This is one of my new friends here in the hippy town with the strawberry farm.  I met him on the internet.  There’s this amazing website called couchsurfing.com, which is where I’ve met most of my cool friends.  They have profiles and offer up their couches so that people like me  have free places to stay and friends everywhere we go.

Since I already have a trailer to stay in at the strawberry farm, I met up with my new amigo just to hang out.  He took me around the town on his dirt bike thingy then to his friend’s house, where we drank yerba matte and chatted like old friends for a couple of hours.  The friend was out of town and he was feeding the cat.

The cat loved to be spanked.  It would cry and cry until you spanked it.  I’ve never met a cat who liked to be hit hard on the butt like that!  Besides the weird cat, his friend also had Tori Amos as a screen saver on his computer.  When I pointed out how odd that was he said, “Yes, my friend is the only straight guy in the world who like Tori Amos.”  He admitted that he, himself, was a fan of Cheryl Crow.

My amigo hosts several couch surfers at his house every week because he loves meeting interesting people and helping people out. Once he let a Russian girl stay for a month, just because she was sad and he felt bad for her.  The next time I am in one place for more than a month, I’m going to have a lot of couch-surfing karma to pay back. 

If only I had more time to write about all the people who have taken me in, fed me, and treated me like a friend, even though they don’t know me!

(El Bolson, Patagonia, Argentina)