.com). A record store by day, its back room is a cosy bar where tonight we are treated to a series of excellent up-and-coming comedians. It’s classic Woody Allen-style New York humour – “Conflations make me happy. Save time: an Italian who always looks on the bright side is a woptimist” – and goes down as easily as the rum-and-hot-cider cocktails.
THE LAUGHTER STOPS when we get back to Lisa and Jim’s. It’s past midnight, but they are still up – and still bickering. This time the bone of contention is the salad for the next day’s lunch. “You should have used onions,” Jim monotones. “But we didn’t have any,” Lisa shrills back. Ealasaid and I exchange resigned glances. I’m starting to realise that couchsurfing isn’t the best way to a woman’s heart.
The following morning we wake before our hosts and, mindful of the previous night’s contretemps, leave without stirring them. A short subway ride and we’re in SoHo, enjoying a Cuban breakfast of muffins, fried eggs and salsa at Café Habana (17 Prince Street, 00-1- 212-6252001, www.ecoeatery. com) – and rejoicing at escaping our hosts’ cramped and increasingly oppressive apartment.
Winter is a great time to visit Manhattan. From the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza to Christmas shopping at Macy’s, the island is synonymous with the season. And nowhere overflows with more winter charm than SoHo, Greenwich Village and the East Village.
We begin our wander in the crowded shopping streets of SoHo, before passing the iconic arches of Washington Square Park, stopping for hot chocolate alongside New York University students in one of Greenwich Village’s many coffee houses.
Once shunned as Greenwich’s poorer cousin, the East Village has over the past two decades been transformed from a grimy, occasionally dangerous home for New York’s vagrants and nonconformists into a thriving neighbourhood of shops, bars and restaurants. Remnants of the old, edgy spirit remain – a colourful mural to Joe Strummer faces the southern side of Tompkins Square Park – but today the East Village is the destination of choice for the city’s young and restless.
It’s not hard to understand why. First Avenue, between 1st and 10th streets, is full of good inexpensive restaurants; Avenue A is the place to go for a beer and a shot for $5 (€3.80) – just the place to forget our couchsurfing travails.
It may be our last night, but we can’t put Jim and Lisa out of our minds just yet: our hosts are planning a Sunday-morning excursion, and we pledged to be back before the witching hour. So having bar-hopped our final hours away, and mindful of our curfew, we reluctantly hail a cab back to Williamsburg.
The transition from teeming, vibrant East Village to our hosts could not be harsher. Their street is totally silent, and when we ring the buzzer it is not Lisa or Jim but an elderly Polish woman from the ground-floor apartment who lets us in. She smiles at me, and, though she has no English, when I wish her a merry Christmas her eyes sparkle and she throws her arms around me.
Unfortunately, the reception upstairs is chillier. The television is blaring, and though Lisa asks a few questions about our day and our plans for the morning, Jim says nothing, just staring blankly at the set.
An odd, forced silence descends on the apartment, broken only by the television and the occasional awkward sound of squishing air-mattress plastic as we struggle to get comfortable – not how I had envisaged our final night in the city that never sleeps.
Couchsurfing is all about the people. When they’re good it’s great. When, like Jim and Lisa, they are quarrelsome, unfriendly and uninterested, it’s pretty awful. Waking on our final morning, my only thought is to make our exit as quick as possible. Jim is fast asleep, but Lisa is awake and reading in the far corner of the room.
After showering and packing in record time, I thank her for the hospitality and make a gift of a bottle of whiskey. I don’t mention that they should visit me in the home of Jameson.
Next time I take my girlfriend to New York I’ll stump up for a proper hotel.
Go there
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies to New York from Dublin and Shannon. Delta (www.delta.com), American Airlines (www.american airlines.ie) and Continental (www. continental.com/ie) also fly from Dublin.