Day 4: Hello Helsingborg

Through a series of exceptional coincidences, instead of going from Malmo to Jonkoping yesterday, we ended up instead at a very typically Swedish house in Helsingborg, drinking specialty beers, eating cheese, and talking about life with 5 Swedish window-cleaning-company workers and 5 German girls from Frankfurt.

Oscar, a regional manager for a window-cleaning company, is the reason we ended up there. He has a very easy-going personality and has recently gotten actively involved n the couchsurfing community. He has a fantastic apartment and for his first hosting experience in Sweden, happened to rescue 3 German girls and the two of us at the Helsingborg train station, piling into his VW Touareg for the quick drive to his uncle’s house – where we met two more German girls who were staying there as well.

Marcus, his uncle, who owns the company, is even more laid-back than Oscar, considering he had about a 20 minute warning that he would be hosting a whole bunch of people for the night. Not to mention that we crashed a beer-tasting and poker guys’ night – although nobody seemed to mind too much.

Marcus left university after the 1^st year of his PhD program in Chemistry to become an entrepreneur. He casually talks about the practicalities and moral challenges of octopus hunting and tells us in passing about recently being on a reality TV show.  He has an incredible life and shares it without a trace of hesitation. He believes that education is the most important thing in life; he says he will probably soon go back to school to finish his PhD.

“Education trains you to think critically… and life – life is about thinking critically. That’s how we separate humans from other humans – that’s how we go about sorting out right from wrong.”

Bjorn, an employee of Oscar’s, who looks like a typical Swedish fisherman, tells me about the regional differences between the north and the south of Sweden, as well as the differences between Stockholm and the rest of Sweden. He explains that people in the north are “strange – they are very quiet because they don’t see as many people as we do down here”. Not that the south is normal – “we’re seen as farmers by the rest of Sweden, and in Stockholm nobody understands us because our accents are so different”. Of course, he thinks that the south is the best part of Sweden, partially because it’s closer to the rest of Europe – it’s so easy to travel to a different country. People in Stockholm, according to Bjorn, are “pretentious without a reason to be. They’re stuck all the way up there thinking they’re so great, while we’re down here actually interacting with other people and having a good time.”

Elina from Frankfurt is one of the other couchsurfers with us. She tells us about how utterly amazed she is by the idea that so many hosts that she has encountered have incredible apartments, and lives, and just want to share all of it – for free – with other people. “How come they want to share everything? They could have it all for themselves, but they don’t want to – they just want to share it.”

She tells us about a host in Den Haag who had a huge house with ten bikes in the back yard (for couchsurfers to pick out one that suited them), and a constant stream of couchsurfers going through his house. His kids – 16 and 18 – spend half of their time with him, and more often than not there are couchsurfers around. Elina mentioned that it must be difficult for them, but also incredibly beneficial – to grow up seeing so many different cultures passing through their house.

The night – and breakfast the next morning – passes in a lazy, relaxed atmosphere that gives you the feeling that time has stopped – that nothing matters in the world at the moment except good company, some good food, and a roof over your head. This is the real essence of couchsurfing, and we’ve managed to land ourselves in it without even knowing we were looking for it. How lucky is that?