CURRENT MISSION

writing and meeting people

ABOUT ME

I am an artist, so most of my energy is creative. I enjoy cooking and conversation about the world, art, travel, anything! I have traveled a lot in Asia, Europe and America, so have plenty of stories and ideas to share. I can make pizzas, rotisserie chicken, even tofu chili con carne...

PHILOSOPHY

Freedom from fear is freedom from ignorance.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

If you are traveling in Cambodia and southeast Asia, I can fill you in on some fun things to do and places to go. I have travelled by bicycle around Southeast Asia, including from Cambodia around Laos, and hopping by plane to Bali to cycle east across the islands of Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores to Timor - so pretty and friendly. Also, I have ridden from Nepal to Ladakh in India - unbelievably fresh and beautiful! I toured all around Sri Lanka via the gorgeous garden highlands, where they grow tea, down through the ancient cities to the coastal beaches in the northeast and south. I rode around South Korea by bicycle, which has temples and creeks of pure water up in the mountains, too.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I am new as of November 2014, and hosted a lovely young couple from Lithuania, and two young female compatriots from Canada, a young woman from Vienna, a lady from Manila, another from Brazil and one more young woman from Spain. Most recently, I have hosted a fabulous woman from Germany, a guy from Spain and a Columbian traveller, as well as three wonderful, sporting Russian lasses..! I met a lady from Spain and we ended up meeting again to go on trips together.

I have lived in Cambodia for around 10 years, first in Kampot, then in Sihanoukville where I taught English Literature at Life University. Last year, I moved to Siem Reap and met up with a couple of surfers. I moved to Phnom Penh to take a job at a newspaper in January, 2023. In Phnom Penh, I chose an apartment with a swimming pool mainly because I broke my femur right after moving to Siem Reap last year, and so I'm trying to rebuild my strength and flexibility once again.

Couchsurfing is a fabulous way to meet friends and have a conversation.

Interests

Literature, civilization, writing, music, photography, art, philosophy, travel, swimming, weight-lifting, cycling, languages, friends...

• arts
• writing
• literature
• photography
• cooking
• traveling
• socializing
• music
• cycling
• swimming
• languages

Music, Movies, and Books

I love all good movies, and mostly listen to jazz and classical music from baroque to opera, as well as 70s+80s punk, old folkies like Sandy Denny, jazz like the Manhattan Transfer, Coltrane, all the greats, and the blues plus anything old 70s - I like the Dead, the Doors, the Allman brothers, the J. Geils Band, Derek and the Dominos, and 80s, 90s stuff like the Clash, the Pistols, Talking Heads, Soft Cell, Pulp, whatever... New-old stuff like the late Amy Winehouse, the Prodigy, Rammstein, Nina Hagen, Iggy Pop, and underground rap like Handsome Boy Modelling School, Talib Kweli, Kool Keith, Jedi Mind Tricks, the Notorious Big, Busdriver, Immortal Technique, Del the Funky Homo Sapien, Rah Digga, CunninLynguists, KRS-One, Hieroglyphics and 374 more gigabytes in my collection of old and new rap. I have over 1TB of mp3s in a variety of genres. (You never know when you'll end up living on a desert island with no internet!)

I have read philosophy and poetry since I was a child of 14. A lot by Sappho, Homer, Catullus, Li Bai, Du Fu, François Villon, Dante Alighieri, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Goethe, John Donne, John Milton, William Blake, Shelley, Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Tristan Tzara, Hart Crane, César Vallejo, García Lorca, Dylan Thomas, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Gregory Corso, John Berryman, Jaroslav Seifert, Charles Olsen, John Betjeman; and novels by Cervantes, Lawrence Sterne, Gorgonl, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, Alfred Döblin, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Conrad Aiken, Wyndham Lewis, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Malcolm Lowry, Yukio Mishima, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Chandler, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Haruki Murakami; and playwrights like Luigi Pirandello, Sam Beckett, Frank Wedekind, Shakespeare, Ionescu, Strindberg, Alfred Jarry, Tennessee Williams; plus social and philosophic thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Bakunin, Marx, William James, Max Müller, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Claude Levi Strauss, Oswald Spengler, George Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, Rudolph Durkheim, Pitirim Sorokin, Henri Bergson, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russel, Alfred North Whitehead, György Lukács, Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Arnheim, Roland Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Theo Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. There are so many more! I have read a lot of women writers and poets too, mostly from the twentieth century... Sara Teasdale, Plath, and the usual Canadian suspects like you know who...

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I travelled by bicycle through China, Xinjiang and twice to Tibet.

Teach, Learn, Share

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What I Can Share with Hosts

Good conversation, some fresh ideas and maybe a nice portrait - in poetic or digital or film imagery - your choice...

Countries I’ve Visited

Algeria, Austria, Botswana, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Laos, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Cambodia, Canada, Taiwan