In the morning, by the time everyone had woken up, a lousy roommate of Fabian-the-Great told us that he was leaving the flat, and so must we. I had millions of things to do in Internet. I packed all my stuff (unsure if I could sleep there again), went out, sat down on the sidewalk with my laptop and worked 2 hours from the wifi until my laptop batteries were flat. That happened around 13:30.
I had then planned to go to a big meeting held by the owners of couchsurfing.org but realised I had mixed up the dates and that the meeting was the day after.
That happens to me all the time, and like always, I was really pissed off after myself. There I was, with one full empty afternoon ahead of me. I tried calling Ulf that did not answer (he had forgotten his mobile at the flat) and obviously, he was the only one I had the phone number of.
I remembered that some of the kids were joining a "Free hugs" action in the afternoon, and though I dislike this activity, it was my only way to get to the group again.
Free-hugging is a hippie activity that consists into hugging total strangers like if they were your best friend, giving them a big dose of fake love and forgetting about them subsequently. I consider it the climax of hypocrisy, along with an intolerable intrusion in the intimacy of strangers. I went there on foot, to save cash.
The free hugs campaign (yeah, "campaign" ; free-huggers are activists) was set up on Stephensplatz, THE tourist hotspot of Vienna. When I got there, I walked straight to a girl that I had met the night before. She didn't recognise me and tried to hug me. I dodged just in time.
That's when a huge rainstorm dispersed the already moribund love-mujahidins and they passed to plan B.
Plan B was to go and have a drink together in a pub not too far from there. It must have been on the official program since there were much much more people there than on Stephensplatz. Around 40 I'd say.
It was a really carefully decorated bar that would score "not too expensive" in the scale of value of a middle class Austrian. Nothing a low-budget nomad would ever push the door of. I sat down with one of my friends called "Dingo", a street artist.
He had spent the day "statueing" in various tourist places. That is to say: standing motionless and in full costume on a pedestal above a donation basket. He had made the tremendous jackpot of 3€ but was still in good mood... as I had always seen him.
I swapped tables quite often, trying to get to meet as many people as possible. I was a bit appalled that the couchsurfing.com website was the centre of pretty much all conversations. It being a traveller's website, I was expecting that people would be talking more about travels than about profile-optimisation and forum-reputation.
After a while, we all left. Next point on the program was to get everyone to a barbecue place on an island on the river. The group moved towards the underground station. I was on too tight a budget so I decided to go on foot. You should have seen the shocked looks when I told them!
I plugged earphones into my mobile on one side and into myself on the other, started a good playlist and off I went for two hours of a half-visiting, half-getting-lost walk through Vienna.
I got really out of my way and tried to hitchhike a kilometre on a big boulevard without success. In the end, I managed to get to the island where the barbecue was set up. But was a long island so I still had quite a bit to walk.
After some distance, a voice called my name behind me. It was Michael from Munich, that was my host when I had gone to Octoberfest 6 month before...
There are many levels of membership in couchsurfing.org. Everyone starts as "standard member". After having gained some recorded experience, a standard member can ask to be promoted to the status of "couchsurfing ambassador". As an "ambassador", the member receives a little yellow flag on his profile (a sort of medal), a better placement in the search results and a couple of other candies. There are many levels of ambassadorship. City ambassadors are below country ambassadors that are below continental ambassadors that themselves respond to global ambassadors. None of those levels actually give more power (unless purely psychological), they just structurate the memberbase according to a hierarchical scheme based on a "first there first served" scheme.
I find it lamentable, but ambassadors love it, and standard members usually don't care.
Well, Michael from Munich is actually a global ambassador AND one of the website administrator. He was walking amoung a group of people that I did not recognise, though one of the girls said she had met me at the Oktoberfest thing. I joined their group.
It turned out that the little group was full of CouchSurfing celebrities. And since I'm an active participant in the forums that let standard members talk (I'm no ambassador), they ended up recognising me. One of the guys in the group in particular was the founder of a "new-features-ideas-for-the-website" forum where I was bound to take root in, being a bit restless in my brain. The original purpose of the forum was defiled some years ago and the administrators of the website do not even read the "new features" discussions for their website that are permanently going on there. So basically, everyone that invested some energy in discussing improvements in order to serve a website that they like found out that all of it was inevitably going to end up wasted.
I can assure you they turned pretty sour against the website's administration. The discussions on the forum included a significant percentage of very vocal uneasiness with the way the website is managed. And a few days before the Vienna calling event, it was shutdown without warning by the said founder. From whom in two years of activity on the forum, I had never seen a single post. I was indeed very curious on the motivations behind his blockade.
But the last thing I wanted is to waste a good party. And there was no reason it was going to be a bad one. There were quite a crowd when we got there. It must have been around 8pm. One really loud Austrian guy walked toward us to sell us bracelets. It was 2€ for the night or 6€ for the whole week-end. I thought it was to pay for the barbecue coals, and since I had only raw food to eat, I dodged. I realised later that there were some other expenses involved, and felt a bit bad for it.
One thing that I noticed very quickly was the prevalence of CouchSurfing t-shirts around me. Some of those kids were clearly using the website as a surrogate for spirituality. They woke up in a couchsurfing sort of mood, wore couchsurfing items, met up with their "couchsurfer" (yep, there is a word for it) friends, and chatted online on CouchSurfing (until the chat was recently shutdown for obscure reasons).
I am pretty strict on the values of hospitality, but I don't go as far as endorsing it through a trademark.
I wanted to have some fun so I tried ignoring it, with lukewarm success. I sat down with a friend to have dinner. Some spread on some bread. As a survival necessity rather than for the pleasure of it. Then I gave a massage to him (he complained about his back). I asked someone to work on me, and soon we had a massaging caterpillar on the grass.
Some kids had started playing frisbee. I joined them in the intention of organizing an "ultimate frisbee" game. It's a sort of team game that rules are similar to that of rugby, but more peaceful and with a disc. It worked.
During a break, the screaming Austrian guy came with an icebox full of beer, a girl was walking behind him with a box labelled "DONATIONS". Great! I got one beer and dropped 50c in the donation box. I did it rather quickly, as I was very thirsty, and sort of overtook the girl that meant to take my coin. It turned out that they were actually selling the beer for 1€50, and that the donation box was in fact a cash register.
Which is so, oh so reminiscent of the way the couchsurfing website is funded. They don't advertise on the website and fuel themselves only through member-cash-flow. But instead of calling for donation, they sell a profile-upgrade for 25€ that they call "verification" instead of "donation" and try to make it look like they are just covering the costs of the operation, while 90% of the income of the website relies on it.
We played until dark. When the game ended, I ran to the Danube, hoping that the warmth of the physical effort would save me from certain death in the cold water. I shed my clothe very quickly, entered the water screaming, swam a couple of strokes, came back, jumped out of it and dried my shivering body as quick as possible. On the side of the lawn, the massage caterpillar was still going.
And, all stoned that I was from the frisbee match and the cold water bath, I sat down on a bench, facing the crowd and the sunset, and watched the black silhouettes of the people cut out on the bright violet sky.
I let my thoughts run for a while on the fact that, when reduced to 2D, people are much more interesting: The 3D physical image of someone doesn't change much and when you've seen it once, you've seen it all, but flattened to 2D, people constantly morph into an infinite panel of shades, merging with the background, or with each other, without even knowing about it.
A group of people on the nearest bench distracted me, as I heard them try to speak in French. I turned to them and tried to join the conversation. It was a conversation about languages. I have heard variations of this topic being discussed a million times. And somehow, I still alway participate to the topic, while telling myself: "not again!": "So you see, in German, the sentence is structured differently" / "But in French, we use gender for everything" / "You know in Finnish, there are no genders?" / "I prefer the way italian grammar is set up" / "Composed verbs in English make it so hard, but so subtle".......... This is the second most common topic in a traveller's meeting. After "where is everybody from" and before "sex" or "politics".
In spite of my very tight budget, I got myself another beer. And doing so, I noticed that the loud Austrian that was there to take my order had spent the whole evening siting on the "donation" chest near the icebox, and was going to spend it all there. I felt really sorry for him, but he seemed content of his lot. And I can't help remembering...
I took part in a sort of "artistic experiment" called SPROUTBAU in Bremen in 2007. 60 artists from all around the world living and working together in the same facility.
On the 7th floor, there was a sort of "lounge", where most of the social interactions were going on. It had a fridge just for beer. On top of that fridge was an open shoebox and, on the fridge, a little sign: "Becks 1€50 | Hemelinger 1€". People would help themselves to the fridge, and throw a coin in the box, or not.
Many times a took beer without paying, and then threw a banknote in the box when I had my wallet on me. The donation box was getting enough cash to replenish the fridge day after day. And I believe that it is the way to go. A community that doesn't trust its own members is not really sustainable.
So I bought myself a beer, and went around talking to people. Some of them I knew, some of them I got to know.
People were leaving by waves. Fabian-the-Great offered me a place to sleep under his table soccer again, but the sky was clear, the temperature bearable so I decided to sleep right where we were, on a bench under the stars. So he left with his crowd of guests.
The last people to leave tried to really make the point that it would not bother them at all if I came to sleep at their place, that was only 1h of night bus away, and that I didn't have to sleep outside. They were clearly not computing the thought of someone wilfully choosing to sleep in a park. And they were also very very hospitable people that probably feel all the better when travellers are piling up to the ceiling of their flat. I'm very much like that too. Once I hosted 8 people in my 20 m² studio and I still feel very proud about it.
In the end, one of them decided to stay with me. After they had left, we walked to the Danube and sat on the grass for a last cigarette. I do not remember the content of our surely deep conversation. We went to bed then.
I slept on a bench very comfortably until 7am, when the hot sun woke me up ; and then I slept very comfortably again on the grass under the trees until 10am.