My favourite couchsurfing story

Couchsurfing refers to staying with hosts from place to place as you travel. It is an adventure that many are not brave enough to take on, but those who do come back with the best stories. This one is our favourite:

I was never the bravest or most daring of youths. I grew up in a household that worshipped stability and where my sister and I were taught to always be as cautious as possible. So I lasted most of my adolescence before I succumbed to that contagious wanderlust.

Japan was my target, and I was determined to get there if I had to swim. I dove headfirst into Japanese language and culture classes. I made as many contacts as I could. I saved every penny possible from my job at the world’s least interesting Dairy Queen. All in anticipation of a trip I was only hoping might come to fruition.

Opportunity came knocking

It was the summer of my twenty-first birthday when I finally got my chance. My Japanese teacher had a friend who owned an English language school in a town called Tarui. He was willing to meet me at the airport.

I was so very, very broke at the time that the thought of paid accommodations was laughable. So I had to trade for my stay in Gifu. The owner of the school offered me free board in his studio apartment in exchange for my assistance teaching classes. With one catch.

For one week during my stay, his son was going to be using the apartment. Which meant I needed to find myself a Japanese couch to sleep on and fast.

This came through at the very last second, as well. The night before I boarded my flight, my Japanese teacher told me she’d found a family willing to take me in. She handed me a piece of note paper with their last name and the date they would pick me up.

Then I was on my way, flying towards the least-planned vacation I had ever taken. I was nearly in hives with worry.

I had good reason to be extra nervous, too. Not only was I abroad for the first time in my life, but in the frenzy of planning and packing, I had forgotten one vital ingredient: a phone that would work internationally. So I was flying about as solo as I could get. All my communication was going to be dependent on the quality and prevalence of free Japanese Wi-Fi. (Spoiler: there’s not much of it).

Of course, nowadays I’m not so naive as to travel without an international phone or a global SIM card, but as I’ve said, I’m the master of poor planning. Incidentally, if you’re ever stuck deciding between the two, believe me, a SIM card is your best option for shorter trips and frequent travel. (BNESIM is one of the more popular options. They offer a pretty sweet package to travellers, including free incoming calls and no roaming charges).

Meeting my host family

I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous in my life as I was the morning that my host family came to pick me up. I had only barely started to acclimate to life in Japan and I had just been informed that no one in my host family spoke any English.

When my host mother arrived to pick me up, I promptly forgot every lick of Japanese I’d ever known and just sort of stared in fear. Was it too late to back out? I don’t even remember the car ride to their house, nor much of unpacking my things.

Nearly petrified at the thought of making a mistake, I followed my host sister to the table for lunch. For me, they’d laid out a fork next to my chopsticks. I’d lived within walking distance of a Chinese restaurant all my life, so of course, I ignored the fork, seeing it as an admission of weakness.

They were so surprised by my chopstick competence that we all stopped eating for a minute to just laugh. And it was like my worry broke. Slowly my Japanese came back, and with the help of a phone translator, we talked well into the night. It became one of the best weeks of my life. We went shopping, hiked to more temples than I could count, and they even threw me a birthday party. And when my week was up, we weren’t ready to say goodbye yet. So I hopped “couches” to another family who was their close personal friends. I learned to drive a Japanese car, ate more sushi than I thought was possible and made several more lifelong friends.

My takeaway

So there it is. My first attempt at couchsurfing (thought to be honest, I was always camped out on a full bed). If there’s a lesson to be learned from that first messy Japan tour of mine it’s this: fear is normal, but never let it stop you from experiencing the world. I’m eternally glad I didn’t have the money to stay in a nice Japanese hotel.