for the past five weeks that I've been in Madrid I have spent $59 93 cents on
food and a big fat zero on accommodations how is this possible you
ask through a not super well-known method of traveling called workaway
hello and welcome back to The Bliss Bean. So according to Wikipedia a workaway is
where volunteers or workawayers are expected to contribute a pre-agreed
amount of time per day in exchange for lodging and food which is provided by
their host. That's the most basic idea of it, you're just doing some sort of work
in exchange for room and board but there are so many different kinds of workaways
out there you might have heard of WWOOFing which is an acronym that has a
way too many different interpretations but it's where you work on an organic
farm and you get food and a place to stay that was the first kind of workaway
that I learned about and I was like well I don't know if I'm cut out for farming
but luckily there's a whole world of different types of opportunities out
there so workaways range from like taking care of kids and teaching
languages to working on art projects or building projects or working at hostels
or bed and breakfasts I found a workaway where you stay at a Buddhist
meditation center I found one where you work at a cat sanctuary I stayed away
from that one because I didn't get a rabies vaccine so I'm sticking to humans
for this trip but yeah there are tons of people all around the world who are
looking for people like you to help them and the hub on the internet for
finding all these opportunities is a website called workaway.info yeah I was
about to say .com but there's no .com it's just .info
workaway.info is a website used by both hosts and workawayers to help them find each
other there is a membership fee for this
website for a yearly membership for a solo account it's thirty six euros and
for a couple's account it's forty eight euros according to my research which I
conducted by simply logging out of my account you can find hosts without
making an account so you can do some research and kind of get a feel for what
opportunities are out there before you go ahead and make that commitment for a
year's membership so on this website each host has a profile where they list
their availabilities what sort of help they're looking for maybe some photos
what reviews other workawayers have left for them and then you as a workawayer also
create your own profile where you tell people about yourself and where you're
traveling what your skills are it's basically like writing your resume
except instead of talking about how amazing you are with spreadsheets or
writing emails you're probably talking about how many languages you know or how
well you get along with new people actually it's kind of a lot like a
resume I think if you're serious about workaway then buying the membership is
well worth the price they have over 40,000 hosts in over 170 countries
their staff check over each profile you can reach out to them if you have
any questions there's features where you can find other workawayers that are nearby
to hang out with or if you know where you're traveling you can find other
people who are travelling to the same place and maybe find a travel buddy it's
just a very very useful resource and I honestly don't know how you would go
about doing a work away without using the work away website so that's the gist
of it I want to tell you a little bit about
the experience that I've personally had so far with work away and also answer
some of the questions that people sent in on Instagram some people asked very
general travel related questions which I definitely want to answer but maybe in a
different video and some people just said hi
so hi so I started reaching out to potential hosts months in advance and I
would recommend doing it as soon as you start planning your trip because they're
either gonna be happy that you're contacting them so early or they're
gonna tell you to email them again at a later date so you really can't go wrong
it's a win-win as for response times I mean these are real people that you're
communicating with so it varies some people respond in a day some people lots
of people never respond so the best thing you can do is just start early and
play the numbers game and send lots and lots of messages I knew which countries
I wanted to visit which I think is an important first step because as I said
there's over 40,000 hosts so if your search criteria is just anyone in the
world who is willing to host you you're probably gonna get a little bit
overwhelmed as for the kind of work that I wanted to do I wasn't really sure
about that part so I was mainly leaning towards opportunities where I could
apply my photography and video skills and kind of shying away from the ones
where you stay with families because honestly I wasn't sure how I would fare
in dealing with children but I didn't want to cross it out so I tried it out
and I'm really glad I did because it ended up being perfect for me so yeah
finally after lots of emailing a lot of unsuccessful attempts I finally found a
family where the dates that I was traveling worked for them the next step
was to arrange a phone call to see if we clicked and my parents also joined in
just to see who their daughter would be staying with honestly it was a little
awkward because there wasn't even that much to talk about we talked about basic
things like what the schedule would look like and how far away was the school and
how far away is the city center and how much free time would I have but I just
overall felt pretty comfortable with them my parents felt comfortable the
host family felt comfortable I think and so it was a pretty quick and easy call
afterwards the mom like talked to her daughters to see if they liked me and
then she emailed me to say that yes they would like to invite me and I responded
that yes I would like to come the few emails that followed involved
me sending my detailed flight information talking about who will pick
me up from the airport figuring out how to get a metro card for myself did I
have a back-up plan if things didn't work out? not really I was gonna be in
Madrid so I knew that if I needed a place to stay there's plenty of hostels
in the city center I speak good enough Spanish like I wouldn't be lost but if
you're doing a work away in a more remote area or if you don't speak the
language that they speak there then yes it probably becomes more important to
have a back-up plan like anyone that you might know in the country who may be
able to help you out or looking into transportation options if you had to
leave things like that I didn't need a back-up plan though
because everything went amazingly as soon as I got there they were so nice
to me I got my own cute little room the girls that I was taking care of drew a
picture of me the mom printed out a schedule for me and like drew out
exactly when my responsibilities were and when I had free time if you're
interested I did make like a day in the life of a workawayer video basically I
would get the girls ready in the morning for school take them to school take them
to after-school activities help them with homework it really was not a lot at
all and it just felt like being a big sister the cool thing about this work
way is that in the end I actually ended up doing a video for my host mom about a
research project that she's working on so I kind of got the best of both worlds
I got to make videos which is what I initially wanted to do but also just
like be a part of family life which I didn't initially realize how helpful and
like comforting that is when you're traveling by yourself and I think that's
kind of at the core of the work away concept obviously they're all very
different and I've only done two so I'm not an expert but you're not there to
just do your job sleep eat their food and then leave you're there to make
connections so it's a different style of traveling but if you click with the
people that you're with it is pretty amazing another question was would my
host family mind if I went out at night I'm not really the type of person to go
out late at night but with both families that I've stayed with I basically had
weekends free and then weekday evenings sometimes you have responsibilities to
take care of but I found that with both families they've been incredibly
accommodating and like explicitly said to me that if
I do have somewhere I want to go just like let them know and we can figure
something out maybe so it depends on who you're staying with but I definitely in
my experience I've never felt like I've been trapped at home and unable to leave
as for socializing I've met some people through Instagram and the workaway
website and then also this website called Meetup honestly like finding
friends while traveling is something I need to get better at it's a skill I'm
learning but it's definitely possible especially if you're in a city like
Madrid you just have to go out and find the opportunities just because you're
traveling alone doesn't mean that you have to spend all of your time alone
because there are plenty of people traveling alone and you guys just have
to find each other okay I've been talking for like an hour and I'm also a
little bit sick so this might have just destroyed my voice but I hope you found
this video helpful if you have more questions you can ask me you can go on
the work away website there is a work away subreddit that I found pretty
helpful honestly just google any questions you
have you'll probably find answers let me know in the comments if you've done any
workaways or if you haven't what country would you travel to and I will