Many many moons ago, I traveled to Europe with a program called Servas that essentially set yo up with people in other countries and allowed you to stay with them for a few days. A quick Google effort reveals that, indeed, the organization is still around. This was pre-widespread-Internet days, and so what the group did was give you a stack of books with people's names and numbers, and you had to arrange the stay via the telephone and a archaic system of communicating whereby word were written on paper and actually sent in an"envelope" to another person, thus conveying a message. Anyway, Servas was cool, and offered me, a fresh-faced kid right out of college, the opportunity to meet and stay with other people who I am sure I would never have met otherwise. It got me out of the hostel system, too, which can be both hectic, over-crowded and annoying.

Well, in the modern age we have the Internet and we have enterprising people eager to make these types of connections easier. And we have a new program called the Couch Surfing Project, a Web site that lets travelers and adventurers get a unique taste of local life. The project is the brainchild of Casey Fenton, who got hold of a university list serve and e-mailed hundreds of local students asking for a place to crash. Rather soon after, he received scads of e-mails from students offering their couches and their friendship him. Very nice. And so for now, Couch Surfing is a free, nonprofit service with more than 60,000 members. Some seven continents are represented (although we haven't confirmed this and wonder where in Antarctica one can find a couch....and close to 200 countries.

Could be a very cool opportunity not just to reduce the cost of travel, but to get in with the locals.

Filed under: Activism, Arts and Culture, Learning, Business, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America, Antarctica