CURRENT MISSION

Surprise me!

ABOUT ME

This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me.

I live by music and scents - beautiful memories always connect to one or both of these and recalling their emotions happens automatically and intensely when I hear that song or smell that scent again.

I love to create things, and I like to believe I can do anything myself. I suppose that's part of my primitive urge for being independent, I suppose my hang for camping in the woods and being self-sufficient is another way this gets expressed. When I'm out in the woods with a knife, I use it to create spoons and forks, when I see a piece of wire and a potato, I would make a battery out of it. Right now I'd love to carve spectacles out of a nice piece of wood.

I consider myself to be a minimalist - I like big things made from small stuff by adding a story to it, soaking it into a bath of emotions that make the whole more than the constituent parts. Some call that Synergy - but the business world attached such horrible connotation to it - I call it creativity.

PHILOSOPHY

Absorb everything, don't compromise

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Locals. They define what a place is really like, and it's exactly that what I'm looking for when traveling. I've arrived to places floating atop the touristic scene and finding myself disappointed, just until I met a couchie who showed how to break through into the reality of that place.

And surprises, the couchsurfing world is so full of surprises.

Interests

I love extraordinary food, soulful music and happy people. I like to jump around on music - I don't think it would qualify for dancing per se. I like to understand what drives people in life and how they stand in society. Understanding the social living conditions of a country is what I like to understand, how it influences people in their daily life and what people do to influence/change it.

I like languages - although I only speak 3 languages properly, what I like most is to find out about details in different languages and see how they connect with other languages. I consider the way people use languages says a lot about their identity, like the Koreans who have (if I remember correctly) 6 different ways to append a word/name with an indicator of your relation to that person - it shows how they respect the other and how they fit into the social hierarchy.

I love dancing - though not the clubbing kind of dancing. I recently started a series of contemporary dancing lessons. It's great, it feels like a whole new world opening up to me, and I'm really happy to discover this different part of myself as a supposed-to-be-grown-up.

I'm also taking acting classes.

• acting
• dancing
• contemporary dancing
• dining
• clubbing
• traveling
• music
• camping
• business
• languages

Music, Movies, and Books

Black keys
Bob dylan
Jacques Brel
Paul simon
The Beatles
Sergio mendez
Sufjan stevens
Dr John
The rascals
Amy Winehouse
Sigur Ros(!!)
Fontella bass
Rock 'n' Roll
still Jacques Brel
Bluegrass

I can watch Tarantino's movies over and over again without getting bored. I love his feel for aesthetics, how he can make a 20 minute scene in which there's so much attention for details and form that the contents/conversation - however banal or short - can become a huge thing.
There's many movies I like, but I rarely remember titles - I like bad action movies (The Die Hard collection) - There are movies that stick with me for a long time (Big fish, Inception, Dogtooth). Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby) never leaves me untouched, Woody Allen can make me laugh, The Cohen Brothers film's I remember to enjoy but the stories tend to be so twisted I usually forget what they are about exactly.

Favourite books popping to mind now are Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (J. Safran Foer), The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson), Blindness (Saramago), The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger). I think they're either books with a great deal of imagination or about a profoundly disturbed character, or both :-D

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Yosemite park, waking up and hearing the sound of leafs being stepped on. Opening my tent and being face to face with a deer who didnt care toon much about me and decided to walk away.

Seeing north korea from an observation post several kilometers north of seoul, being baffled about what must be going on in the minds of the people controlling that place

Countries I’ve Visited

Cambodia, China, Denmark, Italy, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Australia, Belgium, Estonia, Malaysia