Take a father who is leaving again.
And now take a daughter who feels like ET, the Extra-Terrestrial, lost and alone on planet Earth, a dramatically old-fashioned girl (she can't dance, unpretty, not rich, and joy of joys, a bit depressed) who for the first time rents a room of a perpetually departing parent to passing tourists.
Short but necessary flashback. It's a Tuesday evening. Catastrophic ad. The shortest in the history of humanity. Photographs of rare ugliness. Non-existent house rules. Price so high you’re embarassed to say. Those are all things that should be reported in the “Handbook of what not to do when you publish your first ad on AIRBNB".
But destiny is kind to that girl. She sits still for hours, with her heart rate set to zero. She can't believe her room is really online.
The traveling parent of the unpretty girl is greeted with the strumming of harps and the blasts of trumpets among the gods of Olympus: he becomes, without his knowledge, a host, a mythological figure, bringer of light and chaos with a henchman (co-host) ready and willing to do his bidding.
The girl who can't dance just has to wait patiently for the day when a rich dupe would take the bait.
This is now where one of the most eccentric living beings who has ever touched foot on earth comes in, a guy named Grigoris who miraculously, two days later, books that room.
The freaky girl, texting with that guy online just keeps sending her messages (and to think her mother had warned her “Don’t accept sweets from strangers” ...), who later turned out to be a gorgeous greek boy, a Sandokan kind of guy with a pilgrim stick and a small ax in the backpack, I was saying, the freaky girl confirms her five o’clock reservation. State of pure, unprejudiced amazement. Butterflies in her stomach.
And now make sure the greek boy meets the akward girl on a rainy day in Milan.
Let those two get to know each other better, by the fireplace with toast and tea and cakes. Their cares, their looks, their words.
Now make them travel together, being involved in each other’s personal lives, up to Cape North, in Greece and then in Alicante, at Grigoris’ sister’s house (a mythological host, too!).
The construction of a picaresque friendship triggered by AIRBNB, an unlikely, crazy and strange friendship like all friendships, bouncing from one point to another of the five continents.
The combination of grim melancoly and insecurity becomes a faded memory. Then, without knocking, self-confidence breaks in, destroying everything like a lava flow.
When we see the reality of what can happen when we open the doors of our house or, rather, I should say, when we open ourselves to the world. Now that freaky girl can say for sure: if she didn’t rent her room on AIRBNB, she would have missed all this. After all, this is a miracle of hosting, is it not?
