Arriving in Sydney

Mainz is not the most popular destination for travellers or to be put more accurately: Despite being a hidden tourist gem embedded in magnificent mountain and river Rhine scenery, Mainz is unknown among international travellers. Most travellers have no idea that Mainz is located just as far from Frankfurt International Airport as from Frankfurt city. This results in Frankfurt being swamped with requests and Mainz just growing with new members related to the very few requests

I signed up for Couchsurfing late October 2007 before I left Germany for Australia n late December. My first experience after arriving in Sydney was not the most positive one because of a greedy landlady. I was house hunting in Sydney at the busiest peak season time which I found very stressful. This was a time where searching for couches may become extremely difficult. Adam Stone, the Sydney ambassador at that time was so friendly and offered me to store my bags. He was one of my CS(Couchsurfing)first contacts in Sydney and I felt that it was a warm and welcoming group.

I was a total newbie in CS(Couchsurfing) matters, had absolutely no idea how to distinguish a copy paste from a personal one. I even didn't realise that this was common practice and not reading profiles was a daily routine. Some copy pasted emails were really nicely written and touching my heart, so it just took me some time to understand this special CS culture.

My first event that I organised for CS Sydney was my birthday party starting from New Year's Eve 2007. My birthday was exactly on New Year's Day, so the first guests arrived on NYE at 2 pm. I made great friends but added most of them on Facebook. Nearly everyone was pleasant and I had only 3 girls who showed me so little respect and broke my things. They were so disrespectful that I threw them out on the spot and they were still thick-skinned enough to stay until the Fireworks. My location just in front of the Sydney Harbour was another reason why I received so many couch requests until I was unable to distinguish the copy paste and freeloaders from the prospective good guests.

The Sydneysiders were experienced in Couchsurfing and taught me many tricks. I had learnt how to put a keyword on my profile to find out whether they had read my profile or not. I was still that naive that I thought people would respect this and start to either avoid or write personalised requests. The up to 50 copy paste requests per day continued to spam my inbox and I just realised by then that some of them looked for cities only and didn't bother to read profiles. The other hosts in Sydney kept teaching me and helped me how to handle these types of requests.

I started to become disillusioned and the Sydneysiders gave me the advice to shut down my couch for some time to keep myself sane and maintain my positive attitude towards CS(Couchsurfing). At the same time I experienced a cockroach invasion and I needed to negotiate extermination with my landlord. A good excuse not to host for the time being!!! However, I started to organise and attend many meetings, made some friends and enjoyed my life with CS in Sydney. CS offers multiple opportunities where I think that this is rather an offline community where online communication takes place to support our meetings, travelling, hosting and surfing activities.
So far I decided to stay on Couchsurfing and enjoy the social features of CS rather than hospitality exchange.