🤩What a wonderful day to be alive! Hakuna Matata!
🐝🐝I'm Brian and my favorite animal are bees

🌍🌏🌎I want to make the world a better place and have a lot of ambition.
🧳I love living in new cities, I feel like visiting cities for just a bit is too short.
🌐I wish humanity could consider ourselves one united country and eliminate the need for borders.
🦸‍♂🦸‍♀I'm a global citizen, a natural cosmopolitan.
💬I plan to live everywhere and learn every single language before I die.
⌚If I have time, I will do everything along the way as well🙃
❓Will you join me?

🧬My recent life story:
🌎before I was 16 year old, I had never left the USA
🏡then in summer 2016, my family hosted some high school exchange students which opened my eyes to the world
🗼in France I did a 3-week exchange during 2016-17 winter break and became addicted
🥨in Germany - last year of high school and learned German in 2017-18
🗼in France - first year of college and learned French in 2018-19
🌻in Luxembourg - summer construction internship in 2019
🎓in Switzerland - second year of college in 2019-20
🌵in Arizona, USA, I did an internship at a solar panel company in 2020-21
🥨in Germany - last year of college, now working
🚂After that, where will I go?

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

🐣 Even before I found out about couchsurfing, I knew something like this must exist.
👂I heard about it from a friend who had a wonderful experience and I wanted to try it for myself.
💡Now that I've tried it, this is definitely the best idea anyone has ever had.
😇I like hosting and meeting beautiful souls.
✨I'm trying to become more spontaneous in a manageable way.

Check me out on:
🌳https://www.trustroots.org/profile/brian.shaposky
🐝https://www.bewelcome.org/members/brian.shaposky
🕸️https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian_Shaposky
🖇https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian0smith
(I don't update these as often, Couchsurfing is my main one)

Interests

• humanitarian relief
• politics
• drawing
• hiking
• skiing
• engineering
• philosophy
• food
• friends
• freedom
• learning languages
• learning new things
• self improvement
• living abroad
• dreaming
• space
• creating
• thinking
• fruit
• overthinking
• discovering new cultures
• construction
• interesting conversations
• being in nature
• debating
• uniqueness
• critical thinking
• open mind
• too many to list
• waffles
• contemplating
• international politics
• civil engineering
• problem solving
• good books
• helping others
• unity
• changing the world
• philosophical conversations
• having good conversations
• complexity
• making the world a better place
• peacejam
• making others happy

Music, Movies, and Books

Books📚
[https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/98929019-brian-smith]
🦅Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
👑The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
👻The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi
🐤To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
💯All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

My Bible📔:
🕊Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

News📰:
🔵Deutsche Welle DW
🔥Al Jazeera English
ZDF, Franceinfo, Focus Taiwan, Times of India (podcast)

News Commentary🦜:
🎧The David Pakman Show (podcast)
🤨The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Board games🎲:
🃏Double solitaire
🤖Ricochet Robots
💬Anomia
🏘Catan
🌳Kodama
🦉Wingspan (Flügelschlag)

TV Shows📺:
🦴Shadow and Bone
🌊Avatar the Last Airbender
🧠Phineas and Ferb (I'll always be a child at heart)

Movies 🎥
[https://letterboxd.com/brian_shaposky]
🔪Knives out
🪐Avatar (with the Blue ppl)
💫Star Wars (favorite: Rogue one)
😎Django
🐍Mowgli/Jungle book
🆙Up (and most of Pixar's stuff)

Music🎵
[https://open.spotify.com/user/brian2357]
🎶Instrumental stuff like Linsey Sterling or Kurzgesagt's background music
🌆Lin-Manuel Miranda⭐
💬foreign songs (so that I don't have to listen to the words)
🎼I also like the song "Don't judge on me" (I'm not sure if this song actually exists, but it should, and it should be about people not judging each other)

Video Games💻:
🪐Spore
🌳Minecraft
🐞Pokémon
👽Among Us
🔥💧Fireboy and Watergirl

Programming Languages👾:
🐍Python

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

☮✝☪🕉☸✡☯和 --- PEACEJAM --- 和☯✡☸🕉☪✝☮
In February 2019, I went to a PeaceJam conference in Leuven, Belgium.
⚡These conferences have such a great energy!
🕺🏻being a Mentor gave me the opportunity to meet so many great people, like
🧚‍♂🧚‍♀the other mentors,
✌🏻the students,
🧕🏽and even briefly, Tawakkol Karmen, who is the Nobel Peace Laureate at this conference.
✨PeaceJam is a youth empowerment organisation that hosts conferences for 12-18 year old students,
☮trying to use Nobel Peace Laureates to inspire them to take action for Peace.
🗻I've been to these conferences before as a student in the Rocky Mountain Division,
🧚‍♂but this time I went as a Mentor since I'm older, and it was such a great experience!
👨‍👦‍👦I got to be with a smaller group of students to help guide them through the conference.
😇The students in my group where so inspiring to me even, and I hope I was able to inspire them.

Teach, Learn, Share

🧠I appreciate everything about life and want to understand how everything works
🙌🏻I try to make all of my life decisions from me, myself, and I, and not from expectations of society
👷🏻I love to analyze cities from a city planning perspective
🔢I love trying to figure out and learning about STEM related challenges
🌲I prefer to eat vegetarian for environmental reasons, but I'm flexible
👩🏾‍🦱👨🏾‍🦱Black lives matter!

🏙️🌆Places I'd like to *live in* one day (not visit) in no particular order:
🌎Panama City or Colón, Chile, Uruguay,
🌎NYC, Quebec, any US/Canadian West Coast metropolis except LA,
🌍Sweden, Spain, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Brussels,
🌏Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand,
🌍Jordan, South Africa,
🏡interested? hmu lets move there together and be roomies.

💬🦜Languages I'd definitely like to learn one day:
✅English ✅German ✅French Spanish Chinese
Learning languages takes a lot of work and I'd like to also live somewhere I can get regular immersion so I am waiting to start some until such time that I know I can finish.
Considering: Arabic Hindi Portuguese Italian Navajo ASL Japanese, and whatever your language is 😉

What I Can Share with Hosts

🙉My favorite kind of hanging out is talking and walking.
🤔I'm incredibly curious so I especially love long discussions about how to change the world and less ambitious things!
👥I love to share stories and make new meaningful friendships.
🌱Let's chill in a park with a picnic🍓, frisbee🥏, or a hammock.
🤢Or do anything really ❗except🍻bars/pubs/clubs aren't my thing.
🌳I love being outside, like taking walks🚶or bike rides🚲
😶Even after all this though, sometimes I am more shy than I realize.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, United States