Sleeping Around (10 page)

Mariana told me that I was her first couch-surfing guest and that she was a little nervous. It didn't show. She was incredibly bubbly and excited about showing me ‘the best time in Rio'. The girls were dolled up in readiness for a big night out. Mariana's long, straight, jet-black hair was perfectly coiffured and she was wearing designer jeans and a white halter-top showing off her deep golden tan, while Paula, who had long wavy mousey-blonde locks, looked ravishing in a stunning floral dress.

‘Is it okay if we just stay in tonight and eat at home and watch a DVD?' Mariana asked apologetically.

‘That's okay,' I said, trying not to sound too overjoyed.

‘Are you sure?'

Oh yeah, I was sure. And so was my liver. I was still sure even when Mariana held up a DVD and gushed excitedly, ‘We're watching
Pride and Prejudice
.'

Mariana worked as an architect/interior designer in a business that she'd set up with two other friends from university after they'd graduated three years previously. ‘I've had a real busy week, so I need to rest tonight. Then tomorrow I can show you why I'm the coolest girl in all of Rio,' Mariana said with a beaming smile. ‘I've got our entire itinerary planned out.' Our itinerary went something like this: beach—lunch—beach—disco dancing—sleep—beach— lunch—beach—samba dancing. ‘I'm a true
Carioca
girl,' Mariana said. ‘I love the beach and samba dancing.'

‘I hate the beach and I hate samba dancing,' Paula retorted.

‘We have nothing in common,' said Mariana, giving Paula a hug. ‘But we are still best friends.'

We wandered across the road to the supermarket, which overlooked the beach, to get some chocolate. ‘You can't watch a movie without a little bit of chocolate,' Mariana said. The ‘little bit of chocolate' turned into four large blocks of chocolate.

Mariana loved chocolate so much that she had become a member of the ‘Chocolate Lovers' group on CouchSurfing. com, which I later discovered has 1017 members from 38 different countries. Chocolate Lovers is just one of a few thousand diverse groups that have been set up by couch-surfing members. Mariana told me that the members of the Chocolate Lovers group discuss chocolate, have lengthy debates about which country makes the best chocolate and organise chocolate meetings.

By far the largest group on CouchSurfing, apart from specific country or city groups, is the Queer Couch Surfers, with 10 680 members. Other large groups include Photographers (2668 members), Cyclists (2198 members), Beer Lovers (1641 members), and the Tattooed and Pierced Club (1148 members).

Most of the groups have relatively small numbers, although I still found some of them surprisingly popular. The Masturbators group has 179 members (so to speak). The welcoming spiel to the Masturbators group page reads:

Have you jerked at work? Played with the fun dot in the wrong spot? Handled your meat in an airplane seat? Got a fever and played with your beaver? You are not alone! Cum on in.

I imagine some of those masturbators are also among the 106 members of the Virgins Club. One or two of them may also be among the 18 Gay Cyclists, the 15 We Love Panties Group or the 11 Gay Vegetarian Nudists.

Some groups are just plain weird. There are 165 Dumpster Divers, 11 members of the Midget Tossing Society, 29 in the Ikea Couch Club, 9 Lovers of the Pickle, 9 Mayonnaise Experts, 8 Marmite Lovers, 5 in the Anti-Marmite Movement, 5 Kitchen Cupboard Organisers, 87 International Party Girls Seek Toy Boys, 101 in the David Hasselhoff Appreciation Group, 41 Atheists with Biblical Names, and 163 in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

What's a bit of a worry, though, is that only 4 of the 150 000-plus couch surfers are members of the ‘Nice People' group. Some groups have an even lower membership—as in only one member. These exclusive groups include: Irish Dancing; Pakistani Bi Men; Well-dressed; People against War; Radical Feminists; Gay Chefs and Perverts.

When I got home I decided to start my own group called The Karaoke Club—our slogan is ‘Karaoke is everything'. There are currently eleven members who hail from such places as the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Canada, Australia, Iceland, Denmark and the US.

I'm a member of six clubs (I've also since joined Chocolate Lovers), but some people get a little carried away. Mark from Melbourne, Australia, is a member of 242 groups including: Surfing for Peace; The Church of Lasagne; The Moderate Non-alarmist Socialists; Food not Bombs; I Joined Too Many Groups; and How Do You Delete Groups?

Mariana obviously wasn't one of the the 337 People Who Like Cooking because as she rummaged through a pile of plastic containers in the fridge she said, ‘I can't cook. I'm terrible.'

Mariana had a maid who came twice a week and cooked
all
of her meals. ‘Tonight we're having . . . um, crumbed chicken and pasta . . .' Mariana was checking the neatly marked labels on the plastic containers to see what tonight's fare was. ‘. . . And salad and quiche.'

The food was delicious, although the crumbed chicken was only lukewarm. ‘I'm not even good at
heating up
food,' Mariana explained cheerfully.

‘I was told that Copacabana was full of old women,' I said to the girls over dinner.

‘I'm an old woman,' Mariana sighed. ‘I turned twenty-six last month.'

At 26 years old, Mariana is the average age for a couch surfer. In fact, the website is mostly surfed by folk in their twenties, and 72 per cent of couch surfers are aged between twenty and 28. Mind you, it's not all young folk. There are some antediluvians like myself on it as well, with more than 30 000 aged between 40 and 49. At the last body count there were even 146 registered couch surfers over the age of 80.

We tried to watch the movie, but the phone kept ringing. Mariana was a popular old woman. One of the callers was Paula's boyfriend. A boyfriend, incidentally, who she'd never met. Paula had ‘met' him through wayn.com (Where Are You Now), which is similar to CouchSurfing.com, but without the couch. Fellow travellers chat online and meet up if they are in the same city. Paula had been ‘chatting' to Dave from Sydney for a year and they had started ‘dating' four months ago. ‘I hope to meet him soon,' she beamed.

‘My boyfriend hasn't called me all week,' Mariana sniffed.

‘That's because he's an
arsehole
!' Paula cried indignantly.

Mariana rolled her eyes. ‘Paula calls him “The Arsehole”.'

Mariana had been dating ‘The Arsehole' for seven months. Nunoo was from Portugal and had been working for Shell in Rio for the past twelve months.

‘I saw him last Saturday night,' Mariana said. ‘I went to a nightclub and he turned up. We had a lovely night and we had breakfast together and everything. He said he would call me, but he hasn't called all week. Is that strange?'

‘No, he's probably just using you for sex,' I wanted to say, but instead I said, ‘Yeah, a bit strange.'

‘It's not strange,' Paula said musingly. ‘It's because he's an arsehole.' Except Paula pronounced it ‘asshole' with an American accent. In fact, Paula said everything with an American accent. ‘I learnt English from watching the TV show
Friends
,' she drawled. ‘I watch it
every
day.'

‘I learnt most of my English from
Sex and the City
,' Mariana declared.

I thought ‘The Arsehole' might have called when Mariana started crying during one of her many phone calls.

‘It was my mum,' Mariana said afterwards. Mariana's mum worked as a doctor in a small village five hours' flight north of Rio. ‘She calls every day and she misses me so she cries and then she makes me cry. I'm the only child and I'm her princess.'

When both girls started getting teary during a scene in the movie with the rather droll Mr Darcy, I made my excuses and snuck off to bed.

‘I'm so sorry about the weather,' Mariana said sadly as she looked out the window at the drizzling rain. ‘I feel terrible about it.'

‘I don't think it's your fault,' I said. ‘We can do something else. What does a Carioca girl do if she can't go to the beach?'

Mariana's face lit up. ‘We go shopping of course!'

We had planned to catch a bus, but once we'd started walking to the bus stop we kept on walking the 6 kilometres to Ipanema. The rain had stopped and, although it was overcast and gloomy, it was still warm and we just about had the whole of the Copacabana beachfront to ourselves as we shuffled past deserted restaurants and cafes. On our two-hour hike we talked about Mariana's job (she not only did the designs for refurbished apartments, but also did the interior design, including choosing all the furniture), we talked about her family (her parents divorced when Mariana was two years old and her dad had only recently got in touch with her ‘because I'm now successful') and we talked about Nunoo: ‘He goes back to Lisbon in five months and I keep thinking that he is the one. But maybe Paula is right. Maybe he is an arsehole.'

‘I have a Havaianas addiction,' Mariana said as she stopped to buy a white pair with 10-centimetre high heels. My addiction wasn't coming along too badly either. I bought another two pairs of Havaianas, making it four pairs in just two days.

Mariana did love to shop. I lost count of how many clothes shops, jewellery shops, hat shops, belt shops, handbag shops and shoe shops we went into. ‘Are you bored?' Mariana asked me in a lingerie shop full of stunning women trying on bras. ‘No, not really,' I said, wiping the dribble from my chin.

‘I go to this church most Sundays,' Mariana said as we passed a small church in the middle of some fashion boutiques. ‘I pray for more money, so I can do more shopping.'

Just when I thought that I'd finally got
The Girl from Ipanema
out of my head we stopped for a late lunch (as in starting at 4.30) at The Girl from Ipanema restaurant (or the
Garota de Ipanema
in Portuguese). It was at this very restaurant that Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes wrote the song that has come to be Brazil's most iconic soundtrack (as well as the second most recorded song of all time after the Beatles'
Yesterday
).

We grabbed a table by the window and I very quickly figured out why Tom and Vinícius wrote the song there. I said ‘aaahh' a number of times as tall and tanned and young and lovely girls from Ipanema went by in the street. The restaurant was packed with locals and loud American tourists, but the service was efficient and friendly and we shared a main course of
Picanha a Brasileira,
which was a generously laden sizzling plate of superb, thinly sliced rump steak with rice, chips and
farofa
.

We caught the bus back to Mariana's because she had to get home for a ‘beauty' appointment. ‘I'm going to get my fingernails and my footnails done and get my hair blow-waved,' she explained. ‘Brazilian women spend a lot of time and money to look beautiful.' Mariana went to the beauty salon at least once a week and saw her personal trainer three days a week. ‘I have to look good for the beach!' she said brightly.

‘If my boyfriend rings when I'm out,' Mariana said, ‘tell him that I'm busy and that I'm going out tonight with a nice boy from Australia.' I wasn't too keen on getting her boyfriend jealous. Mariana had shown me a photo of Nunoo standing on the beach in little white bathers, showing off his muscles. Muscles that were a hell of a lot bigger than mine.

Mariana came back from the salon looking suitably gorgeous. ‘Now I have to get ready,' she said. ‘It will take me at least an hour,' she added before disappearing into the bathroom. I tried to watch TV. Mariana had cable TV but, as with cable TV the world over, there was nothing on. We left for Melt nightclub with two of Mariana's leggy cousins at eleven o'clock—at which time on a Saturday night at home I'm either in bed or dozing off in front of the television.

Melt nightclub looked very chic and hip, just like the people standing in the queue to get in. It was so chic and hip that the drink cards were credit cards and the doorman wore a three-piece suit. ‘I come here
every
Saturday night,' Mariana said as we were ushered to the front of the slow-moving queue—which was handy because as well as meticulously checking IDs, they were punching everyone's name and details into a computer.

Two more of Mariana's leggy cousins were waiting for us inside at one of the candlelit tables in the ground floor bar. The bar was full of so many glamorous and beautiful people that it looked like the final of
Search for a Supermodel
. I don't speak Portuguese but I could tell that some of them were looking over at me and saying: ‘Who invited the ugly bloke?' I was doing all right for an ugly bloke, though. I was surrounded by a gaggle of gorgeous girls who were all chatting rapidly to each other in Portuguese. ‘They are saying that
all
Brazilian men have a screw loose,' Mariana's Amazonian cousin Roberta told me.