Living Room Couches and Peace - Europe

Living Room Couches and Peace

Europe



"We just got off the night train," I stammer into the phone at eight in the morning, Berlin time, and our first Servas stop. "We thought we'd..."

"Don't bother leaving your bags at the station. You can leave them here!" Katharina Eckhart sings into the phone.

The minute we walk in, she offeres us a hot shower, the keys to her house, breakfast, a map of Berlin and a German-English dictionary, more or less in that order. Her tiny apartment is in an uproar, the kitchen gutted for renovations, everything in piles all over the floor. But in three phone calls, we have a free place to sleep for the next two nights, an invitation to one Servas gathering and another for an evening of Brazilian percussion music in a restored East German brewery.

We had an email that Katharina was expecting our call. Still, it's weird to contact strangers and and ask if you can spend two nights on their living room couch.

That is what Servas travelers do. You join Servas and they send you books, zeroxed pamphlets, sometimes just one typed sheet of the people willing to put you up for two nights - gratis, free, no dinaros - in whatever foreign country you're visiting.

Why would total strangers do such a thing? They - and presumably you, since you've been through the Servas interview process - believe in world peace. If people are talking, goes the rationale, they aren't killing one another. Hence, open doors, open dialogue and intercultural understanding.

Sounds too good to be true. Sometimes it is. People with good intentions are too busy. Their lives are too crazy to put you up. People in popular destinations like Prague can be overwhelmed, with travelers calling every other day for accommodations. Still, after having spent a total of eleven nights with Servas in Germany, Poland and Prague last summer, we'd give the program a Low-Cost Travel A+.

Here's the process. Start at www.servas.org or www.USServas.org to read up on the organization's goals and basic principles. From there you'll see there is a certain amount of jumping through hoops, either worth every postage stamp or a big bother and forget it, depending on your attitude. Would-be travelers are interviewed by area coordinators. You need two letters of recommendation. The coordinator recommends you to the New York office. You write a blurb about yourself in the form of a letter of introduction, and send that along with a fee of $65 per person. The letter comes back, officially stamped, ready to be presented upon arrival to each new host.

Sound long and involved? Not so. The whole process took a couple of days. I got two friends to email recommendations to the area coordinator and stopped by her house for a visit and a pile of papers. I faxed most of the application to New York and sent the rest FedEx. We opted to have the host books sent to France, but they could have come back FedEx in another day.

Servas paperwork is designed to weed out the people who are looking for a cheap place to crash. Servas is first and foremost about sitting around talking - intercultural exchange is the buzzword.

Sitting in our bedroom at my in-laws in France, poring over the newly-arrived Servas books, I thought we needed to find the perfect match. The host books have a mountain of information about every host.

The Berlin student born in 1981, interested in drawing, film, music, traveling, computers and architecture sounds great, but the sleeping bag required, the one-month advance notice and the parents listed as "other people I live with" seem daunting. The fifty-one year old couple from the Baltic Sea coast look good. She's a translator and philologist. He's an architect and a painter. They speak English, as well as basic Russian and French. They have lived in Germany and England, traveled through Europe and like literature, theatre, ecology, architecture, history of art and travels. They have three cats and a dog, advise you bring a sleeping bag, can take two people and only want you to call a couple of days ahead. But no email address.

Eventually, we learned to loosen up and email four or five people. The first people to write back with an invitation were our hosts. We wouldn't have picked the weightlifter in Krakow, Poland but he showed us a world of Polish sculpture we hadn't known existed.

"Take Tram 24, direction Kurdwanow to the third stop from McDonald's Restaurant. Cross the road. Our building is #15. Just ring the bell." These were the directions in Krakow. Every Servas visit takes you to the heart of a new city, so why not start with the public transportation system? It's a treasure hunt, with warm smiles and frequently, excellent food at the destination. Instead of the inside of a tour bus, the pages of a guidebook and the four walls of a hotel room, you get real life.

Sometimes real life is exhausting. Bozena Szfransky, dynamic professor of molecular biology and endocrinology in Olstyn, Poland, regaled us with a three-hour video of her trip to Hawaii. We were lucky. The first version was eight hours long, she told us. And there are the cultural stumbles. Wojtek, who met us at the train station in Gdansk, Poland, armed with maps marked in two colors with must-see recommendations, tram tickets and phone cards, took us directly to Pizza Hut for dinner. Pizza Hut! In Poland!

Servas requires planning ahead, a tactic many dyed-in-the-wool travelers disdain. We like to show up in a new town without any reservations and throw ourselves upon the wheel of fortune, just to see what comes up. There are Servas hosts, marked with NPNR, "No Prior Notice Required," you can call at the last minute. The Wotowskis in Szczecin, Poland were NPNR people. We called for advice on a hotel and ended up spending two days, teaching English courses at their school, going into town to the mall, taking the baby for a walk around the neighborhood. In general, though, folks like to get the spare room ready, stock up on some borscht and potato pancakes and pick the kids' toys up from the stairs.

There are tourists who like to plop down in an anonymous hotel room after a long day in museums and historic districts, turn on the television, run a hot bath and vegetate. There is no vegetation mode with Servas. As soon as you walk through the door, you're "on." You are the Americans, the Germans, the Aussies - entertainment for the next couple of evenings. Since this is the way I like to travel anyway, showing my photo album about life back in the States, looking at their photo albums and wedding videos, talking about life as they live it, asking about interesting things to see and do that aren't in the guidebooks, is not a drawback for me.

Travel is inherently uncomfortable, if we do it right. We're not sleeping in our own beds, eating our own foods or hearing our own language. Travel is a departure from our deep urge to be safe at home. The basic premise of Servas is to leap out of that comfort zone and trust that we will find friends, generosity and connection.

Sometimes, the magic doesn't work. We called and called folks in the Baltic countries and never did find anyone with the time to put us up. When we got to Riga, Latvia, we'd decided to ask them to meet us for coffee and conversation, and that seemed to work better. One of our coffee-klatch hosts told us the Scandinavians are too suspicious of strangers to feel really comfortable with this Servas business.

Roman Branberger, our Prague host for the last three days, parked at the train station and insisted on carrying my bag.

"Did you see this?" he asked, taking the stairs two at a time. There in the middle of a fifties utilitarian building is the old Art Nouveau, turn-of-the-century train station ticket office, converted into a coffee shop. Above, a domed ceiling swirls with nymphs and swains. Below, tourists with piles of suitcases scramble for cabs, never suspecting that this elegant old relic still exists.

"You are our 295^th Servas visitor," Roman tells us, "but we felt we've come to know you as well as our very first."

When the floods surged through the streets of Prague last summer, we sent worried emails to Roman and his wife. They are world friends now. That's what the Servas business is all about.