Couchsurfing dinner + Chocolate

I have been a fairly active CouchSurfer recently. Right now we have a very delightful guest J (who is sitting next to me drying her hair) from Germany. It’s very nice coming home to nice cooking smells (she cooks beautifully) and a clean kitchen (she also does the dishes) in exchange for a room and bed (or in our case, carpeted floor or 3 seater sofa).

We had a great time hanging out yesterday, and having a wonderful dinner hosted by fellow CouchSurfer B. (Thanks for the yummy food!) I guess I’m overdue for another party of some sort… but let’s wait till I’m more organised.

We’re also going to a fantastic event organised by B. It’s called Death By Chocolate, an interactive murder mystery installation that is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival: It will be “The best murder you’ve ever tasted.” Imagine… You’re at a party, a chocolate party to be exact. You walk around, the aftertaste of your favourite block melting in your mouth. You hear a scream from the other room…

Yum. Chocolate, and gore. What a wonderful combination!

It will be held at Koko Black, where everything on the menu has chocolate in it. Check out all the wonderful Flickr photos here.We’ve got tickets for 11 October, and according to B they will sell fast once the show starts. If you want to join us, it is free seating, and tickets are still available when I checked last week.

Hope to see you there!

Movie madness

Thanks to a CouchSurfing pal Jo, I’ve become an ACMI member and I got my first batch of movies last week. You can take out 4 movies for 1 week, and the annual membership fee is $95, which works out to be about $1.69 a week, or about 40cents a video if you get 4 a week. They have a system that will deliver your chosen videos to your local library branch, which is very very handy if you’re far from the CBD.

If you’re in Melbourne, it’s excellent value, so join ACMI here, and support the arts.

The first DVD we watched is Infernal Affairs, the movie that inspired Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winning movie The Departed. We saw The Departed on the big screen when it was showing here and were very impressed, and the original version is more subtle and complex, but at the same time, has more plot holes. I can’t decide which one I like better yet, might watch The Departed again to find out!

Next, we’re revisiting Spirited Away, one of my anime favourites; watching Ghost in the Shell, another anime favourite, and Casablanca (which I have never seen – a crime, I know!).

Should be interesting, and might warrant blogging!

Until my next post, if you don’t mind having an interesting stranger invade your home (and have a spare room/shed/couch/floor), do a good deed and offer your couch on CouchSurfing. Who knows, you might make some excellent friends.

Couchsurfing

I joined Couchsurfing last week as part of an attempt to repay the kindness of strangers who let me stay with them at a moment’s notice when I was travelling.

This week we hosted a very nice Israeli for 3 days and it has been very rewarding and wonderful. I got to travel vicariously through him, and at the same time learn more about the situation in Israel from a very personal perspective. His mother’s house had been bombed and she had just walked out of the living room when the bomb smashed it to bits. Yikes.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are, and we forget to treasure what we have. We forget that everyone has the same basic goal – to be loved and happy. That everyone is the same, deep down. That’s the whole point of traveling.

When you travel you stop and take stock of what you have, what you miss when you are away from home, etc. But the funny thing is, when you go home, you slowly forget all of it! Which is when you start traveling again!

I hope to host more couchsurfers, although P won’t let me host too many. I just want to make sure I host the right sort of people. And of course, let’s not forget the value of alone time!

For security reasons, you will have to join up to see my Couchsurfing profile. If you’re interested in lending a hand (and a couch or spare bed), please email me and I’ll set you up from my end.

How Environmentally Friendly Are You? Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz

Came across this catching up on my newsreading. It’s from Gadling.com – an excellet travel site.

Posted Feb 5th 2007 1:45PM by Justin Glow

Do you drive a gas-guzzling SUV, leave all your lights on and eat at McDonald’s everyday, or do you live completely off the grid, bike to work and grow your own vegetables? Chances are you fall somewhere in between. You may recycle or eat only locally grown veggies and meats, but if you’re like me, you have absolutely no idea whether or not your way of living is doing any harm to Mother Earth.

The Earthday Network has put together an Ecological Footprint Quiz to estimate the amount natural resources your lifestyle requires, and then compares the results to national and worldwide averages. Just fill out some location-based information and answer 15 questions, and you’ll be a little bit closer to knowing whether you’re living in our out of ecological harmony. I wonder how Al Gore would score?

And my results?

	CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES FOOD 2.6 MOBILITY 1.3 SHELTER 0.7 GOODS/SERVICES 2.1 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 6.7
	IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 7.6 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
	IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 3.7 PLANETS.