The reason I got to thinking about it is because today I was sort of interviewed for a couchsurfing related writing assignment by Ellie, a young journalism student. One of Ellie's questions was about how we started couchsurfing.

If you look at our profile you'll notice we've been members since 2008. However, our first CS experience was in August 2009. You see, we lived in Greece for maaaany many years
and joined couchsurfing just as we were making the decision to pack up and come back home. Initially, we thought that we can handle hosting people even with all the craziness going on in our lives during the endless ordeal of leaving a country you've spent a third of your life in. And we also thought, how bad can it get? We'll get, what, one surf request a month?

Oh yeah. About 10 hours after our profile went live, we got a request from someone passing through Thessaloniki. Arriving late at night on a workday. And right in the middle of us packing stuff we needed to send back home. We politely said no. And then we got another one. And another one. And by the time we wrote that third "sorry", we realized that we'll be getting many requests as it was the summer and Greece is wildly popular with travelers that time of the year. We set our status to "maybe", but that only helped a little as we still got a lot of requests. So we decided - our status will be set to "no" (as in, we cannot host right now) until we figure out this whole moving thing.

Months passed, we successfully moved (I'm making it sound like we were moving back from Australia or something but you try picking up your whole 'grown up' life by the roots and moving it accross a border) and life eventually went back to normal. As our hosting status was set to "no' we didn't really get any email notifications from CS and (to be
honest) we forgot about it. Then one day, one crazy soul decided to take a chance and send us a surfing request for Thessaloniki. Oops. We had not updated our profile (we had not even opened it) in almost a year!

I spent some time working on our profile (I'll soon write a post on why and how you should do it). We had no references, no friends, our profile was actually quite sad and just sitting there. But I think we did a decent job with it and in a matter of days, we got our first Skopje-related surfing request. Miriam and Tamar from Jerusalem were coming into Macedonia to spend a 2 week vacation and needed a place to stay for their first 2 days in Skopje. 2 weeks in Macedonia? For a vacation? I know, we were baffled too.

The first time you are seriously (and I mean seriously, not just in the "oh that would be fun to do someday" way) thinking about opening your home to a couchsurfer, it really is a bit like your first time. You really have no idea what to expect: what will your guests be like, will you "click", should you do stuff together or let them do stuff on their own, how about food..? Way too many questions. Especially when the people who'll be staying with you are also new to CSing and have no previous references, as was the case with Miriam and Tamar.

But we bit the bullet. I think what made us decide that they will be our 'first' was the fact that  they were coming all the way from Isreael to spend their vacation here and were not simply passing through Macedonia on the way to somewhere else (which is what our guests do 9 out of 10 times)..

In retrospect, we (or rather, I) really did overstress about it (don't I always). I was worried about all kinds of things: will we recognize each other at the bus station (try losing travelers with huge backpacks), what will they think of Skopje, will we get along, should we eat at home or go out...argh..too many questions. And they they simply arrived and it happened. I'm not giving you all the details, losing a virginity is a somewhat private thing after all:) It's enough to say that the 2 days we spent with Miriam and Tamar made CS converts out of us. We realized that there are no rules and there's no right or wrong way of hosting people - it's all up to you and what you're comfortable with as well as you keep the channels of communication between you and your guests open at all times. Us, we decided that we like to be quite involved in our guests' stay in the city, that we can either cook at home or eat
out and that all the weirdness that comes from having someone you don't know stay in your home can be overcome by simple things - humor and millions and millions of questions about everything... < Miriam still wonders how I remember that they celebrate Hannukah:)

If you are reading this and are considering joining couchsurfing (or have joined but haven't hosted or surfed yet), here's my first and most important piece of advice to you: just do it and figure out your own rules as you go along. The only thing you need to be sure of before you start this journey is that you are ready to open your home and let the world come in.

Have you started couchsurfing? What was the thing you worried most about before you first experienced it? Or if you're still thinking about it, what is your biggest concern? Share it in the comments.