CURRENT MISSION

Know more about your culture (yes, yours!) and practice different languages.

ABOUT ME

I feel passionate about intercultural exchanges. That's why I travel a lot and I try to practice my foreign languages.But being of a different culture does not mean only being of a different citizenship! If you are anything else than a young West European PhD candidate engineer, I am interested in exchanging with you.

PHILOSOPHY

Here are a few principles that I have and that can give you some picture of how I tend to think and behave. I am moved by hope far more than by fear. This means that I quickly trust people, for instance. When I am discussing, I often try to find a compromise of the ideas that would fit everyone best, and not just one group. Finally, after having made a personnal choice, I often fully commit to it.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I started being part of the CouchSurfing community in mid-2011, when I arrived in Illinois to do my studies. When I travel around in the Americas, I want to get an insight of who the people are. So I have been hosted in New York and in Chicago a few times. Then I decided to give a little back to the community, so I got verified and I have been hosting surfers from time to time in Urbana and now in Paris.

Interests

I like being with friends above all : be go out together, often in order to party. I try to have friends from different backgrounds. That's why, when I was on my Urbana-Champaign campus, half my friends were American and the other half were from abroad.
But when I am on my own, I listen to music (EDM), surf the web. I like doing sports, especially running, biking and judo. I also spend a lot of time helping the Free Software community : that means that I offer support to people who try using freedom-respecting software like Firefox, Ubuntu, etc. That activity may be a little geeky, I know. ;-)

• culture
• dancing
• running
• partying
• movies
• traveling
• music
• cycling
• sports
• engineering
• languages
• software
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

In France and Belgium, comic books are quite a huge phenomenon, comparable in size to Japanese mangas and US comics. We call them BDs and I have many of them, mostly action ones (XIII, Thorgal, Lanfeust).
I love movies that are inspired by comic books too, but mostly not superhero ones. I like how daring those films can be as far as the visual effects are concerned. Typical examples are Sin City, Immortal. But I also enjoyed Inception, The Matrix or Cloud Atlas, for instance.
As for music, I like Electronic Dance Music. This goes from trance to club music, from house to electronica. In clubs, I dare dance on the music and not just bounce up and down. When dancing with girls, I prefer to keep it "classy", contrary to too many people in nightclubs.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I organized a big dance show event for many famous French universities. I climbed on Mount Fuji in Japan and in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. I wrote a modest app called Discvur (https://launchpad.net/~agmenor/+archive/discvur). I created and cloned a few GMO bacteria. I took part in the traditional military parade of Bastille Day. Half of my DVD collection is made of German movies. I left the building.

Teach, Learn, Share

I once installed the Ubuntu operating system after one of my CouchSurfing hosts asked me to do so on his computer. I will always say yes to help you doing this too!
If I host you at my place, I would love you to meet my friends and discover the city I live in!

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, Germany, South Korea, United States