wednesday 24/09/2008 Elodie et Laurent/thursday 25/09

so, back b4 we left paris, we were looking for a place to stay a couple nights when we got to Bordeaux, but being last minute, oops! what do you know, we couldn't find anything that had more than just 1 night available...and we weren't moving from hotel to hostel to wherever, obviously. so we decided to check out this website i'd heard of called http://www.couchsurfing.com/ now when i'd heard of it, i never really thought i'd do it, but we were desperate! the concept behind it is opening up your home to travelers for a night or two, sharing a meal or a drink, and hopefully a laugh. well, we had no idea what a treasure this would be for us. we found this couple, the only response that pulled up, interestingly, Elodie and Laurent, who from their profile seemed super fun so we asked if we could crash with them. they said yes, gave us directions, and so we showed up tuesday evening.



had tons of fun chatting and got along very well. elodie speaks fabulous english and laurent speaks and understands un peu- a little.



turns out we have a bit in common--elodie works at a winery and laurent plays the guitar and they both love to travel. in fact, they bought a house which is 3 levels which they are remodeling to make into several small flats which they are going to sell hopefully next summer and go travel around the world with their profits! we couldn't believe our good luck to find such cool people so early on. it can be hard to make friends in a foreign country, but it has been very easy to get to know them.



so thursday, ben and i head out to find his schools and see if they have housing for us. long story a little shorter, they do, but it's not pretty....we would share a tiny tiny room with just a bed, dresser, table, and sink/mirror located just down the hall from communal bathrooms that DID NOT smell good. no kitchen, no fridge, nothing to give us any hope of cooking a meal or housing friends/guests. we were a bit discouraged but were not crushed. my school had no housing whatsoever, but we were determined to look in the ads, ask around and hopefully find something that we could affort and more importantly, allow us to do one of the things we love most: cooking meals and entertaining.



after a couple of hours on the internet and laurent helping me uncode the french ads, we started talking about his flats he's creating out of his home. i made a joke about one saying i wish it was ready and we could just rent from him and elodie...not sure how it came up later, but he said that the one upstairs was almost ready and if we couldn't find anything else, maybe we could rent that one!! i wasn't sure if he was just being polite, or felt bad for us, or maybe it really would be a good thing for them....a huge relief for us, sure, but they had said nothing b4 of wanting to rent so i didn't know how to take it. anyways, later in the evening, i was like "puis-je te parler franchement?" basically, can i talk straight with you? and he was like, yah... so i asked him about what he'd said (as he'd mentioned it again earlier, always with "if you can't find anything else") and asked him if it would be a good thing for him and elodie, and basically they were both like, "yah, we'd really love to have you two around" and other things like they were scared we'd think they just wanted our money and we're like, heck no! we don't want to stress about housing no take advantage of your generosity of letting us couchsurf. they on the spot set a not very high at all rent for our awesome flat that will be done....not sure when, but it's looking really good. still needs plumbing. awh, who needs running water, right? :)

needless to say we were overjoyed. super cool flat, super fun "roomies" for real, cuz at time we'll even be sharing the upstairs flat when they start some major renovations on the middle floor. but we've told them many times that we're "facile à vivre" --easy going, as they seem just as much if not more so.