Mike + Emi Lewandowicz's Photo

Verified Profile

  • Payment verified
  • Phone verified
  • Government ID not verified

Maybe Accepting Guests

  • Last login almost 2 years ago

Join Couchsurfing to see Mike + Emi’s full profile.

Overview

  • 61 references 28 Confirmed & Positive
  • Fluent in English, Polish
  • 46, Other
  • Member since 2007
  • doctors / travelers / dreamers
  • constantly improving
  • From Lodz, Lodzkie, Poland
  • Profile 100% complete

About Me

CURRENT MISSION

Bring up our children in the spirit of tolerance and in the need to discover.

ABOUT ME

We are a family, that is most important. That means more fun but also some limitations.

We live our everyday life taking advantage of all happy moments that occur to us. Our life is mostly concentrated on hard work and family. We do meet a lot of people and we feel comfortable with that.

When we get squizzed between stagnation and frustration, we set off for a while. We love traveling. We love the smell and taste of adventure. And we love South America.

Happily merried, with our two sons and a little baby girl, we have been trying to combat the stereotypes of parenthood - lack of time and overwhelming quantity of new duties.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

We learned about CS reading Experimental Travel, a book published by Lonely Planet. This idea was always close to our hearts. While traveling, many times we came across people who showed us a lot of hospitality. I remember one night in Chinese mountains near Chengdu. It started to rain and we had no place to sleep. We knocked on one door and started to explain in strange gestures our desire for a dry peace of floor. An old man looked at us and said "No!". And just after that, he explained "no, not on the floor" and let us in his own couch! Well, it wasn't a couch, a simple bed of reeds.

How do we participate? Just started here, but had had a few opportunities to help others without being a CS member. Now we continue as CS members. We hope it's just the beginning.

We also organize CS meetings in our neighborhoods, and to be even more active, we've become city ambassadors and then turned to family ambassadors.

We participate through learning. CS gives lots of opportunities to redefine our sense of hospitality, tolerance, openmindedness, generosity. Every couchsurfer we host and every couchsurfer that we are hosted by makes us better people, changing our synaptic patterns in the brain to achieve more capacity. We hope to have similar impact on others :)

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

We had a few opportunities to sleep at the places of people we met while traveling. It was great. It always involved a lot of talks and laughter, and was always unforgettable time. We loved most the discussions and stories that went on till dawn.

Our first CS experience was in Vienna, Austria, on March 17th, 2007. We slept at Matt's. Wow, it was phenomanal :) We really liked him and his girlfriend. We had so little time to talk, though... Then, Emi, our future baby and Emi's sister had some great CS moments in Portugal in the beginning of May 2007. Thank you Diogo and Nuno! We were hosted by Matilda in Stockholm. She added a huge portion of extra flavour to our trip. And we're not talking only about the cinnamon rolls or the reindeer casserole she prepared for us... We met Nalany (Turkey) in our hometown. She tought us we can make wonderful friends without going far! Thene there were Barry and Allison who came just a day before our son was born :) We could list all of our friends and some friends of them. Every single meeting was exceptional and unforgettable. Every single person traced our thoughts and memories.

We've felt we really became a part of this community. We've tried to participate in the local meetings and animate BoatPeople group. We're always open to meeting people and hosting them. And we try to travel as much as we can. We believe that bringing up kids in this positive atmosphere will make them understand the world better.

Interests

Travel; Photography; Jazz; Medicine

  • books
  • photography
  • reading
  • traveling
  • socializing
  • jazz
  • medicine
  • mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies: European cinematography
Music: Jazz and around. Blues. World music. Glass and Nyman. Kronos Quartet. Mogwai.
Books: Anything that captures all attention (Noah Gordon and C.R. Zafon, Stieg Larsson, Jurgen Thorwald to name some cosmopolitan authors), otherwise with all our duties it takes much time to read the whole book.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Birth of our children was the most amazing, most touching experiences of our entire lives.

However, logging in to CS is an exceptional moment every other day!

Teach, Learn, Share

Free your mind, and your ass will follow.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela

Countries I’ve Lived In

Poland

Old School Badges

  • 12 Vouches
  • Pioneer Badge

Join Couchsurfing to see Mike + Emi’s full profile.

My Groups