When we're in Europe, in between organized Esperanto events and visiting friends, we're hoping to stay with local residents in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Slovakia, and Italy. We intend to do that through Pasporta Servo, a kind of relative to Servas, with which some people are familiar. A booklet (and online file) lists people ready to host other Esperanto speakers for a night or two or three. Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal had a
front-page article about Pasporta Servo on November 12. The writer had a phone interview with me and Les a couple of months ago, to hear our experiences. (Les used it in Berlin and Moscow, and we hosted about ten visitors to Seattle.) But he chose (rightly) to focus on a friend of ours from California, who used it over a hundred times during a 16-month trip through Europe after college. That woman has been one of our inspirations in planning our trip to Esperantujo.
In other news, we rented a 10x19 storage locker in Seattle, near the boat, for putting all our belongings in. Even though we don't need the full space yet, we'll start using it next week when we rent a Zipcar cargo van and move everything from our current small storage locker in Bellevue. During the next few months we can gradually pack up things not used very often and bring them to the locker, instead of having our apartment filled with boxes.
