Eight cities. Thirty-three days. 12.500 kilometers. A motor home transformed into a zeppelin. And one goal: live those experiences hidden to anyone traveling as a tourist; plus, get to know cities with the help of others and enlist the participation of its people.

To sum up, that’s been ExperienceLess, an eight-city romp full of rewarding impressions from both a personal and professional standpoint.

ExperienceLess is a spinoff of trourist, a social network for trips by non-tourists created for the two-fold purpose of enjoying unique experiences among friends and underscoring our principal ideal: to live the places, rather than merely visit them. During our crusade, we’ve scampered through Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Istambul and Barcelona – cities in which we often resorted to the unconventional in order to meet our objectives.

Seated in squares, parks, even a metro, we’ve held up a cardboard poster bearing the message: “Help! I’m ExperienceLess. I don’t want to visit your city, I want to live it. Thanks.” As you can readily see, our setting was not unlike that of a homeless person and the name of our project’s initiative was not pure happenstance.

Admittedly, there were people who when they saw us understood nothing. Others observed us with indifference. Generally speaking, though, we were quite pleased with the hospitality shown. People gave their time and interest so that we could walk away from their cities with more than just mute stares from historical buildings and museums.

Our backpack of experiences was filled with all kinds of goodies: home-cooked Dutch cuisine with a student in Amsterdam; a hoola-hoop class in a Berlin park, a birthday bash with a Budapest boy, smoking a water pipe atop an Istanbul rooftop, and collectively cooking a potato omelet with a couple in Barcelona, with a follow-up concert to boot. Not bad for four amigos who before the trip were ExperienceLess.