CURRENT MISSION

Seeking permanent residency in a state of grace

ABOUT ME

I'm a Montrealer who has lived in South Africa, Mozambique, South Korea, and Canada. I'm spent the last few years working as a teacher/documentary filmmaker/video editor in those places, focusing on community development. I like spending time with people from diverse backgrounds with diverse interests, speaking diverse languages, and let everyone I meet surprise me in their own way.

I come from a long line of travellers...Irish, Polish, French, and Scottish, who sometimes boarded boats away from the places they came, and were other times shown the door.
My favourite person in my life is my own personal Ulysses: my grandmother was born in eastern Poland in 1930, sent to Siberia in 1940, and travelled through Kazakhstan, Iran, India, ending up in a refugee village at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro for seven years before coming to Montreal. I realized as I got older that her story was an important part of who I am, leading to me to seek out authentic and intense human experiences at home and around the world, while showing me that home is wherever you find yourself surrounded by people you love.

PHILOSOPHY

"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." H-Miller

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've surfed alot of couches across the world, in N.A., Europe, Africa and Asia, but it's been through friends and random encounters. I'm looking forward to now seeing where CS brings me. It's the hosts I've stayed with that have made it fun - every person you meet has something to teach you.

Interests

Filmmaking, people, journalism, music, running, philosophy, reading, politics, and travel.

• literature
• documentaries
• film making
• running
• politics
• movies
• reading
• traveling
• music
• teaching
• journalism
• languages

Music, Movies, and Books

Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Etta James, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Magnetic Fields, Wolf Parade, Joy Division, M. Ward, Caetano Veloso, Jacques Brel, VU, Miles Davis, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Swans, Brian Eno, Fréhel, Serge Gainsbourg
Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar Wai, Jia Zhang Ke, Michael Haneke

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I worked in a film archive in Mozambique that had 15,000 old film reels, and during monsoons we used to project these old socialist films from the 1970s onto the walls of the archive, old films that had become beautifully cracked and warped from time and decay.

Teach, Learn, Share

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Cambodia, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Norway, Spain, Swaziland, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe

Countries I’ve Lived In

Canada, Mozambique, South Africa, South Korea

•