Couch Surfing!

So I've never heard of this before, but I found this website today. It's called Couch Surfing. What is it, you ask? Well, it's not sitting on your couch skimming through TV channels, it's so much more exciting than that.

Couch Surfing is a huge online community of people that are willing to open up their houses for free to let travelers stay with them, hang out with them, show them around their place of residence, and just be generally hospitable. It's not just an American thing, in fact, there are over 200 countries represented in this and over 800,000 couch surfers.

After discovering this two things came to mind. One - this would be a GREAT way to experience a road trip across the U.S. AND a great way to experience Europe. You could do it with a friend or by yourself, either way it would be awesome. Just crashing on people's couches and hanging out with them all over the country/countries. Two - It would be so awesome to have my own place to host couch surfers. It would be such a cool ministry to be able to serve others by letting them use your couch, feeding them, and getting to know them. It's not even something that's very time consuming, you could be hosting couch surfers while working or going to school full-time.

The biggest question from people is: "Is it safe?" which is a good and valid question. They explain all the safety precautions on the website. Things like verifying identity and most importantly, user reviews. On every couch surfer's account you can see all the reviews they've been given as either a host or a guest, so it's basically just seeing someone's reputation with people. If you're a host you can decline any request to stay at your house, and they can't find out where you live until you tell them. Also, the stats on the website kind of speak for themselves. I was on just now and on their statistics page it says that in the past week, there were 14,180 positive, 22 negative feedback. That's a pretty dang good chance for something positive. They also posted that overall 99.794 percent of all experiences are positive (That's 2,058,419 positive experiences!)

Basically I'm just stoked for this. I kind of want to start doing it this summer, but I don't have any money. Might have to wait a little longer. I can't wait to see Europe and meet a bunch of people using this site. Seriously, I AM PUMPED!

Check it out - Couchsurfing.com