By Ahmad Adha, SYI Facebook Group Member
Hi everyone! I wanna talk about Couchsurfing. So, I’ve done it for almost six years, mostly hosting. Many references have been left on my profile. I don’t have big expectation in surfing cause of my past experience about it in which my host treated me differently to a surfer from Australia. Next week I’m coming to Iran. Maybe, it’s gonna be different. I sent a couple of requests and I got declines and a maybe. So, I was thinking ‘what if I am not an Indonesian?’. I decided to do a social experiment thingy and asked an Italian friend of mine to make a couch request to the same people that I sent to, using the same sentences as in my requests, to see how different the responses. He has no reference on his profile. Yet, the responses were different. He got accepted by people who refused me. It’s funny how the world would treat you differently when you look different and/or are from another part of the world.
PS. I already got a host before I wrote this.
