Dear couchsurfers,

My name is Malte, I am a professional photojournalist (www.maltejaeger.de) from Berlin, Germany (profilename: w86malte). I'm starting to do a photographic reportage project about hospitality communities. I am intending to show how couchsurfing is able to bring cultures together. My aim in this project is to document how CS creates worldwide, fascinating personal contacts, makes international understanding possible and helps people of different social classes getting closer.
My idea is to travel with five or six very different active couchsurfers to very different regions of the world. I will cover those journeys with emphasis on the social interaction. In the end the project will be published as a book.
I would be grateful to get some help from your side. I want to work with international couchsurfers but its impossible to read nearly 900.000 profiles to figure out who might be the most interesting traveller for my project.

I would be glad to hear that you think that you might be the right one to travel with!
Or to be informed about other interesting couchsurfers you would like to recommend.

For my project it isn't important to search for the ordinary, representative couchsurfer, but to portray the very special ones of you, doing unusual things, using the system in a special way.
The main idea of the story is to show the biggest diversity possible. So at least one of those characteristics should fit to you:

- Origin vs. destination (It is very important that you are from a region in which hospitality has another value than in the traveling destination. In general there must be explicit cultural differences between you, the travellers and the hosts. Such as Indonesians travelling for their first time to Saudi Arabia, or Russian couchsurfers travelling to Brazil, or...)
- Travelling destination (there are different important factors:
1.) I just want to visit hosts which are natives in the destination, no exchange students, NGO staffers, or other members of foreign cultures.
2.) I want to explore regions in which the amount of people using CS differs significantly.
3.) The cultural differences of the destinations must be extremely high. (only one of those might be out of the western world, another should be Asian, Indian, African, or....)
- You should be a genuine couchsurfer (no couchsurfer by chance, mixing CS trips with stays in hostels, cruises, hotels, or whatever else)
- You should travel in a special way (such as sailboat hitchhiking (work for passage), cycling, hiking, train, roadtripping, hitchhiking...the only thing generally needed would be journeys containing more than only one single destination such as classical city trips)
- You should be on a special „mission“ (such as: work, studies, adventure, missionarie...everything but please no simple tourism!)
- Your Personalities should be somehow special including your personal interests (such as: extrovert, party oriented performance artist, or: highly intellectual, autistic world master in chess, or...)
- Different Ages (the age of different couchsurfers appearing in the project should be as different as possible from very young to very old)
- By no means you should be like typical tourists (with guidebooks from one monument to the other...). Of my interest are only couchsurfers really willing to learn to know other cultures and people.
- You should travel in this year (2009)

I am looking forward to receive positive news of your side and to my upcoming CS experience around the world.

Thank you very much for any type of help!

Cheers,
Malte Jäger