We’ve arrived in Sevilla, yet another super cute and friendly Spanish city, with delicious food, gorgeous architecture, and an abundance of beautiful churches. And in this city we have the added benefit of the hospitality of some friends we met through home exchange.
In Sevilla we are staying five nights with some folks we met through the house swap website Home for Home. This particular home exchange site has a high concentration of users in Spain so I signed up to try to find a swap for our stay in the south. I contacted this couple too late; they had already set up a swap to California. Their response was very friendly so I offered to show them around my city during their stay. I figured worst case I would meet some new people, practice my Spanish, and get some tips about things to do in Sevilla. After our initial tour of the city we got together several more times as I took them to events around the city, and I thoroughly enjoyed our time together.
This lovely couple invited us to stay with them in Sevilla. I considered this a fallback option and continued searching for house swaps. I did find a few potential home exchanges in town, but my new friends looked at the offers and said they were both in very inconvenient locations (and now that we’re here I see that they were right). So here we are, staying with friends.
Their flat is in a perfect location in the center of old town, within walking distance of everything we might want to see. They actually vacated the apartment for us, and are sleeping around the corner in a vacant place their friend uses for an art studio. We really couldn’t ask for kinder hosts. And of course we’re thoroughly enjoying our time hanging out with them over dinners and drinks.
I wrote previously on the unanticipated benefit of making new friends through home exchange. I’ve had a surprising number of hospitality offers from people who know nothing about me other than my desire to visit their town via a home exchange. Perhaps this is just the kindness of the Spanish people, since my searches this year have been mostly focused on this trip to Spain. But it has inspired me to offer at least the service of showing strangers around my city if I can’t agree to their house swap proposal. Perhaps in the future we’ll consider doing formal hospitality exchanges through home swap websites.
