I already talked about Couchsurfing besides surfing couches here.

But hey, there’s more!

For example, with lots of expats and linguistically highly motivated people around, the Vienna Language Exchange is a pretty active bunch of people. The most active sub-group is the German Conversation Group. They meet every week to improve their levels of speaking German, and everybody is welcome: beginners, intermediates, experts and (of course!) native speakers.

Nearly the same applies to the French Conversation Meeting. It only started (again) two weeks ago, and the group is pretty small still, but we are happy about everybody joining the meetings. To me, it is big fun to see how fast speaking a language improves your speaking skills. Last week, I had a really tough time speaking about me leaving work and starting to study, and this week, talking about Geocaching, it was way easier already.

If you need further information, have a look at the Vienna CS Group once in a while. Events will be announced there some days in advance.

As Bettina had to leave the flat at 8.30 in the morning, Georg and I were sent out into the city, too. We had known before, so I posted on the Salzburg group if anybody wanted to join us for breakfast. No one came, so it was only the two of us. Before breakfast, we even found time to do some really necessary shopping: a belt for him, a new pair of short trousers for me.

At 10, we met with a group of couchsurfers for the announced city hike. It took us ages (1.5 hrs) to do a walk that could easily be done within half an hour. A pity, but next time we’ll just do the sight seeing on our own 🙂

After the city walk, we made for the train station. We were meeting there to leave for Hallein/Bad Dürrnstein to go tobogganing on Salzburg’s longest summer toboggan. I’m not sure if the label “toboggan” is right, because you’re going down in a toboggan, but on rails … well, never mind. It is a 30-45 minutes drive by car to go there, and we had more than enough rides to share. Georg and I went with Jacquie, who lives in Bavaria, and her couchsurfer Akis from Greece.

Some people decided to go up by foot – according to the signs and information panel, this should be a 2 hrs walk, but they made it in little more than 1. The bigger part of the group went up in the chair lift. It took us some time to get the tickets, because we wanted to get the group discount, but had to collect the money and pay in one go in order to do so. The ride up was fun: we could watch some people riding down already, and at one point we spotted the other group, hiking their way up.

After arriving on top, we made for the mountain’s peak, which is on the other side of the austrian-german border. This border-crossing caused some laughter and funny pictures; more than the peak itself, which did not even provide a nice sight of the surrounding, as there was trees all around.

After the hikers’ group arrived at the restaurant at the top station, we enjoyed a good meal and then made for the descent. At first I had not been sure if I really wanted to do that, but sometimes, one must do something in spite of oneself. And I’m happy I did, because it was great fun!

After me (and the two following on my heels), there was a huge gap, caused by Jacqui who had already announced that, being a scaredy-pants, she would be descenting really slowly. After her, Akis came down, trying to film his ride with his camcorder. Everybody who was down already cheered at everybody coming down, even if they were no couchsurfers – it was great 🙂

Unfortunately, Akis’ camcorder did not record the whole ride. In fact, it did not record any of it. After some minutes of considering, he shyly asked, if it would be a trouble to anyone if he would do the whole thing again. It wasn’t – and Georg even joined him for a second ride.

In the evening, we were meeting at Augustiner Bräu; as Bettina was visiting her parents, we could not get into the flat, so we went there directly with Jacqui and Akis (who was very happy having his second ride recorded 100%).  The day had been very exhausting, so we were the first ones to leave again, after only 2 beers and some Schweinsbraten.

So in the end we did not have to go to Salzburg without a couch fixed. As said before, I received a message asking if I still had need of a place to stay, and if I would stay with Bettina. I did like to, and as she even had enough room to host the two of us, we were very relaxed on our way to Salzburg.

Arriving there, we got in contact with Bettina, to drop off our stuff before heading to the first event: dinner at Paul Stubm. We were a bit late for the dinner itself, but just in time for a beer (or three) after. As always, we met some already familiar faces there, some from last year’s SOS, some from this year’s Vienna Calling. And, of course, there were some new people around, like Iris from Bavaria and her boyfriend Manuel from Hamburg, with whom we had a great time and some really funny talks, e.g. “How can I calculate how often a group of >n< people will have to clink their glasses until everybody clinked everybody’s glass once?”. All of us had learned that once, but forgotten, so we still had parts of the formula in our heads and “only” had to recover it.

This happened in the last pub we went to, and only at 1 in the morning. Shortly after, Bettina, Georg and I decided to go home and catch some sleep in order to survive the next day’s programme: furniture shopping for Bettina, and sight seeing and tobogganing for Georg and me.

Vienna Calling did not only mean having a good time to many Couchsurfers all over Austria. It also inspired them to creating and organising their own, usually slightly smaller, international Couchsurfing meetings.

One of them is SOS (Sounds of Salzburg). First edition took place last year in September. Georg and I did not have much time to spend there, because we already had accepted an invitation for a housewarming party in Innsbruck. Still, we spend one evening with the group, went for dinner and afterwards for some drinks with them. We did not couchsurf, but stayed at a friend’s place in the surroundings of the city.

SOS will happen again this weekend, so September 2nd – 4th. Our plan, as we did not succeed in finding a host by writing requests, was to just go there and wear a sign saying “I need a couch”. And then, all of a sudden, I received a message of a girl from Salzburg saying she’d like to host people during the weekend, and if I would like to stay at her place. She already asked another couchsurfer if she still needed a couch, so together with Georg we will be 4 people, and it might be a bit cosy, but who cares! It’s a CS event – sleeping is overestimated!