Jamie, James, and I (along with the VSC) welcomed 6 international couch surfers to Vancouver this evening with a night out to Tanpopo, a favourite sushi restaurant of ours.
Among them were students from China, France, Switzerland, Czech, Finland, Danmark, Australia and the Netherlands who met each other while attending university back in the Niagara region. As the school year came to an end, they decided to come out to Vancouver for the west coast experience before splitting up. Jan Kopkas, a couch surfer who had sent out the email about their plans to the Vancouver Couch Surfers group, had a very out-going personality. Joost de Konig, hailing from the Netherlands, was just as adventurous and social. In fact, when we moved on from having sushi at Tanpopo's to the SoHo pub across the street for some drinks, we had a lengthy discussion about the world we live in today. And through that discussion, we realised that we had a lot in common about our field of study: human geography and marketing. That discussion spawned recommended readings of "So Yesterday" by Scott Westerfeld and "No Logo" by Naomi Klein.
Another interesting fellow I had the pleasure of meeting this evening was an older gentleman named Robert Shaw. With a full beard to go with his bushy grey quaff, he resembled a mountaineer who lived up in a cabin in the mountains. He had taken these international students snow-shoeing just the day before and were showing me the spectacular pictures on his little digital.
Now I have more contacts to add to the list of couch surfing friends. I hope they enjoyed their stay here in Vancouver!
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