Melanie Kruvelis

And the strangest thing — well, besides the fact that I was awake at 5 a.m. in Valencia, Spain, watching the entire city burn alive for a festival that celebrates man’s right to ignite — was that I didn’t hate him. This man of theory and meaning and all those terrible things — this man was not hated. In the 72 hours I spent in his normally nauseating, pseudo-intellectual presence, I never considering grabbing that hemp necklace around his neck and strangling him until there was no tomorrow. Au contraire. I fell in love. And I fell hard.

I promise, this is not a love story. Nor is this a poorly written Carrie Bradshaw rant about how great sex is in Europe — after all, as an empiricist I couldn’t make such a claim in good consciousness. No, the subject matter of this poorly written rant is CouchSurfing. And why this website made me stop brushing my hair and start believing in humanity.

My lover’s name was Miguel, by the way. Or, more precisely, Miguel was the name of my feigning prophet lover. But he wasn’t the only inamorato I made that weekend. There was the girl with the dolphin laugh. The girl with the dragon tattoos. The feisty blonde German who was last seen looking for her pants. And the kind of smelly Italian kid who was never ten centimeters away from a bottle of hair gel. In just a matter of hours, this free floor to crash on, this free shower to neglect to use and these people — these strange, wonderful, shiny happy freaky people — became to me what peanut butter is to jelly. Which is to say, a sandwich.

Before I go off and grab my cake of rainbows and smiles from the oven, I’d like to address your concerns about CouchSurfing, because I have a hunch that no matter how much weed you’re smoking right now, you must be wondering how much weed I was smoking when I signed up for this freak show. The answer is a lot but that’s really not the point. CouchSurfing is an online community where members can create profiles to either host guests or find a couch to drool on for a couple of nights — for free. And yes, of course, Mom, the site is teeming with thieves, axe murderers and Ponzi schemers. After all, with more than a million users and reviews in The New York Times, Time magazine and now the world-renowned Michigan Daily, we can only presume that the Hitlers of the world congregate here to do bad things to weird people.

But in all seriousness, we all know that the neo-Nazis aren’t really good with computers, and if you just use a bit of common sense, it’s not hard to be a safe surfer. For instance, do you request to surf with a 35-year-old man who, according to his profile, only has a couch for blonde women between the ages of 18 and 22 with bra sizes between 34C and 38D? Perhaps. But if you’d rather not wake to a large man friend smelling your hair, pick the vegetarian. The vegan. The macrobiotic tree bark eater. Anyone who describes themselves as looking for their place in the universe. These are the people you want. These are the people who will make you breakfast (tree bark tea with a side of stick), who will give you space, tell you what to do and where to go — probably somewhere with trees.

But sometimes, you decide to stay with the guy who “likes to party” and doesn’t own any yoga mats. And that’s okay too. Because maybe you’ll end up sleeping on the floor with ten other surfers. Ten other Brits. Californians. Swedes that are far too attractive to even be in the same room as you. Ten other nomads who just want to figure out how to see everything with the ten bucks they’ve got. You wouldn’t think something as trivial as frugality would bring people together, but after our first meal together, well, we kind of became inseparable, this non-functional unit of sorts. I guess that’s called a family. It was more than just people looking to drop their crap off in some random dude’s apartment while they go get hammered in a new city. They were looking for new people and new things and just new.

And that’s the story of how traveling can change. And how it should change. Ad infinitum.

Melanie Kruvelis can be reached at melkruv@umich.edu.