Have You Met Ted?

It’s hard to adequately express how truly incredible last night was.

One goal to Amsterdam was to play a rousing game of “Have You Met Ashlee,” my variation of “Have You Met Ted” from How I Met Your Mother, where one friend introduces the subsequent, unsuspecting friend to an equally-unsuspecting stranger and walks away.  I succeeded (albeit at the expense of the top of my beer) on Super Bowl Sunday as well as the previous Friday with my neighbor, Maarten (the name of the game having been altered accordingly).  However, last night I played wingman to no one but myself, alone in a room of travelers doing the same.

Couchsurfers is an international organization founded to help travelers meet people abroad in hopes of scoring a few free nights on a host couch, kinda like the “Tale of the Sex-less Innkeeper” (I really miss How I Met Your Mother), or to just generally meet people even if no couch can be provided.  I fall in the latter group.

Thanks to Juli, my fellow IF scholar, I was able to make it to my first Couchsurfer weekly meeting last night.  The evening began with a pre-meet-up around 8 PM (20:00 here, I can’t get used to military time) with dinner at Talia, a cozy Italian (or rather, ‘Talian as it were) bistro providing reduced prices on probably the best slice of pizza I have ever purchased.  It certainly gave the North End a run anyway.  Here I shyly entered the lounge to the welcome of a Lisa and Jasper, a charming, involved, and extremely well-traveled couple from Utrecht who chatted with me for an hour and a half about their time with the program and my travels from Boston, sprinkling the conversation with Sarah Palin and Monty Python jokes; my kind of people.

From Talia, we met up with the main meeting at a pub next door.  We were among the first to arrive, or so I assume, given that we watched many travelers after us enter the pub “like giant questionmarks” curious to differentiate between those there for the meet up and those who had simply stumbled upon a good bar.  Within the hour, however, the questionmarks had faded as the bar became overrun with travelers and locals alike associated with the program, all others moving to somewhere more usual.

This event was anything but usual.  First we met a Polish girl interning at a local university bio department attempting to prove life on Mars; certainly a conversation starter.  Next, a newly-migrated couple from Milan and soon our table had extended along an entire wall of the bar, and the bar itself quickly became a melting-pot boiling over; a Tower of Babel antithesis. 

*Pause* Today’s “pretentious phrase of the day”: Tower of Babel antithesis.

*Un-pause*  I had some of the most exciting and genuine conversations of my life in this time, language barrier rendered non-existent (fortunately for me, that barrier was destroyed with English.  I’m trying not to think that way, but given my best, failed, bi-lingual efforts, what other option do I have?).  One of my best conversations was 45 minutes with a Russian woman who admittedly spoke minimal English.

Two elements were the most telling.  One, I got there at 8 and left at 2.  Six hours more than well spent. Two, by the end of the night people around the bar who had come in separately were laughing and hitting each other as if they had grown up together and planned to meet tonight per usual.  At the end, not only had I had a great time, with great people, at a great price, I also felt that I had accomplished something.  The organization helps put the “Inter[cultural]” in “InterFuture.”