Our Couch surfing
experience up to this point had been great. Kenny and Johnny were
wonderful and made us feel very much at home in their homes. When we
arrived in Oostende the situation was a little less favorable. Our
host Niels was an artist/ blogger who split his time between his
parents home (laundry mat in Oostende) and this parents country home
out in the countryside.
The living room
area in his parents home in Oostende was warm and cozy, which I
cannot say was true for the rest of the place. Strangely set up, his
parents owned an apartment building attached to the Laundry mat and
supposedly stayed in some rooms out the back.
Niels took us up
to the room that we were supposed to stay in, which was a challenge
to get to the stair case blocked by old bicycles. When we reached the
room it was bare except for two chairs, one very dim light overhead
and an half inflated air mattress with a load of blankets. The
windows had paper covering them, as if the place were abandoned or
being renovated (I still haven’t decided which, and yes I did ask),
the wall paper looked 100 years old and there was absolutely no
heating.
We put our stuff
down and Igor asked if there was somewhere else that we could stay,
so Niels took us to his parent’s room in the other part of the
complex. Up a small stair case, the room wasn’t much better than
the other one, although it at least had a real bed, a heating
blanket, and a TV among some other out of place furniture. We decided
that this was a better room to stay in so Igor moved all our stuff
over to this room.
I went up to the
room first and basically put on all the clothes I had, shivering a
bit waiting for Igor. When he walked in I think it worried him that I
was so cold, but we decided it would be like camping (at which I
seriously wished I had my sleeping bag). That night I didn’t sleep
very well, though I think Igor slept like a stone. I sort of went in
and out of sleep until 5 am when I finally did fall all the way
asleep until about 9:30 am.
We got up in the
morning and hurried out the door to catch our next train to Bruges
(Brugge), thankful to be warm and moving on.
All this to say
that Niels is a very nice person but perhaps should put a disclaimer
on his place that let’s people know that they will be cold.
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