sofasurfers

“How do you fancy some karaoke?” Like – do you even need to ask?!
After dniner, we go to meet my hosts’ school-teacher friends – a
mixture of UK, US, Canadian and Chinese twentysomethings – at KTV, a
posh Chinese karaoke chain. The VIP suite has been hired, bottles of
Absolut vodka have been bought, and pride has been pocketed: Bridge
over Troubled Water, Don’t Cry for me, Argentina, Big Girls are
Beautiful and more are warbled, shouted, rapped, wailed, while vodka
is slurped, slammed and spilled. At one moment, I hear a giant
amplified belch – I turn aghast to the holder of the microphone: it is
Beth. “Oh, that’s Beth for you,” says Gareth, the other half of my
hosts…
But at about 2am, my long day, my rubbish train sleep (I’d landed in
Xi’an at 8 this morning) AND news that we’re booked in to sing till
6am begin to sully my spirit. Argh – how to escape? Fortunately (or as
fortunately as one can hope for), Beth has gone AWOL (”Oh that’s Beth
for you”) - but apparently, she can’t be far away, and she’s probably
homewardbound. Gareth puts in a call, and I soon find her out in the
street thick in fisticuffs with some local Chinese, drinking a beer
for the road and chowing on a sausage sandwich. Then we even have a
bit of a moment, as I say I need to collect my rucksacks from the
youth hostel… “You can collect them tomorrow”… I need them – they
have all my valuables… “It’s too far.” It’s like 20m up the road, at
the Bell Tower, the very centre of town. “I don’t know where that is.”
Ok, we are going there – it’s no detour. I will pay for the taxi. “Oh
sorry, I am being drunk and bullish.”
We jump in a taxi. But first she demands a MacDonalds. But you’ve just
had a sausage sandwich plus dinner. Fortunately it is shut, and I get
to regroup with my possessions. 20 minutes later, we arrive home –
another greying communist block – to be greeted by a fractious
Chihuahua cross with cupboard syndrome (ie, it’s been alone and inside
all day and a new guest is all too exciting for her, as she jumps,
barks, runs in circles in seeming perpetuity). This is all too
exciting for me, as I find myself overtired and on the precipice of
rattiness. I’ve booked into go and see the Terracotta Army the next
day, so I turn in – into my own room with a double bed! Beth takes to
the sofa and a particularly loud DVD performance of The Wedding
Crashers, and prompty passes out. I then fret around my bedroom about
whether it’s really not guestly to march out into the living room and
turn the TV off. What if she just looks like she’s asleep, but is
actually thoroughly enjoying the movie?! I peek through the crack in
my bedroom door, and it’s impossible to see. I wander out into the
living room with the pretext of tidying my boots (!)… and I turn off
the TV – it is neither noticed nor remembered. The nomadic life of a
couchsurfer is unavoidably chaotic – dates change, hosts change,
you’re constantly on the go, without much control as to when and
where; sleep and peace are rare luxuries. A chaotic host is chaos too
much.

Terracotta Army in Xi

So at the designated time, I trot alo g to KFC, the meeting point for
the Xi’an couchsurfing group monthly get-together (some serendipity
that it lands on the day I land, sans host). This is where a) I hope
to connect with my replacement hosts, and where b) I hope to parachute
into a readymade social gathering with instant friends. It’s only when
I arrive at KFC-on-a-China-scale (ie a vast, 600-cover eaterie) that I
start feeling a bit tragic/shy/lost. I see one whitey with two young
Chinese people, but I can’t bring myself to assume that the one
mixed-race group are the couchsurfers. I hide behind some fauxliage in
an attempt to bore myself into action. Soon after, I hear the words in
my ear, “Are you here for the couchsurfing meeting?” (’Meeting’ – why
so businesslike?). Hello Romeo (real name, apparently) – Romeo is a
Californian airline pilot who had actually called me earlier in the
day to respond to my last-minute couch request (though by that time it
was all sorted). “Do you know if this is the right KFC?” he adds.
Pointing out that there is in fact another (though smaller) KFC
directly opposite, I find myself potentially in yet another ‘casual’
directions drama (when due to meet my Beijing hosts at Peking
University’s West Gate, I learnt that there were in fact two West
Gates… and then there was of course the “which Ulan Bator public
library” fiasco). This, I realise, is a Chinese hazard – so big,
everything is in duplicates: London is just so village by comparison.
Actually, no such drama ensued – the other group I’d spied were in
fact couchsurfers, and we gravitated together in one seemingly normal
and thoroughly unstrange collection of strangers: not one person had
met before, yet there was so much to share. Eventuallythe female half
of my hosts arrived –Beth, a 26-year-old Canadian English teacher –
and we set off to our meal (not in KFC).