So the aim of this blog is supposed to go beyond the purely biographical, and having now looked in-depth at about eight universities, I believe I am well enough equipped to make some initial comments on Unis in the USA.
I have found myself writing certain things in almost every review that I do. First of all, the campuses. They are all so nice. In Britain, you're lucky if you even have a campus, since universities are generally a mish-mash of odd buildings generally congregated into an unspecific area of some-city-or-other. In America, campuses are always arranged neatly with clear-cut perimetres, and have been specially laid-out to create maximum aesthetic value. It is rare that you feel really part of a city when you're on campus, like you do in 99% of British universities. There are almost always plenty of trees, pleasant open spaces and architecture that looks like it was actually designed to look nice.
Secondly, the professors. Almost every student I talk to says something like this: "The teachers are really good, and what's nice is that they care about all their students, I really feel like they want us to succeed." At the smaller schools, the student will then always add "and they encourage you to go see them, and to form real relationships with them. I enjoy going to have a drink with my professors in a bar after class." And they always say it as if this state of affairs is unique to their university. I don't know how much this is a contrast or similarity with Britain, but it's striking that in America there seems to be a lot of real value attached to the teaching process.
Thirdly, student organisations and university activities. In every university I've looked at in America, the students (and the websites) are gushing about the hundreds of student-organised activities and various interesting types of parties and the sports and the music/theatre/art workshops, and the visiting speakers and the Peace corps, and the Greek life and the political groups and the international exchange programs and the student newspapers/TV/radio stations etc etc etc. I can't help but think that America has the edge on college-life vibrancy.
The final thing that I need to mention is a lot more obvious, and it is the curriculum. Once you see the awesome range of subjects students can do all at once in America, you simply can't believe that other countries would be so insane as to impose one single subject from the age of 18 until graduation. Admissions people bang on about making sure to choose the subject that most interests you, but what kind of person only has one such subject? A person who has been artificially limited in his life and education. US universities are judged on the spectrum of courses they are able to offer. In Britain the range is minimal - Cambridge itself barely manages more than 20-25 courses - because students only ever get to pick one of them, and no one is going to study early Taoist philosophy for three years no matter how appealing it is.
I'll try and provide some more (and deeper) thoughts on the subject as the trip progresses.
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Texas Schmexas
I had a great weekend in Houston with my cousin Jordy and his girlfriend Marissa. They took me on a whizzing tour of the city, which seemed nice enough, except for the neighbourhood with the oil-millionaire’s mansions, which seemed ridiculously opulent. I had a good time getting to know Rice University, where my cousin earned his degree a few years back, and which I really liked.
In the evenings we patronised a couple of awesome eateries with names like Hickery Hollow, where you sit at long tables with your fellow jolly diners, admire the decorating (antlers, buffalo heads, ballistic weaponry, flags etc) and eat platefuls of classic Texas fare (think meat, bread, BBQ sauce, potatoes, baked beans and ice tea or root beer) in quantities more usually associated with extinct reptilian monsters. Live bluegrass bands played songs with names like “Johnny ain’t comin’ home for to sing a-dyin’”.
---Brief Interlude--- in which I take a minute to mention one aspect of America that nobody talks about but which is the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen anywhere I’ve been in the world. Namely, the sky. Every day, at about 7-8pm and 4-5am, the world looks likes it is coming to a spectacular end. The clouds turn florescent pink or orange, and assume shapes like apocalyptical mountains. My jaw muscles give up in awe. Even when it’s not sunset, the cloud formations are so majestic that it’s all I can do to stop myself kneeling in the middle of the street and crying out for forgiveness. Imagine leaving a building or vehicle, stepping out onto the pavement and seeing this:
Actually, that is a picture of a deep-space nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s really not far off what the sky looks like in America. Talking of nebulae, I found time while in Houston to visit the space centre (of “we have a problem” fame), and check out some incredible stuff about space. They did a thoroughly good job of making me want to be an astronaut, in fact. Did you know, for example, that NASA will be sending men to the moon again in 2020, in order to establish an actual proper base there, which, and this is the really cool part, will be used as a refueling point for the first mission to Mars in 2030. The first person to set foot on another planet is alive today.
Anyhow, Austin was generally a cool place, certainly somewhere I’d love to spend my university years, though I didn’t have long there before I was off again, to New Orleans, or, in the local dialect, “Nawlins”.
In the evenings we patronised a couple of awesome eateries with names like Hickery Hollow, where you sit at long tables with your fellow jolly diners, admire the decorating (antlers, buffalo heads, ballistic weaponry, flags etc) and eat platefuls of classic Texas fare (think meat, bread, BBQ sauce, potatoes, baked beans and ice tea or root beer) in quantities more usually associated with extinct reptilian monsters. Live bluegrass bands played songs with names like “Johnny ain’t comin’ home for to sing a-dyin’”.
---Brief Interlude--- in which I take a minute to mention one aspect of America that nobody talks about but which is the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen anywhere I’ve been in the world. Namely, the sky. Every day, at about 7-8pm and 4-5am, the world looks likes it is coming to a spectacular end. The clouds turn florescent pink or orange, and assume shapes like apocalyptical mountains. My jaw muscles give up in awe. Even when it’s not sunset, the cloud formations are so majestic that it’s all I can do to stop myself kneeling in the middle of the street and crying out for forgiveness. Imagine leaving a building or vehicle, stepping out onto the pavement and seeing this:
Actually, that is a picture of a deep-space nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s really not far off what the sky looks like in America. Talking of nebulae, I found time while in Houston to visit the space centre (of “we have a problem” fame), and check out some incredible stuff about space. They did a thoroughly good job of making me want to be an astronaut, in fact. Did you know, for example, that NASA will be sending men to the moon again in 2020, in order to establish an actual proper base there, which, and this is the really cool part, will be used as a refueling point for the first mission to Mars in 2030. The first person to set foot on another planet is alive today.
From Mars to Austin, where I was hosted by a group of whacky University of Texas students in their awesome three-bedroom flat to the south of the city. I had fun chatting and living it up with them into the wee hours of the morning, as they were a uniformly interesting and hilarious bunch. One of them, Dani, was a DJ for UT’s renowned student radio station, so she took me to see the studio and watch her spin some discs. Indeed if you were listening to KVRX 91.7FM at about 10:45pm on Tuesday night you probably heard me give a brief live performance of a song by an Austin band (…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead) on a piano that happened to be around.
Other cool things I saw in Austin included a massive cloud of bats that fly up from under a bridge every day at sunset, and also the Texas State Capitol, where I idly watched the State Senate pass a few bills. In California I had had two hours to kill in Sacramento changing buses, so I had given myself a quick tour of the State Capitol there, which looks identical to the Texas one and to the national one in DC (and presumably every state capitol in the country – they don’t seem to be very imaginative with this…). In California, however, there had been a cool protest by a large number of people from Laos, all wearing white shirts, who had apparently been concerned about a Supreme Court ruling about the legality of a Lao general who may or may not have been plotting to overthrow the government in Laos from America. There were news teams, riot police, camera crews and everything.
Anyhow, Austin was generally a cool place, certainly somewhere I’d love to spend my university years, though I didn’t have long there before I was off again, to New Orleans, or, in the local dialect, “Nawlins”.
Friday, 22 May 2009
No LA-ughing Matter
The bus from San Francisco broke down sixty miles outside Los Angeles, with the whole back half of the passengers almost unconscious from the petrol fumes that had got into the air-con system. The driver pulled up on the side of the motorway, and we waited an hour or more for the replacement service. It was a good introduction to the feel of things in LA.
It’s not that I had a bad time in the world’s second biggest city, it’s just that the city and I didn’t hit it off. LA hasn’t seemed to have grasped the idea of looking nice. Downtown is concrete and polluted, Hollywood is run-down and polluted, and the rest has been abandoned as a basket case…and it’s polluted. As a Northern Californian at heart, I have to reveal my bias here, but seriously, I was expecting more.
Only one of the many people I solicited in LA, Steven, agreed to take me as a couchsurfer. I knew from his profile that he went to school at the University of Southern California (useful for me since I am reviewing this one). What it didn’t say on his profile is that he is actually a member of a fraternity there. Thus it was that I found myself in ATΩ, a USC frat-house. It wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it might be. It was very much like in the movies though.
The residents (inmates?) of the mansion which houses the fraternity (on a street full of similar mansions) were sons of wealthy USC alumni, with heads filled mostly with women and substances. Fortunately, Steven himself was a member of couchsurfing.com, and thus a very friendly, interesting and open-minded chap, and had a great taste in music as well. I actually had plenty of fun there, and even began to appreciate the comradely atmosphere of the house.
After getting the low-down on USC, I took the Metrorail train out to an eastern suburb of the metropolis, Claremont, where I felt like I’d just arrived on the other side of the world. Claremont was clean, peaceful, spacious and walkable, and the girls at the tiny all-female Scripps College were a jarringly pleasant and sophisticated bunch, earning themselves a big thumbs-up in their new Uni in the USA entry.
Unfortunately, I got so carried away by the lovely change of atmosphere that I misread the train timetable and missed the last train back. This had happened to me once before, when I went to an Obama rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia, back in September. At the time, I had only recently finished traveling in Europe, so the concept of there being a "last" train did not even occur to me. This time, as with that time, I had to find a motel, though the one in Claremont was not nearly as cheap or Psycho-esque as the awesome place I’d found in Fredericksburg.
The next day I found my way out to another distant suburb, Malibu, on the opposite side of the city, a journey of about three hours. Here I met up with my second host, Justin, who was wonderful and lived in a house with ten other West-Coast guys, and three other couchsurfers while I was there (from Holland, South Korea and Uruguay – what a mix!).
The location was insane. Malibu is situated right on a fantastical stretch of world-famous coast-line, and the house was perched up in the beautiful Mediterranean hills overlooking the mighty Pacific. Justin drove me the ten miles from Pepperdine, the third LA university I was looking at (equally well situated), on his motorbike, on a road that people come from the across the world just to drive on, but which caught me totally by surprise. In the evening we hiked up to the top of one of the hills and watched a magnificent sunset over the ocean.
Wrapping up in LA with an abortive trip to Universal Studios, which was altered in favour of the new Star Trek movie after we discovered that the cost to get into the famous theme-park would be roughly my budget for the next week-and-a-half, I spent the night in Ventura, a little north of LA, with my Etonian friends again at a concert of Ukrainian "gypsy-punks" Gogol Bordello, a band that would be described in British parlance as complete nutters, or in American parlance as Communists.
Up early the next morning, and I began my Tolkienesque 2-day saga of a journey into the far corner of Texas. I had decided to skip Arizona and New Mexico, not a decision I took lightly, but again I felt thwarted by US public transportation, since all the cool bits of those states are inaccessible sans auto. So I passed grimly through famous cities like Phoenix, El Paso and San Antonito, and decided to write this update a few hours short of my final destination in Houston. Texas is the first state I’ve been to that didn’t vote for Obama in November (just ponder that thought for a while) and you can see it in road signs such as "Don’t Mess With Texas. Littering Fine $1000". Also in the bus drivers that look like Terminator 2.
I’ve also passed through two time-zones to get here. Let us take a moment to consider the logistics of a country that has no fewer than four different time zones (more if you include Alaska and Hawaii), including over 10 states that span more than one. Imagine having to change your watch every time you go to a nearby town in the same state. In Indiana, the parts of the state that are in one time zone are not even continuous. My personal favourite is Arizona, which is part of the Mountain Time Zone during the winter, but in the summer ignores the daylight savings switch of that time zone, putting it back into the Pacific Time Zone. One area in the northeast of the state does observe the time change, however, apart from a little bit of that area which doesn’t. This makes it technically possible to go for a two hour-or-so drive and have to change your watch about eight times.
And with that thought, I leave you to imagine what awaits me in America’s fifth largest-city, Houston, Texas.
Saturday, 16 May 2009
The Bells of Saint Francis
This update is brought to you from a greyhound bus somewhere south of San Francisco. Greyhounds have been a bit of a disappointment, if I'm honest. My image of a Greyhound was a rickety old sheet-metal construction made in the 60s, with hippy symbols painted along the sides, cheap uncomfortable plastic seats inside, and the luggage strapped on to the roof. In reality, they are massive modern coaches with soft, suspiciously comfy seats, luggage compartments, air conditioning and reading lights. In other words, the same as English long-distance buses. Still, the comradely atmosphere aboard the buses was very much not English, and did live up to my expectations. The folks on the overnight slog south from Portland were a satisfyingly motley crew, and the chap in front of me even had a real life pirate eye-patch.
Arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area is for me a slightly awkward mix of feeling like I'm home, and feeling like I'm at an exciting theme-park that I only get to go to every few years. I lived in the East Bay for a year-and-a-half when I was six, and still have family living there. Indeed, it was to my grandparents house that I transported myself, even though my grandparents were at that time ironically leaving my house in England to start their holiday in Europe. In the evening I was joined by two fellow British travelers, both of them Old Etonians, and I gave them a dramatic (non-)entry to the house by breaking the latch on the door, making it impossible to get in.
It was about midnight when this happened, and so with the help of my good-natured uncle who lives nearby we set about trying to find an alternative route into the house, where my belongings were already locked away and where soft beds awaited us. As we attempted to prise open windows and back doors, I started imagining having to explain to my grandparents how we had sealed their house from the outside, and I started deciding which was the least expensive thing to break to gain entry. Eventually however, the day was saved at about 1:30 am when we managed to stick a long pole through the letterbox on the garage (which is connected to the main house) and press the inside button on the wall that opened the garage door.
With a roof over our heads and a garage-opening clicker for a house key, we set about exploring all the wonderful (and to me familiar) delights of the area. On day one we went to Berkeley, strolled through the university campus, and marveled at the delights of Telegraph Avenue such as Fat Slice pizza and the two best record stores in the world, Rasputin and Amoeba. We almost went to a film at the movie theatre where I used to work, but decided instead to buy a 50-cent video at Rasputin and watch it at home with a bowl of that traditional American delicacy, Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese. Mmmm. The next day we delved into San Francisco proper, taking trams, eating huge plates of noodles in Chinatown, hiking up Lombard Street, breathing the chocolate-perfumed air of Ghirardelli Square and reveling in the sea-side haunts of Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39.
The grand finale came when we were picked up from the San Francisco docks by my uncle in his huge motorboat, and taken for a whiz round the bay in the sunset. We sailed past foreboding Alcatraz and the millionaires’ homes in Sausalito and Tiburon, as well as under the Golden Gate Bridge itself, with the lit up skyline of San Francisco guiding us all the way. It was an awesome experience, as we took about 75 thousand photos of the Golden Gate framed by a blazing orange and pink sky. San Francisco's bay really is a magical place, and the views from every corner are breath-taking.
We were awake when the sun rose the next morning, too, because we had to catch he early train over to Merced, from which we took a shuttle into Yosemite National Park. This was the first natural wonder I'd seen on the trip, and not because America is short of natural wonders. There were plenty in Washington and Oregon near where I'd been that I'd really wanted to explore. But the issue that's becoming an ever greater problem for my travel plans is transport. I've always thought the situation in Britain was dire - with outrageous train fares and service that pales in comparison to what the Europeans enjoy. But in America, the transport problem is much much worse. The trains are as expensive if not worse than England, the buses are hardly any cheaper, the speed is abysmal, urban transit is patchy at best and most of all, public transport serves almost nowhere. Portland, for example, is only about half-an-hour's drive from what I've heard is the magnificent Columbia river gorge, but if you don't have a car, there is literally no bus or train that will take you there.
So to get to Yosemite, you have to wake up at five in the morning and get home at one in the morning, to be taken on various painfully slow and uber-expensive modes of transport about six hours each way, and finally get to spend a short afternoon in the park. Fortunately for us, therefore, Yosemite was the most fantastic array of natural extremities, with searing mountain sides, dazzling white-water rivers, sumptuous pine forests, insane cliff-faces, psycho waterfalls and delightful little paths through this natural treasure trove, all of which well justified the slog and lightness of wallet.
Arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area is for me a slightly awkward mix of feeling like I'm home, and feeling like I'm at an exciting theme-park that I only get to go to every few years. I lived in the East Bay for a year-and-a-half when I was six, and still have family living there. Indeed, it was to my grandparents house that I transported myself, even though my grandparents were at that time ironically leaving my house in England to start their holiday in Europe. In the evening I was joined by two fellow British travelers, both of them Old Etonians, and I gave them a dramatic (non-)entry to the house by breaking the latch on the door, making it impossible to get in.
It was about midnight when this happened, and so with the help of my good-natured uncle who lives nearby we set about trying to find an alternative route into the house, where my belongings were already locked away and where soft beds awaited us. As we attempted to prise open windows and back doors, I started imagining having to explain to my grandparents how we had sealed their house from the outside, and I started deciding which was the least expensive thing to break to gain entry. Eventually however, the day was saved at about 1:30 am when we managed to stick a long pole through the letterbox on the garage (which is connected to the main house) and press the inside button on the wall that opened the garage door.
With a roof over our heads and a garage-opening clicker for a house key, we set about exploring all the wonderful (and to me familiar) delights of the area. On day one we went to Berkeley, strolled through the university campus, and marveled at the delights of Telegraph Avenue such as Fat Slice pizza and the two best record stores in the world, Rasputin and Amoeba. We almost went to a film at the movie theatre where I used to work, but decided instead to buy a 50-cent video at Rasputin and watch it at home with a bowl of that traditional American delicacy, Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese. Mmmm. The next day we delved into San Francisco proper, taking trams, eating huge plates of noodles in Chinatown, hiking up Lombard Street, breathing the chocolate-perfumed air of Ghirardelli Square and reveling in the sea-side haunts of Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39.
The grand finale came when we were picked up from the San Francisco docks by my uncle in his huge motorboat, and taken for a whiz round the bay in the sunset. We sailed past foreboding Alcatraz and the millionaires’ homes in Sausalito and Tiburon, as well as under the Golden Gate Bridge itself, with the lit up skyline of San Francisco guiding us all the way. It was an awesome experience, as we took about 75 thousand photos of the Golden Gate framed by a blazing orange and pink sky. San Francisco's bay really is a magical place, and the views from every corner are breath-taking.
We were awake when the sun rose the next morning, too, because we had to catch he early train over to Merced, from which we took a shuttle into Yosemite National Park. This was the first natural wonder I'd seen on the trip, and not because America is short of natural wonders. There were plenty in Washington and Oregon near where I'd been that I'd really wanted to explore. But the issue that's becoming an ever greater problem for my travel plans is transport. I've always thought the situation in Britain was dire - with outrageous train fares and service that pales in comparison to what the Europeans enjoy. But in America, the transport problem is much much worse. The trains are as expensive if not worse than England, the buses are hardly any cheaper, the speed is abysmal, urban transit is patchy at best and most of all, public transport serves almost nowhere. Portland, for example, is only about half-an-hour's drive from what I've heard is the magnificent Columbia river gorge, but if you don't have a car, there is literally no bus or train that will take you there.
So to get to Yosemite, you have to wake up at five in the morning and get home at one in the morning, to be taken on various painfully slow and uber-expensive modes of transport about six hours each way, and finally get to spend a short afternoon in the park. Fortunately for us, therefore, Yosemite was the most fantastic array of natural extremities, with searing mountain sides, dazzling white-water rivers, sumptuous pine forests, insane cliff-faces, psycho waterfalls and delightful little paths through this natural treasure trove, all of which well justified the slog and lightness of wallet.
There were no universities that I needed to look at in San Francisco and around, so it's back on the job when I reach my next destination, infamous Los Angeles.
Land of Ports
"Well Portland, Oregon", sings Loretta Lynn, "if that ain't love then tell me what is." I rolled in off the 5:30 Seattle train, and made my way to Lewis and Clark College, the next victim of Uni in the USA inclusion, conveniently also the home of my next host. Walking from the train station to the pick up point for the L&C shuttle was a surreal experience. Portland seemed to be the perfect incarnation of the American Dream City. The streets are broad and unpolluted, the pavements wide and made of lovely brick, meticulously free of any speck of litter or dirt. Trees and statues of Snow-White-esque woodland creatures are positioned at strategically charming intervals along the precisely uniform grid system. There appear to be very few inhabitants cluttering things up. Immaculate sky-scrapers loom over the ghostly scene.
Lewis and Clarke was a lovely place to spend six days; it's a little Liberal Arts College with a small but beautiful campus overlooking the Oregon countryside and the terrifying volcanoes of Mt St Helens and Mt Hood. My hostess was a French girl, Coline, whom I met through mutual acquaintance rather than couchsurfing, and the fact that she wasn't American didn't seem to a hindrance to being as incredibly kind as the folks I'd stayed with in Seattle. In fact, she was working as a language assistant in the College, and lived with three other charming language assistants from China, Japan and Siberia, all of whom were equally friendly and welcoming. I even had a bed to sleep on, a luxury I hadn't experienced in many months. Horrah!
The days were spent in a fairly relaxed fashion: after "doing" L&C I crossed the river to the slightly more famous Liberal Arts rival Reed College, which had an equally nice campus but a totally different atmosphere. I also had time to have a look around Portland (which had a lot more soul to it than my first impressions suggested), and on the weekend Coline and I hit the famous Saturday Market, which was an incredible blitz of salespeople with eccentric ideas such as making loads of brilliant decorations out of cutlery, or wallets out of duct-tape, and interesting food choices. In the end we opted for Voodoo Donuts, a fantastic underground cult venue with types of pastries that Doctor Seuss would be proud of inventing, and pictures on the plaster-peeling walls that would have made Andy Warhole's brain salivate. There were Voodoo Donuts T-shirts and underwear on sale. Apparently people have been married in there.
The famously changeable Portland weather was largely stable during my stay, with one or two sublime cloudless days towards the end. My last day in Portland was Lewis and Clark's graduation day, so I got to witness the spectacle of hundreds of be-gowned graduates and professors in colourful costumes listening to coming-of-age speeches and finally throwing their mortar boards in the air just like they're supposed to. Reed is even more extravagant, since apparently they have a whole ceremony for burning their papers after they've finished with them. Anyways, after eating as many cookies and complementary pastries as it is possible to consume at the post-graduation reception, I jumped on a bus, sat on it for 17 hours, and arrived in the one and only Bay Area.
Lewis and Clarke was a lovely place to spend six days; it's a little Liberal Arts College with a small but beautiful campus overlooking the Oregon countryside and the terrifying volcanoes of Mt St Helens and Mt Hood. My hostess was a French girl, Coline, whom I met through mutual acquaintance rather than couchsurfing, and the fact that she wasn't American didn't seem to a hindrance to being as incredibly kind as the folks I'd stayed with in Seattle. In fact, she was working as a language assistant in the College, and lived with three other charming language assistants from China, Japan and Siberia, all of whom were equally friendly and welcoming. I even had a bed to sleep on, a luxury I hadn't experienced in many months. Horrah!
The days were spent in a fairly relaxed fashion: after "doing" L&C I crossed the river to the slightly more famous Liberal Arts rival Reed College, which had an equally nice campus but a totally different atmosphere. I also had time to have a look around Portland (which had a lot more soul to it than my first impressions suggested), and on the weekend Coline and I hit the famous Saturday Market, which was an incredible blitz of salespeople with eccentric ideas such as making loads of brilliant decorations out of cutlery, or wallets out of duct-tape, and interesting food choices. In the end we opted for Voodoo Donuts, a fantastic underground cult venue with types of pastries that Doctor Seuss would be proud of inventing, and pictures on the plaster-peeling walls that would have made Andy Warhole's brain salivate. There were Voodoo Donuts T-shirts and underwear on sale. Apparently people have been married in there.
The famously changeable Portland weather was largely stable during my stay, with one or two sublime cloudless days towards the end. My last day in Portland was Lewis and Clark's graduation day, so I got to witness the spectacle of hundreds of be-gowned graduates and professors in colourful costumes listening to coming-of-age speeches and finally throwing their mortar boards in the air just like they're supposed to. Reed is even more extravagant, since apparently they have a whole ceremony for burning their papers after they've finished with them. Anyways, after eating as many cookies and complementary pastries as it is possible to consume at the post-graduation reception, I jumped on a bus, sat on it for 17 hours, and arrived in the one and only Bay Area.
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
On couchsurfing
I've had a question or two about my main mode of accommodation during this trip, which is brought to me via the inspirational website couchsurfing.com. As this is quite an interesting phenomenon in itself, a few words here might be appropriate.
Couchsurfing was invented in 2003 by a chap called Casey Fenton, who, like every traveller, dreamed of the basic simplicity of free accommodation. According to him, he was going to Iceland, of all places, and decided to spam email the 1500 students of of the University of Iceland, eventually receiving over 50 offers of sofas to sleep on. The alternative theory is that he just copied and improved the already existing hospitalityclub.com.
The premise is that the internet can be used to harness the inherent hospitable instincts of the majority of people world wide. Travellers create an account, are encouraged to list as much information as possible (including whether they are able to host people or not), and are supposed to "verify" themselves by paying a small sum of money and entering the password that is sent to them on the post card mailed to the credit card's address.
Members have total control who they ask to stay with and who they allow to stay with them. Security is ensured through references and the "vouching" system, which basically means that people who have already been vouched for three times can then vouch for others to show how much they trust them. References are left by people once they have surfed with/hosted each other, as a brief description of their experience for other travellers to read.
The site now claims over 1 million members. My experience of couchsurfing started in March when I got my first taste of free shelter with hosts in Berlin and Copenhagen. These two, combined with the two I stayed with in Seattle, have convinced me that the arrangement is fantastic.
Hosts are by nature friendly and welcoming (if they weren't they wouldn't put themselves down for hosting), and generally interesting to talk to, with lots of fun traveling experiences of themselves. If they have time then they can show you round the city and take you to awesome places that only the locals know about and don't get mentioned in the guide books. Goodness knows how much I saved on hostel expenses in super-expensive Copenhagen!
Surfers may fall prey to any number of inconveniences: couches can be small and uncomfortable, hosts may have irritating pets, the living room in which one sleeps may not be a paragon of privacy, or the house might be miles away on the outskirts of the city. But it's not as if the alternative options at hostels are free of such problems, and it makes the traveling experience more authentic. Folks who use couchsurfing do so in order to have such experiences and share them with new and interesting people from the local culture.
Couchsurfers also organise local meet-ups, especially in large cities, where lone travellers can go have a fun night with interesting people if they are otherwise unengaged. In Berlin I went to a language sharing session and had the slightly surreal experience of speaking Spanish all night with a big group of people in the middle of Germany.
Participants in couchsurfing are generally attracted by the idealistic nature of the social experiment - that people are generally nice enough to share what they have with each other through the common bond of humanity. And the nice thing is, it seems to be working.
Couchsurfing was invented in 2003 by a chap called Casey Fenton, who, like every traveller, dreamed of the basic simplicity of free accommodation. According to him, he was going to Iceland, of all places, and decided to spam email the 1500 students of of the University of Iceland, eventually receiving over 50 offers of sofas to sleep on. The alternative theory is that he just copied and improved the already existing hospitalityclub.com.
The premise is that the internet can be used to harness the inherent hospitable instincts of the majority of people world wide. Travellers create an account, are encouraged to list as much information as possible (including whether they are able to host people or not), and are supposed to "verify" themselves by paying a small sum of money and entering the password that is sent to them on the post card mailed to the credit card's address.
Members have total control who they ask to stay with and who they allow to stay with them. Security is ensured through references and the "vouching" system, which basically means that people who have already been vouched for three times can then vouch for others to show how much they trust them. References are left by people once they have surfed with/hosted each other, as a brief description of their experience for other travellers to read.
The site now claims over 1 million members. My experience of couchsurfing started in March when I got my first taste of free shelter with hosts in Berlin and Copenhagen. These two, combined with the two I stayed with in Seattle, have convinced me that the arrangement is fantastic.
Hosts are by nature friendly and welcoming (if they weren't they wouldn't put themselves down for hosting), and generally interesting to talk to, with lots of fun traveling experiences of themselves. If they have time then they can show you round the city and take you to awesome places that only the locals know about and don't get mentioned in the guide books. Goodness knows how much I saved on hostel expenses in super-expensive Copenhagen!
Surfers may fall prey to any number of inconveniences: couches can be small and uncomfortable, hosts may have irritating pets, the living room in which one sleeps may not be a paragon of privacy, or the house might be miles away on the outskirts of the city. But it's not as if the alternative options at hostels are free of such problems, and it makes the traveling experience more authentic. Folks who use couchsurfing do so in order to have such experiences and share them with new and interesting people from the local culture.
Couchsurfers also organise local meet-ups, especially in large cities, where lone travellers can go have a fun night with interesting people if they are otherwise unengaged. In Berlin I went to a language sharing session and had the slightly surreal experience of speaking Spanish all night with a big group of people in the middle of Germany.
Participants in couchsurfing are generally attracted by the idealistic nature of the social experiment - that people are generally nice enough to share what they have with each other through the common bond of humanity. And the nice thing is, it seems to be working.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
What do Bill Gates, Starbucks and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
Seattle was everything I hoped it would be and more. The first morning my lovely hostess Vanessa took me and some of her friends to a special vegan restaurant down in an odd little suburb in the south of the city. There was a reassuring light British drizzle, and I was delighted to hear grunge music playing in the background, just like it's supposed to in Seattle. After, we popped into a cool little record and comic book store, owned by a grizzled rocker who claimed to have known Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love before they knew each other.
Pausing amidst the giant skyscrapers and upmarket cafes of downtown, we witnessed a typical marijuana legalisation rally, and more importantly I found a See's Candy shop, one of the finest institutions of the West Coast, and which I always make sure to patronise when I get the chance.
Onwards to the beautiful and enormous university campus, filled with glowing pink cherry blossoms and lovely brick buildings. We had a late lunch in a classic Seattle pho restaurant - something I'd never done before. Pho, for those of you who like me have never heard of it, is pronounced fuh, and is a rather tasty Vietnamese noodle soup dish which apparently forms a significant chunk of the student diet due to how cheap it is. I also sampled chai tea in one of the ridiculous number of laptop-filled coffee shops, and we rounded the day at the movies in true American fashion (although in not very American fashion we didn't have to pay because Vanessa knew the cinema owner).
The next day there were yet more fun foods to be sampled in crepe restaurants and ice cream parlours, as well as a interesting little artisan's outlet down near where Kurt Cobain shot himself. I spent a large chunk of Monday on campus again gathering the final bits of research for my wonderful article on the University of Washington, with help from my second kind hosts, Logan and Eliza, but also had time to visit the iconic Pike Place market, which was simultaneously authentic and a bit touristy. Logan and Eliza made some yummy home-made pho in the evening, to follow the spectacular lasagna from the night before. Mmmm. Food in Seattle is good. Next stop Portland Oregon.
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Arrival
Every airport experience is slightly different. At Heathrow there are miles of pointless corridors (which I'm sure go in circles), in Mexico there are guards who have to keep people's luggage from being stolen before they can even take it off the conveyor. In Russia there's endless officialdom. In Geneva I once passed through a passport check in which the checker was actually reading a book and giving no more than a bored nod at the passports as they were presented.
America regularly wins the prize for most surreal airport experiences. One time I arrived at customs in San Francisco to find the terrifying faces of Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice grinning down at me. There's normally a large draped flag or two, and signs explaining why border control is such an important and prestigious activity. The airport at Charlotte, North Carolina, at which I arrived yesterday, was the first airport where I'd ever seen the featureless and carefully neutral waiting-room seats replaced by lovely white rocking chairs.
I didn't use them for too long however, since I was soon to board another plane that would take me to the opposite corner of the country. The folks on the flight to Seattle clearly came from a different demographic; there was a greater abundance of headphones, hoodies and general hipness for a start, as well as lots of knowledgeable-looking business men and at least one bloke in a full length Matrix leather jacket. A guy in the seat in front of me had a mask over his nose and mouth. Either he had just done an important operation and forgotten to take it off, or he was really paranoid about swine flu. I made sure to cough and sneeze a lot anyway.
It's a great experience arriving in an American city, and Seattle is no exception. From the two bus trips it took to get to my first host's house I saw all the classic give-aways of US urbanity: the sky scrapers, the water fountains (by which I mean the kind you drink from, not the kind you look at - why do these brilliant things not exist in England?), the random people in a car that wished me happy Friday, the city-centre streets that are so wide that they would be a three lane motorway in England, the Starbucks on every corner.
I only had ten dollars on me, but the bus ticket was $1.75 and they didn't have change ("that's not how it works"). Fortunately, from the cross section I found on the bus, Seattlers are the nicest people on the planet. Someone gave me a spare ticket they had, and then someone else gave me another bus pass valid for my second journey. Two people were helping me work out where to get off. Arriving at last, I had a brief exchange with my (again) outrageously friendly host from couchsurfing.com (so much outwardness and kindness is very unsettling for a Brit like myself, born and bred on introversion) before collapsing onto a sofa and, what with having got about three hours' real sleep in the last 48, falling swiftly into unconsciousness.
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