We arrived in Madrid and made our way to the Plaza de Espana to meet Jeremy, our first couch surfing host. For those of you who don’t know, couch surfers are an internet community of people who offer their homes to travelers for free, and since you typically end up sleeping on their couch, they call it couch surfing. Joey and I have hosted a handful of travelers over the last year, and since none of them were serial killers or that weird at all, we decided that we would try it as travelers. At the very least we would save some money and meet some interesting people.
And we met Jeremy. Jeremy is a French ex-pat who lives in Madrid, working as a language tutor. As you will see from the pictures, Jeremy is, in my opinion, very French looking. According to his profile, he considers himself an expert in English, but he is an earnest amateur at best. During one conversation it took me ten minutes to understand that in France three separate channels show Desperate Housewives. Really?
Hardly worth the effort. I’m not criticizing him—Jeremy honestly loves language, he says he knows 8, and you can tell he hosts couch surfers, particularly English speakers, so that he can practice. I admire this for two reasons. One, if my French were at the level of his English, I would never dream of hosting a French speaker, so he is certainly brave. Two, though we struggled to understand each other, he genuinely wanted to communicate with us and he strove to make that happen. During conversations he would look up words and then ask us how to use certain phrases or verbs.
In all of that I didn’t ask him how to say one thing in French, and I realized we native English speakers aren’t very generous with other languages. For us other languages are more like novelties because we understand that English is the language of culture and commerce, and that in terms of cost benefit analysis, the effort necessary to really learn another language isn’t worth it since English is king. Traveling helps us see how the rest of the world perceives our language and our culture and how we perceive ourselves, and I love this because I don’t know if I would ever think about this if it weren’t for encountering people like Jeremy. I realized that Europeans are like distant cousins to us Americans, so even though we have relatives in common, our families are different, and it’s always interesting to see how other families raise their children, so to speak.
But Jeremy was only with us in Madrid for one night because he was going to a nude beach for a couple of days (true story). We thought this meant that we were getting kicked out after one night, but then something incredible happened—he gave us the keys to his apartment—and he told us we are welcome to come and go as we please. Crazy, really. But then I looked around and realized he had no fear of us taking anything. There was nothing to take, unless we wanted a PC laptop with a French keyboard. We didn’t.
Now to that first night. His apartment had three bedrooms, but one of them was inaccessible for reasons that remain inexplicable, and because Jeremy’s roommate had the other room, this meant that all four of us would be sleeping in Jeremy’s room—his tiny, tiny room with two mattresses and a fold out couch. It was kind of like if you combined a sleep over with a refugee camp in Africa, except hotter. Way hotter. Jeremy had no AC because Europeans love to sweat and love to smell like sweat. I’m serious—there was nary a fan, which blows my mind because it’s not like ceiling or floor fans are a big secret. That first night in Madrid may be the worst night of sleep I have ever had, if you can call having your eyes closed for eight hours pretending to sleep while you roll around in your own sweat sleep. Hey, at least it was free.