ABOUT ME

I am an English language teaching assistant in Innsbruck as well as Hall in Tirol, Austria. I am always up to meet new people and to travel.

PHILOSOPHY

I try to meet people half way there, including myself

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I have very little as of yet. I just opened an account sort of recently. It seems like the perfect thing for me, though, because the most important part of traveling for me is meeting people. Staying in hostels is great because you can easily meet a bunch of travelers, but couch surfing allows one to meet local people, which is also important. I look forward to seeing how this works out.

Interests

I enjoy all kinds of outdoor activities: hiking, rock climbing, biking, skiing, kayaking, camping, scuba diving, jumping off of tall rocks in to water, etc.

I also enjoy foreign languages, reading, watching movies, traveling,

I enjoy cooking with and/or for other people.

I enjoy talking and listening

• birds
• fish
• books
• singing
• dining
• cooking
• movies
• reading
• traveling
• billiards
• socializing
• outdoor activities
• cycling
• fishing
• hiking
• kayaking
• camping
• surfing
• scuba diving
• skiing
• rock climbing
• languages
• beaches

Music, Movies, and Books

My taste in movies and in music is eclectic. My favorite films are the Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), Lost in Translation (Coppola), Before Sunrise (Linklater). I do not tend to like tent pole, super conventional Hollywood films, but I try to look for the things that are done well in anything I watch.

Music I have, like everyone, pretty eclectic taste. I can appreciate more or less any style of music. I do not tend to enjoy top 40 style stuff, though everything has its place.

I am not well read but enjoy reading. Right now I am trying to work on my German by reading German stuff.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Let's do something cool together!

but so I don't cop out on this question, here's a very self indulgent account of a self aggrandizing story:

In the summer of 2007 I did a month long outdoor leadership and sea kayaking course in Southeast Alaska. About two weeks in I began to be aware of the odor of my body and decided to go for a bath. I hiked to a river nearby to find the banks lined with decapitated and/or disemboweled salmon corpses. Some corpses were completely intact excepting that their eyes had been pecked out by birds. As I hiked upstream, the density of salmon corpses on the bank and the intensity of the stench diminished. A 20 lb pink salmon flopped out of the water across my path. I watched it flop frantically until it managed to land in a shallow pool of water. It occurred to me that the salmon, which had returned to the river of their birth in anticipation of spawning, were so densely packed in the river water that many less fortunate salmon must have beached themselves and been unable to get back in to the water, suffocating and then eventually having their eyeballs eaten by birds, while the many decapitated and/or disembowled salmon must have been chomped on by bears, who must've been gorging themselves on the readily available buffet of salmon. When I finally made it up past the salmon and began to bathe I was a substantial distance from the beach. The cold water and the tingle of dr. bronner's mint castille soap - I have never enjoyed bathing so much, until a black bear pops out of the woods like 15 feet upstream from me and snaps a salmon out of the water. Jaw slightly agape, I watch, stunned, as it rips its jaws back and forth, snapping the salmon's spine without difficulty.

Then it looks at me. For a second our eyes remain locked.

I remember you're supposed to make noise, so I aggressively greeted the bear and menacingly inquired about its catch "HEY BEAR!! HOW"S THE FUCKING FISH? etc." and for a while I'm just shouting at this black bear as it stares at me blankly with a limp salmon hanging out of the sides of its gigantic mouth. Then all at once it drops the salmon and books it in to the forest. So I sang for a while, pretty pszched not to have been mauled, and it was in this fully naked, joyful state of singing gratitude that I was surprised by a handful of other trip members emerging from the other side of the river.

Teach, Learn, Share

I am very down to learn languages, and to teach what I know.

I am very down to learn how to cook the kinds of food you like to cook, and to show you how to cook what I know.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria

Countries I’ve Lived In

Austria, Israel, United States