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An old friend of Levi's decided to visit Madrid last weekend, so despite the bitter cold, we went to meet up with him and explore the city we'd only briefly seen during paperwork visits. My previous impression had been a negative one, tainted by ugly bureaucratic buildings and 1960s commercial architecture, but I found myself pleasantly surprised by the beautiful, lively center of the city. We visited the famous plazas and parks, ate and drank in the exotic and varied sorts of places that don't exist in Zafra, and saw Picasso's Guernica at the Reina Sofia museum (it's surprisingly big). The highlight for me, in my ever-escalating nerdiness for the ancient, was a 2000-year-old temple, gifted to the city by the Egyptian government as a thanks for excavation assistance. It's a gorgeous little stone structure lined with miraculously intact hieroglyphics and altarpieces, dedicated to Isis and Amun and decorated by the Ptolemies and later completed by Augustus and Tiberius. I could have stayed in there all day.

We're budget travelers, (to put it gently; the more truthful description is that we cut every corner except wine and beer), so while Mike stayed in a comfortable, centrally-located hostel, Levi and I squeezed ourselves into the top bunk of a 20-year-old Romanian exchange student in a downtown expat neighborhood.

To explain:

Since moving to Europe, Levi and I have been couchsurfing, a strange and ostensibly reckless activity to most sane Westerners. The basic principle is simple enough: you put a facebook-like profile on couchsurfing.org, describing yourself and, if you are able/willing, offering up your couch or spare bedroom to complete strangers who might happen to be passing through your town. When you travel, you search for profiles of people living in your destination, and rather than paying for a hotel, you go sleep in their house.

While I recognize that it sounds like the beginning of a 90s slasher flick, or at least a desperate plea to be robbed blind, I've come to regard it as one of the best things the internet has to offer. In the ten or so times I've surfed or hosted surfers, I haven't had a single negative experience, nor have I met anyone who has. The system works on references, so when someone asked to stay with us, we can read all the things previous hosts have said about them, and thus far, all the references have turned out to be perfectly true. Even when we've taken the risk and stayed with a unreferenced newbie, it's been great.

I stayed with a group of happy-go-lucky Brazilian guys in Dublin and spent a great weekend with them and two German girls they were hosting. In Zafra, I stayed with a super hospitable Spanish woman who found us our apartment and would become a friend, student, and travel buddy. In Lisbon we spent 5 days in a gorgeous downtown apartment with a lifelong local who took us to his favorite restaurants and cafes. We've hosted twenty-somethings from France, the Czech Republic, Poland, Britain, America, Germany, and Austria; a Italian family with an 8-year-old daughter who knew only enough English to ask for juice, and a 70-year-old Englishman who had spent most of his adult life in Venezuela and skyped his son in Spanglish.

This most recent couchsurf landed us in Lavapiés, a trendy, bustling, international neighborhood a metro stop away from the city center. Despite the cold, the playgrounds, plazas, and sidewalk cafes were always alive with people speaking an incredible array of languages, moving in and out of the Indian, Mexican, Lebanese and Japanese restaurants. Our Romanian host lives in a small flat with a Polish couple, a French guy and a girl from Portugal. They are all students with Erasmus, a Europe-wide university exchange program, and they´re studying in English, although it's the native language of none of them.

The whole weekend was a perfect portrait of a modern, amalgomated European culture. Living in the very Spanish town of Zafra, it's easy to forget that this a globalized, progressive, diverse world exists here, and couchsurfing is a great lifeline to that world.