CouchSurfing: Pros & Cons

Okay. This site is amazing! If you haven't heard of it, or the idea of it, it's basically a great way of networking with travellers. If you're travelling and need a place to sleep you can find someone in the area with a spare couch or bed that's willing to let you stay for a couple of nights for free :) Hold on. Sounds creepy right? Not really. It's easy to figure out if you can trust a person or not by the feedback given by previous travellers, looking through how detailed their profile is, and there's always something called trusting your gut feeling.

Aside from using it as a way to save money on accommodation, it's an easy way of seeing if like-minded people are up for the things you want to do.

For example, I've been super down this past week because I really need to get my adventure started but have yet to find any motivation to do anything :( I was looking through the message boards for Australia and found someone in Sydney looking for a travelling buddy! So I messaged her because we both want to go to Melbourne and other places in Australia, and we met up to go to Manly Beach yesterday with another girl that she met through CouchSurfing. We're going to Melbourne next week! And then we'll find a way to Adelaide, Uluru, and Alice Springs. I FINALLY HAVE PLANS!! WOOHOOO :)

Unfortunately, some people misuse the site as a way to hook up with people, like this 26 year old guy from Sydney who messaged me. At first it seemed all friendly he was just asking how I liked it and how long I was planning to stay. I asked him where he'd recommend to hang out and places to avoid and he immediately says, "I know some bars around my neck of the woods," which was not really what I meant to imply. I complained about the price of alcohol here and he says:

So the first thing I hear when I read this message is Ms. Jack's voice telling me a few hours before I left to the airport, "Don't be too trusting. Trust your intuition." That and the whole okay this is creepy alarm starts ringing, especially after having a look at his profile to see that he's 26, and that his preference for CouchSurfers was specifically female, and that the only two people that gave feedback were girls talking about him showing them good beer or something like that. So I stopped replying. I told Evelyne and Jen (the two girls I met) the story and they had stories of their own. I wait for the day women don't have to worry about what men are up to. HA.

But seriously... the only cons I've found so far are creepy guys, which most often only women have to deal with. The fact that I met two awesome travelling buddies has said a lot :)

I'll tell you more about the girls once I get to know them!