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This summer, my family and I decided to do a home exchange for our vacation. This means that for two weeks, we lived in the house of some family we’d never met, and they lived in ours. Half of the people I tell this to ask me a series of questions, often beginning with: Did they sleep in your bed? (Yes.) On your linens? (Yes.) Did they steal anything? (No.) But surely they broke something? (Not really.)
If you are in this group, then you might be too squeamish for house swapping. As the many websites dedicated to the practice will tell you, this is a cheap, convenient, and popular way to travel. But it is also a form of willing identity theft. For two weeks, this family drove our car, rode our bikes, and cooked in our kitchen. Their daughters played with my daughter’s dolls, and their sons wore my son’s pirate costumes. For all I know the mom wore my clothes every day. That part was not in our informal agreement, but given the weird imposter feel of the arrangement, it could have been tempting.
I got the idea from my brother-in-law. He had signed up first, and one night he was at our house on the site checking on who had responded to him. This lead-up phase works much the same way as with online dating sites. You post a picture of your house and wait to see who bites. You can also initiate contact with people you’re interested in. I urged him to be aspirational and only contact people who lived in chateaus. Yes, this is just like contacting potential mates who are too good looking or otherwise out of your league. But, just as with dating, I convinced him that they had some flaw that would cancel out the family crest. In this case, it was shaky English. Owners of chateaus offered access to “musculation” rooms (exercise rooms) and nearby “equitation” (horse-back riding). One promised décor that was “castle-typical.” Ha ha, I thought. Such French inbreds would be lucky to stay in my 1940s Wardman.
The next day we signed up ourselves, and noticed another parallel to dating sites: The route to signing up involves encouraging fantasy. We took pictures of our house, which we described as a “large light filled house” in the “heart of Washington.” We took advantage of the European crush on Obama by adding “15 minutes from the White House,” hoping to prompt visions of Obama running past our front door every morning, or Bo wandering into the yard. My husband milked this beautifully: “One of the most striking things about our neighborhood these days is that it is jammed with Obama people,” he wrote. “Many of his staffers and advisers live near us.” We did not mention that they escape in the summer to avoid the killer humidity and the mosquitoes.
We got bites from Italy, Spain, France, California, Canada, New England. We imagined ourselves biking around Tuscany, sight-seeing in Madrid. Ultimately, reality set in. Nibbles turned into e-mail exchanges where we and our potential partners sussed each other out. City or country? How many beds? How many kids? How big is your car? Do the bikes have flat tires? Wi-Fi or no? We haggled over details and dates and finally settled with, not noblemen, but our French socioeconomic equivalent—a nice, middle-class family from Brittany, with four kids, and plenty of toys, bikes, and bedrooms. That’s one more kid than we have, but I figured French children are famous for being docile and proto-adult, so they wouldn’t do too much damage.
Writing in the New York Times recently about her summer rentals in Cape Cod, novelist Jumpa Lahiri describes inspecting the kitchens: “the stale McCormick spices, the speckled enamel stockpots in which countless visitors have boiled their corn.” I have rented a couple of beach houses and recognize the sensation. The standard décor—the framed lighthouses, the wooden birds, the scented honey—is supposed to provide some light architecture for your imagination without filling in too many details, like a stage set for a not yet written play. On our beach vacations, the children run around pretending to be lost mariners, while we chat about beach houses we’d like to own some day.
Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.
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