Living with the locals(2)
"We actually learned to rent houses and apartments when we were living in Europe," says Beijing expat Allison DeLusque, "because it was much cheaper and certainly easier to have a kitchen for children. My kids are 4 and 6, so it's often easier to buy some local food and enjoy dinner at home while the kids go to sleep."
Interns and other workers in transit have also taken advantage of the site's short-term listings. Companies like Wimdu are a market outgrowth of social websites that have long catered to travelers who want to experience local life with locals, not guides operating from sterile hotel settings.
Sites such as Couchsurfing.com and Hospitality Club have millions of members who thrive on being guests of like-minded hosts.
In the new wave of sites, the profiles are more about the properties, not the people. In a recent promotion in Europe, Vugteveen says, a company contest has promoted "the world's best job", in which the winner will get to be a "bed tester" for Wimdu and travel the continent "with a bag of money and a camera".
And then there's Xia Jie, who enjoys being a hutong host so much you sense she's already got the world's best job.
"When we lost the rights to our home in the '60s and '70s," she says, "the people around me were uninvited strangers. Now I am surrounded by people I am happy to share a bottle of wine with - and I do! I love for my guests to sit in my courtyard and enjoy what we've been able to create here."
Her guests might stay for a night or a month, savoring the traditional one-story siheyuan architecture with its gracefully curving roofs. That, says Wimdu's Vugteveen, is giving travelers a sense of a city that no hotel can match.
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