CURRENT MISSION

Decide what to do in my holidays

ABOUT ME

Well I was raised in a small city in the north of Portugal called Viseu. It's said it's the heart of Portugal but it's so organized city it seems more like Austria, a Hungarian friend of mine said when she visited me. There I grew up helping my grandparents with farming, playing Playstation, reading adventure books, playing with my friends, studying for my dream and listening to a lot of underground hip-hop music while tagging all the city around and cover it with hundreds of stickers with political and social messages. Youth!

Studying hard I got into medical school and listening to hip-hop music took me to choose a medical school in Lisbon, the portuguese city where I could feed more my need of urbanity. And I fed it with a lot of beers in Bairro Alto, some social volunteering works and with a lot of Fado, our traditional music that speaks about destiny and remembers us, portuguese people, who we are if one day we get lost.

After 3 years living the freedom of Lisbon I needed to get lost and my Fado (destiny) was Budapest. So, 2 weeks after I recorded my first hip-hop album with my group "NovOrpheu", I left Portugal to start again and alone from the zero surrounded by the mysterious magyars. There I discovered the sense of borders and how beautiful it is if they are fictitious as they are for an European citizen inside European Union. Yes, I am European!, it was what I learned most wandering around Budapest for one year knowing nothing of Hungarian besides "egészségedre" and "Köszönöm" (I'm not proud of my shitty skills in Hungarian). I traveled a lot around Central and Eastern Europe and I discovered how sad it is to live in the southwestern point of Europe surrounded just by Spain and Atlantic Ocean - maybe you envy me but for me it's claustrophobic. After one year I could say Budapest and Danube river have changed my life and changed I decided to go back home with 2 more portuguese friends stepping on every single country of the Balkans- in Belgrade I had my 1st Couchsurfing experience and it was scaring - and Sicily and Tunisia and finally I was back home, Lisbon.

Lisbon has changed as the eyes staring at her (Lisbon is a woman with a lot of hills!) in the moment of the return. Full of fresh memories from some other Europe, Lisbon affirmed to me her singularity. She's a really different capital comparing to all the others I have seen. We both changed but we still love each other. To minimize the claustrophobic sensation I explained you before I decided to give a 2nd chance to Couchsurfing and I started hosting couchsurfers from all over the world and like that even in the southwestern corner of Europe I keep myself jumping over the borders and dreaming about what it's behind the wall.

At my side of the wall I discovered what was Poetry Slam and I kind of moved my creativity skills from hip-hop to these self-poetry performance competitions where my fear of being on the stage started to dissipate as I simply got used to it. However I managed to jump literally over the wall as well. I visited London and there I had an overdose of cosmopolitanism which made me think about moving there soon. I had the incredible opportunity to get into a humanitarian relief mission in Haiti for 2 months after the 12th January 2010 catastrophic earthquake- I want to be not just a citizen without borders but also a doctor without borders. I got into a research project in the Belgrade's Faculty of Medicine and there I lived a cold and snowing February "playing" with rats in the lab and falling in love with Serbia once again. Well it was my 5th time there and I still volim trube (love trumpets)!

Now I just got graduated - "E por isso sou doutor e sou fadista!". It seems I am already a doctor! But it still seems I am lying while I'm repeating it to myself. But it's true and I have to get use to it.

Thanks to the couchsurfer who alerted me about my empty profile description - now maybe I exaggerated a little bit :)

PHILOSOPHY

Let's talk about it at the dinner...

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to surf properly and the only time I tried (my 1st CS experience) I had a really bad impression. But I knew I had been just unlucky and I decided to give Couchsurfing a chance and then another chance and chance after chance I am still hosting regularly surfers who request me and also surfers who write to the group "last minute couch Lisbon". Now I am finally preparing my first successful surfing experience and experience after experience maybe I will get to know you.

Interests

I want to use Medicine as my passport to the word!
I will be a student forever... forever learning!
Poetry Slam is my language when I am on the stage...
Music sets the beat of my life! Let the beat change as life changes me...
A romance creates worlds and a poem should destroy them!
I will write a book!
Let's drink something and go out tonight!
News, I am starting to feel addicted to news... a new religion?
Cultures, strange cultures, make me feel stranger... anthropologist!
Travel by train (I love trains!), by air, by boat, by car, simply walking my street...
And interested about what doesn't interest me yet!

• books
• poetry
• performing arts
• humanitarian relief
• beer
• walking
• drinking
• boating
• news
• reading
• traveling
• music
• hip-hop music
• surfing
• anthropology
• medicine
• religion
• study abroad
• volunteering
• mountains

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Let's see, hummm, I:
- recorded an hip-hop album in 2009 with my group Novorpheu (www.soundcloud.com/novorpheu)
- fell in love with Budapest living there for one year as an Erasmus student
- am an urban cyclist in the hilly city of Lisbon
- was a medical volunteer in Haiti for 2 months after the 2010 Earthquake
- travelled for 3 weeks with a home studio inside my shoulder bag (www.soundcloud.com/cristianoduna)

Teach, Learn, Share

We have always something to learn with the others...

...mainly at the dinner table :-)

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Macedonia, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Haiti, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia

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