Staying with strangers

Couchsurfing. I told you I´d do it and you all looked at me in horror. I don´t think anyone could get their heads round how I could walk into the house of a complete stranger and set myself up for the night on their couch. Even if I did have Andy there to ¨protect me¨. But we´ve done it, and I can´t imagine how people make their way round the big cities of the world without it now.
So, it´s true that I didn´t exactly choose my first couchsurfing ¨host¨ as carefully as I should. ¨Has couch¨ was all I needed and I fired an email to a guy named Bebeto asking if we could stay and if he could show us round his city. Two days later, we turned up on his doorstep in the nicest area of Sao Paulo, backpacks on and ready to stay the night. It turned out he hated football, hated sitting drinking in pubs and had no interest in films. It looked like a recipe for disaster. But an hour later we were sitting down to a traditional Brazilian lunch with him and his girlfriend, the same afternoon we were getting a guided tour of the whole city and in the evening we were drinking beers in one of the newest bars in Sao Paulo with around 10 other couchsurfers. And by the time the weekend ended, we´d met a dozen of his friends, eaten sushi in Japan Town, gone clubbing in Vila Madalena, in which every street was decorated with fairy lights, and watched Sao Paulo in a football match in their home stadium with a Paulista and a Dutch guy. And we´d made a whole host of new friends. I think if we´d not met Bebeto and his lovely girlfriend, Raquel, we´d still be sitting in our hostel in some quiet suburb, playing cards and wondering whether it was safe to get on the tube. Believe me, in a city of 20 million people, with 60,000 tower blocks, it´s pretty hard to know where to go. But thanks to Bebeto, we ended up loving the city and the people in it. As a tourist in Rio, you feel like a target for everyone _ muggers, beggars, taxi drivers, restauranteurs... _ but in Sao Paulo we never once felt threatened.
If you´d asked me two years ago what I thought of making friends over the internet, I too would have looked at you in horror. In fact, that´s exactly what I did to Andy when he started playing video games with a bunch of people he´d met online. But now I´d thoroughly recommend it and hope that if I ever do find a house and a couch, it will be ¨surfed¨ many times on my return to England.