CURRENT MISSION

Learn French!

ABOUT ME

I moved to Montreal about a year ago to start a new job. While it has kept me busy, I have also been enjoying learning about the city and its history and exploring its sights, and especially its food!

PHILOSOPHY

Keep an open mind

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Hosted and met several travelers while living in Xinjiang China and stayed with CS'ers while traveling in Kazakhstan.

Interests

I consider myself lucky in that my personal interests and my work mesh very closely. I love to travel and I spend several months every year in China for work. I enjoy meeting new people and learning new things; going to museums; cultural events; all sports but especially walking, hiking, biking (because I can exercise and sight-see at the same time!) and swimming; reading -- especially travel literature; evenings spent cooking for my friends and sitting around talking

• literature
• dining
• cooking
• exercise
• walking
• reading
• traveling
• cycling
• hiking
• sports
• swimming
• history

Music, Movies, and Books

Tell me a good story and you can captivate my interest. I enjoy almost all movies -- especially indies and art film, but also Japanese anime, silly over-the-top Hong Kong kung fu comedies, and pirated movies and Tivo'ed zipped CDs of TV series that I buy every trip to China. I am a voracious reader-- my personal reads are travel writing, literature, historical fiction, and fiction with psychologically developed characters. For work I am currently reading a lot on identity formation, memory, and the uses of public history sites, museums and monuments to shape understandings of history and ethnicity.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

The elegant white stone pagodas that stretch to the horizon on the deserted Plain of Pagan in Myanmar (Burma) at dawn. The endless grassland of Mongolia and its sandstorms. Breath-taking. Biking across Malaysia, Thailand, and south China. Digging up 4000 year old skeletons in Inner Mongolia that were found stretched out on the ruined remains of a house wall and thrown into a storage pit-- what calamity had befallen on these people???

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan

Countries I’ve Lived In

Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, United States

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