My name is Yu Check Tsang (23) and I'm from Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

My view of life has completely changed after my internship at an architect. The things I did (designing, drawing, etc.) was fun to do, but I just don't see myself having a 9-5 job in the office for 5 days a week.

For a long time I've been struggling to find what I really want to do in the future and it was around the end of 2016 when I found something that really interested me, which is videography.

You see, I have a YouTube-channel since February 2016, but I wasn't so serious about it. Then I had a minor ''business'' in November 2016 and I linked that YouTube-channel to that minor. To keep it short, I started to upload more and more videos and the more I worked with editing videos, the more knowledge I gained. Then I realized that I really enjoy what I was doing. I could edit videos for hours and hours while forgetting the time.

Eventually I also realized it's all about stories. Telling a story through audio/visual content and I believe that everyone has a story and some of them have to be told and shared, so other people can benefit from it. Whether it's educational or inspirational, interaction happens when things are shared.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I started using Couchsurfing back in summer 2016 when I travelled for the first time on my own for 33 days through 5 countries in Europe. I wanted to know the experience of staying at total strangers. I got hosted once during that trip, which also allowed me to extend my entire trip for a few more days. I'm still thankful for that and I hope I can stay and connect with strangers from all over the world so I can feel and learn the culture a little bit better and share some stories.

Interests

Photography, Videography

• photography
• film making
• live music

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

The story behind the photo with me in the mountains.

Switzerland, Grindelwald, more than 2000 meters above sea level. It was my last day in Switzerland during my Interrail trip. This place made me feel different. Maybe peaceful would be a better word to describe that. Anyways, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to see the beauty of this place, so I decided to rent a bike and biked all the way from Interlaken to Grindelwald.

I left Interlaken at around 01:30PM. The roads were steep and it was hot outside. Maybe 26 degrees Celsius. I have to say that THIS bike trip was a real physical and especially a MENTAL challenge. My feet were hurting, my body told me to go back, but my mind kept telling myself that once I get all the way up there, it would be the best bike trip I've ever had. So I kept biking. It took me around 2 hours to get all the way up. I thought I’ve made it, but then I asked a nice lady at the ticket office at the train station of Grindelwald Grund. She told me I still have to go all the way up to Grindelwald Dorf. This was maybe the hardest part, because mentally I expected to be there, but in reality I had 10 more minutes to go. The roads were the steepest too.

The first thing I did once I got up there was buying myself a Swiss penknife. A Hiker red to be exact. It was just a small reward for myself :) Anyways, it started to rain just when I arrived. The clouds were covering the mountains. I couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters around me. The idea was to zipline down the mountain, but the zipline was closed. With the rain and the clouds still covering everything, I eventually decided to take the cable car up to First - the top of the mountain in that area - at around 05:30PM.

Sitting for about 20-25 minutes in the cable really make me think. I’ve came so far and the weather basically separated my definition of a perfect day from an ‘’okay’’ day. I haven’t mentioned it before, but I broke my camera lens the day before, so I kind of felt like things didn’t go as well as I hoped for. But I was like ‘’You know what? Fck it. Just enjoy this moment even when things seems fcked up.’’

Anyways, once I got up there, I still tried to take some quick snapshots, because my camera isn’t waterproof. With everything I’ve learned about photography so far, I set up my tripod when the rain started to stop. I used the time-lapse feature on this camera, because I just wanted to make a PHOTOGRAPH and not a SNAPSHOT and I personally think this photo could’ve been better in so many different ways, but it was perfect for this moment. It was around 06:15PM when I just tried to see if I could use my other camera with the broken lens and surprisingly, the lens worked! So I set my both cameras up for some time-lapses.

The last cable car that went down was at 06:30PM. I hanged around for maybe an hour before the rain completely stopped at 06:20PM - 10 minutes before I had to leave - and there was a 2 to 3 minutes gap when the clouds completely disappeared and I could see EVERYTHING. The mountains, the village/town, the grass, the waterfalls, the ice on the mountains etc. I just cannot describe how that felt. I can use a thousand words to describe that moment, but no word would tell you how I felt, unless you’ve experienced the same moment as I did up there at First. I decided not to take any photographs, because this was just a moment for me, myself and I. Just to merge with the surroundings without being distracted by my tools I used to capture my stories.

Teach, Learn, Share

Teach: English, photography, videography

Learn: English speaking skills, photography from different perspectives, videography from different perspectives

Share: Stories

Countries I’ve Visited

Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Kenya, Northern Ireland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand

Countries I’ve Lived In

Netherlands