UPDATE

Вітаємо українців!

People that were forced to leave Ukraine due to Russian invasion can stay at our place until they find a more permanent shelter or be able to go back to their home.

CURRENT MISSION

Finalize my thesis. Establish a waste management platform. Curate photo exhibitions. Found my own hostel.

REQUESTS

There is no hidden password in my profile. I understand why people do it but I don't like it. I expect people to address me personally and to mention why they want to stay with me. I appreciate when people write about themselves and about what they are going to do while they are in Radolfzell.

ABOUT ME

I have inherited two passions from my father, traveling and photography. He taught me that the earth is merely a blue marble and that there are no distances you cannot overcome. And he introduced me to the world of photography. There were always cameras in our home. I recall playing with my grandmother's Voigtländer bellows camera when I was only a few years old. Throughout the years, he has taught me a lot about photography and I'm grateful for it.

In the beginning and mid 1990s our family traveled several times to Italy and France. In 1997 my father convinced my mother to cross the Atlantic and visit a friend near Montreal, Canada. My father had visited him before. He had fallen in love with the beauty of the countries nature and the friendliness of its people and wanted to share them with us. After visiting his friend, we went on a one-month road trip at Canada's East coast. We had a rented car and rough coordinates of the places we wanted to see but no predefined route. It was an amazing journey. We passed Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We returned to Canada four years later to see Ontario and the US New England states Maine, Vermont and New Hamphire.

Since my first non-family vacation with a friend in 2004, we interrailed through France and Italy for three weeks, I became eventually addicted to traveling. I try to travel as much as possible. But there are social, financial and time contraints. During my travels I like to get in touch with locals, random people in the streets and listen to their views and learn more about their culture. In 2006, I spent two semesters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. During the stay I had the chance to explore other places in Malaysia, also together with my father who visited me for a few weeks, and to visit its neighbours Singapore and Thailand (mostly for visa run). In the semester break, right after the 2006 football world cup in Germany, I traveled to China. I started in Guangzhou and took trains and buses to Chengdu, Xian, Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin before leaving to Hong Kong and Macau (http://bit.ly/travelchina2006). In 2008, I took a semester off to travel to Indonesia (http://bit.ly/travelindonesia2008). Since then, I come back to this beautiful and diverse country almost every year. It has become a home away from home.
This summer I went to the Balkans, my first trip mostly by hitchhiking (http://bit.ly/hitchhikingbalkans).

I currently study Environmental Systems Sciences with focus on sustainable managenemt at the University of Graz. Before, I finished a bachelor-like degree (Diplom) in business administration and Indonesian.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I have joined couchsurfing in April 2009. I had been at hospitality club before, a predecessor of couchsurfing that died years ago, but rarely used it. At that time I was visited a dear friend in Saint-Petersburg who I had met in Berlin two month earlier. She told me about couchsurfing and convinced me to sign up. I used couchsurfing for the first time in Moscow, two weeks after.

I arrived in Indonesia two month later to conduct a study on villagers’ behaviour concerning water and environment in Gunung Kidul, Yogyakarta. The study was scheduled for July, so I had roughly a month time for traveling. I didn't know if couchsurfing worked in Indonesia, so I only contacted a single person. I was surprised when I received an instant reply. She couldn't host me as she was only allowed to have girls in her boarding house. But she offered to organize a couch at a friend's place. She and her friend picked me up at Semerang train station (Central Java) the next morning.

She later commended a friend in Yogyakarta. After staying with him for several days he offered to rent the room I was sleeping in. Eventually, we regularly co-hosted couchsurfers until I left Indonesia in January 2010.

At one of the regular couchsurfing meetings at Bintang Café (Sosrowijayan, Yogyakarta), I met my later girlfriend and fiancée. Now (end of 2016), Bintang Café is closed and we broke up. Nonetheless, I'm back in Yogyakarta and will try to welcome as many couchsurfers as possible.

Interests

I'm a passionate photographer, shooting both digital and analogue. Taking photos is like meditating for me. Waiting for prints feels like waiting to open presents on Christmas eve. I have a nice collection of different cameras that I inherited from and extended in regular visits to flea markets. But I'm lacking a RolleiFlex and Leica M-series. Currently, I shoot digital on Nikon D7000, and analog on Pentax Spotmatic II, Nikon FM2 and Canon AE-1 Program. Beginning of this year I got my first tattoo, a Javanese dragon, and got hooked on the art. I will at least get one more tattoo this summer.

• photography
• tattoos
• piercings
• politics
• traveling
• hiking
• backpacking
• hockey
• badminton
• visual arts
• hitchhiking
• longboarding
• ultimate frisbee
• analog photography
• climate change
• waste management
• systems sciences

Music, Movies, and Books

I like to listen to all styles of music and I’m happy to be introduced to the favorite music of the people I host or that host me. I like 80's Synthwave and minimalistic electronic music, like Welle: Erdball. I'm a big fan of the Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill films, both westerns and action-comedies. I like Hitchcock's Vertigo, Rear Window, The Rope, Psycho, Dial M for Murder and North by Northwest. I'm a child of the 80's, so I'm into all kinds of action and action-comedy films from that era. Amongst others, I like Short Circuit, Gremlins and Terminator. I adore the Back to the Future trilogy and have cried hectoliters of tears to Forrest Gump. I'm a fellow of The Lord of the Ring trilogy and only recently have started to like Star Wars. I like books of Franz Kafka, George Orwell and Douglas Adams. Series: Breaking Bad, Rick and Morty, Black Mirror, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Seinfeld, Mr. Robot

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I have experienced countless weird situations in my travels, most of them were caused by my explorative and sometimes naive behavior. Amongst others, I got lost in an Indonesian national park, slept on the floor in an overbooked train in China, hiked a mountain and the Great Wall in flip flops, traveled to an island in the gulf of Sulawesi where I stayed with locals in a small village or most recently quit my job to run away with a couchsurfer from Poland to travel the Balkans for a month.

Teach, Learn, Share

I can introduce you to the basics of photography and teach you how to play with shutter speed, aperature, focal length and iso speed. I can teach you some German and Indonesian. I'm eager to learn new languages and about culture and politics.

What I Can Share with Hosts

I might start vivid discussion about political, economical, environmental and social issues. I'm happy to talk with people who have constrasting opions. I can share travel experiences from the places I went to, especially in South East Asia.

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, Estonia, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Scotland, Singapore, Slovenia, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United States, Vatican City State

Countries I’ve Lived In

Austria, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia

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