Please read carefully 'My Home' before sending me a request!

"Alas volat propiis."
Be a bird.

I grew up in Vietnam then moved to America when I was 16. I have been living on East Coast for the past seven years.

I am tea savvy, with about 54 different types of tea in my current collection. My travel also involves collecting exotic tea blends, so I would strongly prefer hosting those who know of/ bring with them some special tea from where they're from :)

I also run, practice yoga and recently into boxing. I don't eat mammals and haven't done so for the past 6 years. Most of the time I am comfortable as a vegetarian.

I have travelled across Europe with Couchsurfing and met many amazing fellow couchsurfers when I was working in Milan, Italy. I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of this community and would love to welcome you here.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I came across Couchsurfing awhile ago from my friends who backpacked to Prague by himself all summer.

I want to travel, learn, experience, taste, drink, drift, interact, make friends, challenge and engage :)

Interests

- nature, yoga, mediation, coffee break, rain, old villas, wet grass, flower markets, lanterns, walking, textile patterns, skyline, full moon, festivals, traveling (duh), reading real books, smelling real books, writing, handmade notebooks, calligraphy, Indie rock, eyes.
- Cancer fascinates me. It's the smartest thing out there, how it changes, adapts and manifests itself is an amazing field to learn about
- Healthism. I don't follow diets, veganism and such are not of my interests (Fact: Oreo is vegan). I customize my diet for ultimate physical and emotional health within the location and time being ;)
- Cooking: marriage of arts and sciences ❤️ I have an Instagram account (evelynnguyenxd) dedicated to food :3
- Foodgasm :)
- I love petrichor, the smell of the air after the rain. Night markets, motorcycle rides, discovering abandoned places, learning new languages as I hop from places to places.

• arts
• writing
• books
• diy
• festivals
• ethics
• dining
• cooking
• beer
• coffee
• vegan
• yoga
• dieting
• meditation
• walking
• drinking
• flowers
• reading
• traveling
• cycling
• backpacking
• rock climbing
• calligraphy
• chemistry
• languages
• lakes

Music, Movies, and Books

Amelie, Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, Jeux D’enfants, Fur, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, La Vie en Rose, Titanic, Casablanca, Wes Anderson, All About Eve, Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon, Never Let Me Go, The Mummy Series, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Hmm I don't watch movies often, only on occasion. I prefer to move around rather than sitting still for 2-3 hours.

- Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lingren
- Totto-chan The Little Girl at the Window - Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
- On the Road - Jack Kerouac
- A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini.
- Snow Flower and a Secret Fan – Lisa See
- The Bluest Eyes, Beloved – Toni Morrison
- A Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
- The Optimist’s Daughter- Eudora Welty
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Allegory of Love – C.S. Lewis
- Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegurt, Haruki Murakami, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel G. Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Earnest Hemingway, Sylvia Path, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien

Music: The Strokes, Daughter, Sia, Tom Waits, Avicii, Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks, Lykke Li, Edith Piaf, Of Monsters and Men, Mumford & Sons, The Beatles, Train, The XX, Guns n’ Roses, Bon Jovi, Scorpions, X Japan, Avenged Sevenfold, Animal Collective, Trinh Cong Son, Pham Duy, Paganini, Secret Garden

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

When I was 18, I first backpacked to a mountain in South Vietnam to meditate, and the day before my friend and I made a DIY pepper spray. It's illegal in Vietnam to own one, but I'm pretty sure what we did was just chemistry in practice.

It was my first time self backpacking and a pretty scary one. I had a nightmare the night before that I would die with number 26, and live with the number 22. In the morning, I looked up the bus line I was traveling with and read 3 serious death accidents from different years that involved the same route that I was taking. Pretty terrified but the bus had no 26 on it, so I was fine. I went to a zen monastery on the mountain and stayed for 3 days.

On the last day, as I was walking in the pine wood, I met a young foreigner who was dressing in a monk suit, and we took a 4-hour walk. He went there every day from 9am to 5pm to ponder at the scenery. He was a French pharmacist, learning Vietnamese, and I was a Vietnamese biochemist-to-be, learning French back then. We communicated in English and talked about pretty much everything from Albert Camus to medical ethics. Since that moment, I became amazed at how much I could connect with a stranger I just met a few hours ago, and I still believe now that by traveling and experiencing, I could learn much more than a static life. And so then on! :)

Teach, Learn, Share

Pretty much everything I know I'd be willing to share :)

What I Can Share with Hosts

Endless conversations about practically everything :) A fun spirit, enthusiastic soul and a warm personality

Countries I’ve Visited

Cambodia, France, Italy, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Netherlands, Panama, Russian Federation, Singapore, Thailand, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Italy, United States, Viet Nam