I will never forget this awkward feeling when at around midnight you enter the dark and small, but very cozy flat in the suburbs of Vilnius. A sleepy host offers you a cup of hot green tea with a piece of delicious mille-feuille cake, but you kindly refuse the invitation, looking forward to bedding down on a warm and soft mattress as soon as possible. This is what my first experience of staying in a foreign country through the Couchsurfing platform looked like. You might have never heard of it, but couchsurfing is a social network that currently unites more than 400 thousand hosts with more than 4 million surfers worldwide. To be honest, by this time I had already been an accomplished globetrotter, but my experience had not gone beyond staying…show more content… What do you do when you feel like booking a bed at your desired destination? I assume that visiting one of the website offering myriads of available properties for rent worldwide would the most common answer. In just a few clicks away you can find literally millions of reviews written by the real guests, browse photos, read the descriptions and eventually find the most suitable option for your trip. Conversely, couchsurfing is rather a lottery with the fifty percent chance of winning. Unfortunately, you can never be completely sure what the person on the other side of the screen is like. On the one hand, you may find yourself in the annoying community of rather talkative host, irredeemably ruining your holiday. On the other hand, you may spend a couple of unforgettable sleepless nights chatting about traveling and life experiences over a beer. Who knows, perhaps next time by clicking on the “find a host” button you would end up having a blast in the astonishing apartments, situated atop a prestigious skyscraper with an extraordinary dizzying 360-degree views of the hustle and bustle of the life of the big city, stretching to the