The year I let 100 strangers spend the night on my couch

Couchsurfing, where complete strangers from all around the world are invited into your home, can help transform your life, writes Sophie Donaldson

WOULD you let a stranger stay on your couch? How about 100 strangers in a year? I did, and before you ask, no, it wasn’t for the money. Circa 2011, it was before Airbnb had entered into the general lexicon. I was living in a shared house with three flatmates; Ronan, the Sydney-born mostly Irish-reared contrarian with a distinctive accent who often clashed with Frenchie, aptly named for his Gallic swagger and unapologetic Frenchness.

Then there was Polly, a Russian-speaking petite blonde who had spent the previous few years travelling the world with her boyfriend. Working full-time as an architect, she was suffering from an aching wanderlust that was compounded by her office job and would regale us with tales of other people’s adventures. In an attempt to appease her gnawing travel bug, she propositioned the household to try couchsurfing and inexplicably, we all said yes.

For the uninitiated, Couchsurfing.com is like the lovechild of Facebook and Airbnb. Hosts and surfers both create profiles about themselves, the hosts describ- ing their home and surfers describing themselves. Surfers contact hosts in the hope of staying with them and it is at the discretion of the host to accept or reject their request.

We added our names to Polly’s existing account with a few photos and then selected the option to make the house ‘available’. The requests began filtering in and we soon had our first surfers.

I don’t remember much about those first guests except that they ignited something in us all that saw a constant flow of couchsurfers follow in their wake. There were musicians, nurses, fed up civil servants, students and full-time backpackers and they came from all over; Austria, Canada, Brazil, Poland, Estonia, Mexico, South Korea, Alaska, Bosnia and Switzerland.

There was Francesca, the vivacious Italian who cooked so much food every surface in the kitchen cradled a crispybased pizza. Jakob and Holger, the six-foot Germans who would play ping-pong with Frenchie in the living room using saucepans or squash rackets in lieu of wooden paddles. Giles, who worked as a teacher in New Caledonia and spent his summers travelling the world. And Swann, the tiny Parisian artist whose couch I slept on the first time I went to Paris.

James, a flame-haired Dubliner, has become a dear friend. He shared our futon with his Italian fling Antonio, a barber who offered haircuts by way of saying thanks for having him. Martina, the gen- erous pretzel-baking Bavarian, ended up staying for six weeks sharing Polly’s attic bedroom and invited us to her wedding last summer.

There was the Frenchman who had travelled through the Middle East literally dodging bombs with a guitar strapped to his back. The jovial Icelandic boys who wanted haircuts then sat patiently being shorn like sheep as we gave them buzz cuts. The Hawaiian guy who only had five days off and used them to travel the world.

While our home might have resembled a commune, its inhabitants living a frugal bohemian existence, we were either full-time workers or full-time students. We paid rent and bills while maintaining a home that just happened to be a temporary shelter for strangers.

What was intended as a brief dalliance for Polly’s sanity resulted in a kinetic household of people and accents,