CURRENT MISSION

Adjust to life in Texas (from California)

ABOUT ME

I am a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. I was born and raised in a suburb between San Francisco and San Jose. I love classical music, especially the Russian composers, and I look to them for inspiration in my own composing. I'm proud to be a Californian, but my California is one of forests, mountains, bluffs, farms, and deserts, not glamour and movie stars. Hopefully, someday, I'll be a successful composer and perhaps a novelist, but until then, who knows? Ducks, Geese, and Swans are my favorite animals; I treat them as my holy creatures.

PHILOSOPHY

Silence is often the best music.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I have surfed and hosted several times. I intend to host more frequently, as I have been fortunate enough to be hosted by many great people.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Most of my couchsurfing I've done in Central and Eastern Europe. I very much enjoy hosts who are involved in my experience in their city or town, and I cannot thank them enough for taking time out of their lives to enrich mine. However, I also enjoy the liberty of browsing a town on my own, and so I am also thankful to my hosts who otherwise have work, school, or other engagements who were unable to guide me, but prepared me with the knowledge needed to be on my own. Other than occasional mishaps of connection, I have never had a bad experience.

Interests

Music, Hiking, Mountains, Geography, writing, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bernstein, Mahler, Borodin, Central and Eastern Europe, history, language, food, good alcohol, ducks, geese, swans, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Balkans, Baltics, Russia, Scandinavia.

• animals
• culture
• writing
• singing
• dining
• traveling
• music
• classical music
• hiking
• geography
• history
• tourism
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

The Graduate, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Mahler, Catch-22, Death and the Dervish, Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke, A Minor Apocalypse, Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

My high school choir had the random fortune of singing in front of thousands of Swedes in Stockholm during a First of May celebration in 2004.

Teach, Learn, Share

People from Northern California are often very proud of their region, and are defensive against the popular stereotype that all Californians surf and know movie stars, which is more representative of Southern California culture (however misleading that representation is). The Southern Californian Hollywood image is what most of world thinks is California, and Northern Californians are well aware of this. If you travel to Northern California, be careful not to make assumptions relating to Southern California culture (which might offend), and show some cultural awareness of the locale.

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Croatia, Estonia, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Russian Federation, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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