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I stood outside of the Termini train station in Rome waiting to be picked up by someone named Matteo in a blue Volkswagen Golf. I passed the time in the rain squinting at every car that passed. I was anxious because I had only seen a picture of Matteo and was worried that we would have trouble recognizing each other. My phone vibrated, announcing a new text message: “I right in front you.” I was so nervous that I would miss the car that I failed to see the blue Golf parked two feet away.

Matteo, dressed in a flawless dark blue Italian suit, stepped out of the car with an umbrella for me. We both smiled shyly and kissed each other on the cheek. It was the first time for both of us and we weren’t sure what to say or how to act. After a week of e-mails and text messages we had just now met in person. A friend and I were going to sleep at his apartment for the weekend. Our first CouchSurfing experience had begun.

The next two days were unforgettable. Matteo, a 30-year-old civil engineer, was our “touristic bus” as he drove my friend and I all over Rome. Our faces were pressed against the windows as he told us about Rome’s modern and ancient marvels in his accented English. We ended up staying with his childhood friend, Luca, a 30-year-old liver transplant surgeon, because Matteo had an unexpected work conflict. Immediately after we picked up Luca, who had been working and living in London, at the airport, he trusted us with the keys to his one-bedroom apartment. Luca offered us his bed because he would be working at a hospital for 24 hours straight, but my friend and I felt more comfortable sharing the small but comfortable pullout couch. Both mornings, Matteo and Luca called to check in and give us advice on how to see the very best of Rome. When we parted, I knew that I would probably never see either of them again. However, this short visit strengthened my belief that kindness among strangers still exists, despite my parents’ reaction when I told them I was going to stay with people I met on the Internet.

The CouchSurfing Project is an online global network that connects travelers who are looking for a place to stay with locals who are willing to provide accommodations for free. As of March 1, 2007, the network has more than 174,336 registered members in 213 countries. Unlike social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, which keep members connected online with people they already talk to, CouchSurfing.com is intended to bring complete strangers together offline to create unique bonds that cross cultures and continents. The CouchSurfing motto is “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time.” Judging by the more than 38,000 successful surfings and the more than 44,000 friendships created on the site, CouchSurfing is truly changing lives.

This is how it works: Anyone can set up a free online profile that describes who they are, what they do, where they live and whether they are able to host travelers. Surfers, or travelers, can search for available hosts using criteria such as location, age, language and gender, and then e-mail the ones they feel compatible with. If the potential host also feels comfortable with the arrangement, then they can make plans to meet face to face. Visits can be as short as a cup of coffee or as long as a few months, but most visits are one or two nights. Members can leave references about people they hosted or stayed with on their profiles. This vouching system puts safety and trust into the hands of the CouchSurfing community.

A computer programmer in Conway, N. H., named Casey Fenton created the project. Fenton, then an overworked 22-year-old, needed a break and found a cheap, last-minute plane ticket to Iceland. Not knowing a soul in the country and with only four days to plan and no place to stay, Fenton hacked into the University of Iceland’s student directory. He spammed 1,500 students with a message saying he was coming in a few days and wanted to see the real Iceland. He received more than 50 replies and ended up spending the weekend sleeping in a garage and partying with newfound friends he has kept to this day. When he returned to the United States he decided that he wanted to travel like that all the time. Creating the network took him four years, but in January 2004, with help from three friends, CouchSurfing.com debuted and the four founders gave members the opportunity to make friends out of strangers while traveling.

So members will see that you are serious about the project, put up a picture, fill out the entire profile and make friends, says Justin Montgomery, 2006 graduate. Montgomery had plans with six hosts for his travels in Europe last summer when the CouchSurfing site crashed three days before he was supposed to go. The site was down for a month, from June to July 2006, but it was rebuilt and “CouchSurfing 2.0” has been stable and fully operational ever since. Montgomery lost all of his contacts and the e-mails he had sent to the hosts and had to start over with the interim CouchSurfing emergency board. Montgomery was lucky enough to connect with two members to host he and his mom in Italy.

In Genova, a 27-year-old student hosted Montgomery and his mom for two nights. Both of them had their own rooms and their host cooked them meals that used regional ingredients, he says. In return, they cooked a breakfast of eggs, sausage and toast so that their host could experience an American meal. Montgomery was upset that he wasn’t able to CouchSurf during the whole trip as he had planned, but it worked out, he says. After his mom left he continued to travel, met a couple from California in Prague and was invited to stay two nights with them.

“You shouldn’t just rely on CouchSurfing,” Montgomery says. “It makes things easier, but traveling in foreign countries forced me to develop interaction skills and make friends on my own.”

Jason Palikij, 2006 graduate, says CouchSurfing helped him get around in an unfamiliar environment and let him find out how other cultures perceive him. “I never thought of myself as a loud American,” Palikij says, “but my Swedish hosts commented that I was very opinionated.”

Palikij surfed with two couples while in Sweden for an academic conference. He says that having his hosts show him around was much better than a pre-bought package because they took it upon themselves to be his tour guides. Palikij’s first hosts took him to IKEA and made sure he found Swedish fish candy after he mentioned how much he enjoyed it in the United States. Eating with them gave him a lot of insight into what it is like to be a native Swede, he says. His hosts made a point of sitting down for meals together and introduced him to open-faced sandwiches, which he makes all the time now, he says. In return for their generosity Palikij brought his hosts wine as a gift and taught them drinking games.

“CouchSurfing is not for people who want to mooch,” Palikij says. “It’s a grassroots form of being a foreign ambassador for your country.”

As Palikij’s experience shows, hosts and surfers both take the exchange personally. The project is not about finding a free place to stay — it’s a way of gaining an insider perspective instead of just observing a country and its culture. Hosts let travelers into their homes and take them places they would never be able to find on their own as a regular tourist. Surfers need to be respectful and acknowledge the risk hosts take by inviting them into their daily lives, says Ethan Gilsdorf, a Boston-based freelance writer who is working on a travel anthology that includes CouchSurfing stories. Gilsdorf has hosted people from all over the world. It can be awkward if guests are not outgoing, but he has hit it off with most of his surfers, he says.

“There is always the potential for something bizarre to happen,” Gilsdorf says. “You just never know, so you have to take a leap of faith and extend your generosity. It’s liberating. In terms of spiritual benefit, by opening your heart and being trusting, you will be rewarded.”

When he’s traveling he’s reminded how similar people are all over the world and how easy it is to make a connection, he says. Gilsdorf found CouchSurfing in 2005 when he was looking for a way to cheaply fund a trip through Europe on assignment with the Boston Globe. He CouchSurfed in Iceland and one host took him to her secret hot springs spot. Gilsdorf describes the time they spent sitting in the hot springs under the stars as “one of those perfect moments.”

The idea of staying with random people you meet is not a new concept. People have been traveling this way forever, says Eric Lesage, CouchSurfing administrator and media coordinator. However, CouchSurfing broadens the range by giving travelers the opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds instead of having to rely on friends or friends of friends. The CouchSurfing community is unique because people are coming in with the same qualities, such as open-mindedness, trustworthiness and curiosity, and members are the ones participating in and developing the project, he says.

This global, tightly knit community spirit is also what makes CouchSurfing so safe, Lesage says. In the project’s three years of existence, there have been 96,474 positive experiences of CouchSurfers meeting together face-to-face and fewer than 185 reported negative ones. Most negative experiences are written to be warnings about members who are difficult to get along with or who do not show up when they said they would. CouchSurfing strongly encourages people to leave negative references if needed because they speak about a member’s history, Lesage says.

“We don’t want troublemakers,” Lesage says. “We care a lot about members’ safety, but CouchSurfing can’t be held accountable. We provide the tools and tips so that we can protect ourselves and other members.”

CouchSurfing is built on a foundation of trust. Safety tools include a system that lets members vouch for each other and privacy settings that let members adopt user names instead of using their real names. The site provides extensive safety tips for surfers, hosts, women traveling alone, and narrower groups such as vegetarians and families. Tips cover the whole surfing experience, from searching for a compatible host to exchanging contact info. References are the quintessential safety precaution because they come from real-life experience. Lesage says references aren’t anonymous because they want people to be held accountable for what they say. Mediators settle misunderstandings between members, but Lesage says he can count the number of times that has happened on his fingers.

Despite the number of overwhelmingly positive experiences, having an experience that doesn’t fulfill expectations is always a possibility. People who want to be part of the CouchSurfing community have to be willing to take that risk, says Bill Staples, professor of sociology.

“It’s important to be aware,” Staples says. “The Internet has the potential to link people and build a network based on common interests, but it will only work as well as the community decides it will.”

CouchSurfing.com members need to decide how far they want to put themselves out there, says Staples, the author of three books on surveillance. The problem with most social networking sites is people don’t always have control over their information and who can see it, he says. Member profiles on the CouchSurfing Web site are available for anyone with Internet access to see. Non-members can look through any of the content on the site, but they aren’t able to contact members, participate in chats or post any material. Members contact each other by sending e-mails through the CouchSurfing interface and do not get a member’s contact information unless he or she decides to give it out. For safety purposes, CouchSurfing monitors and records all communication sent through the site. The amount of personal information members want to post is entirely voluntary, but profiles show when and where the member last signed in unless the member changes his or her privacy settings. These safety features exist to help members, but unless members inform themselves about how to change their privacy settings, they may not be getting the amount of privacy they want.

Crystal Bock, a 25-year-old Lawrenceburg, Mo., resident, has been a surfer since 2004 and says it’s important that people trust and listen to themselves. She has to defend her decision to travel alone to Americans she encounters, but Europeans think nothing of it, she says. Bock thinks that solitary travelers are embraced more in Europe because the cultures and languages are so smashed together there that it’s not weird to be traveling alone. People put themselves in more danger driving somewhere than doing anything else, she says. Bock remembers one host telling her that when she came out of the CouchSurfing closet to her mom, her mom cried and refused to accept it. Her mom kept telling her, “I wish you would quit staying with strangers.” However, in the CouchSurfing community, strangers feel more like friends.

Bock is getting married in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in the fall and had been consulting with a wedding planner there. For several months they exchanged polite, businesslike e-mails until Bock looked up hosts in the area and saw her wedding planner listed. Since both found out they were CouchSurfers, they have changed their opinions of one another. “I feel like I know her already,” Bock says.

Besides changing the way she sees people, CouchSurfing has changed the way she travels, Bock says. Before, she focused on what she could see when she traveled, but now she focuses on whom she can meet and what adventures they can have together. A few of Bock’s more unusual experiences have been staying with a juggler/butter museum employee, sleeping in a storage unit because her host was in the process of moving, and dancing in the rain in front of the Alamo at 2 a.m. She says that with CouchSurfing you get to experience so much more than the average tourist.

“I think it’s weird to pay $100 to sleep alone or even $15 to bunk with other people,” Bock says. “As CouchSurfers, we’re staying in an actual home and getting a friend who tells us ‘go here, don’t go here.’ We’re normal. They’re the weird ones.”

Since my initial experience in Rome, I’ve had three more unforgettable CouchSurfing experiences. I knew enough Italian to travel by myself in Italy, but I didn’t know any of the languages in the other countries I CouchSurfed in. I felt a little helpless and uncomfortable having to rely on a stranger to translate and provide for me. However, relying on my hosts gave me local insight I never would have had with a tour guide. In Berlin, our host, Chris, a 28-year-old with a Master of Science degree, taught my friend and I to cheat the train system by telling us how to avoid the ticket officers. In Brussels, my host, Ziggy, a 40-year-old painter, took me to the best Belgian chocolate shop and made sure I didn’t get ripped off when buying gifts for my family. In Namur, Belgium, my hosts, Julien, a 23-year-old astronomy researcher, and Aline, a 23-year-old student, introduced me to Belgian beer and took me to their favorite hole-in-the-wall fry stand. I may have done the dishes, slept on mattresses on the floor, and had to adapt to someone else’s schedule during my vacations, but staying with locals more than made up for any inconveniences I experienced. Without my hosts’ guidance, I probably would have let the language barrier keep me from trying anything that wasn’t touristy and harmless.

As for Matteo, who I thought I would never see again, he recently wrote me an e-mail titled “USA now!” He was traveling in the United States for business and he wanted to try and meet up. We were unable to get together, but the next day a CouchSurfer named Cesar, who is walking around the world, sent me an e-mail inquiring if my couch had a vacancy this weekend. I hope I will get the chance to repay the generosity I have received by letting Cesar into my own little world in Lawrence the way my hosts did for me in their cities.

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