Going To My First Couchsurfing Event

While in San Diego, I was staying at a friend's house. My friend, Catalan, had a fancy professional bicycle. Something I was interested in doing at some point in my life was a big bicycle trip.

He took me to store that he bought it at, REI. It was a big amazing store filled with adventurous  things that I like.
One of the worker's at the store was telling us that he made a bicycle trip all the way across America! He also told us that he used Couchsurfing a lot along the way.
I had heard of Couchsurfing before but I've always thought,
what kind of people do that?? and wondered about safety.
I always used to expect to find perverted weirdo's on sites designed for meeting people... But maybe websites like that have become normal in this day in time. Damn, I was so ignorant back then.
He explained it was a legitimate and awesome site that lots of travelers used. It sounded cool so Catalan and I went and created a profile when we got back to the house.
Couchsurfing.org was organized by regions of the world. 
On the region pages are conversations like a newsfeed on Facebook.  Some people also create events that you can read about and click the join button if you wish.
On the San Diego area page was an event that a lot of people were going to called Tipsy Tuesday. It was a weekly
event where couchsurfers meet-up at a bar on Tuesday.
We were reading about it and it said that at 10 p.m. the bar had a reverse happy hour? Not sure what that meant.
Catalan said, "So, does that mean the drinks are twice as expensive?" 

When Tuesday came, we found the bar and the group of 
couchsurfers inside. More people showed up later. It was my first ever involvement in couchsurfing. Basically, everyone introduced themselves to other people and socialized. 
I talked to many people and told them I was in the beginning stage of my trip and had never used couchsurfing.
I was relieved that couchsurfing seemed like a cool community of travelers so far. The people were nice to talk to
and no one seemed like the creepy crazy person that I feared of being online. 
Another guy and I went to the other side of the bar and played Foosball. People from the couchsurfing meeting were now spread throughout the bar. I didn't know if everyone I talked to was with couchsurfing or just someone at the bar.
The bar had quite a bit of people in it.
Later, I noticed a guy who was smiling a lot. He was really smiling all the time. I looked at him and said "why are you so happy?!" He started talking to me about love and positive energy and was starting to sound a little hippie-ish at that point. After talking to him for a little while about love and hate, he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with hate.
" Let me show you something" he said. He walked over to a
stranger, pointed at him and said "I don't know this guy, but I love him because he's beautiful." The stranger smiled.
Then he walked over to a crowd of people. Suddenly, everyone had their arms around each other and formed a circle. I got caught in this circle. The happy guy was across from me in the circle. The circle started spinning around and the happy guy said "can you feel it? can you feel the love?"

I personally think he was on acid.

Well, that was my first ever experience with couchsurfing. I just went to an event. But my first time ever using it to meet up with an individual directly from the site is in the next blog post....