HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING I used to host and be hosted, but can't do that right now as we live in a tiny room. SORRY! Hopefully that will change one day ;-) COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE Listening to stories about Japan and expat life somewhere above the clouds in the Kazakh winterwondercapital Astana.

My bookshelves are full of quite "classical" 19th/20th century stuff - which, years after studying literature, I still like: existentialistic prose (more Camus than Sartre), travel literature (Mark Twain, Saint-Exupéry, Cees Nooteboom..), the (exiled) writer-journalists of the 20ies-40ies (Brecht, Tucholsky, Anna Seghers, Mascha Kaléko) and simply great narrators, poets and playwrights, whether Shakespeare, Voltaire, Giraudoux, Mallarmé, Poe, Joyce, Hemingway, Wilde, Cortázar, Onetti.. or J.S.Foer - and great comics like Quino's Mafalda or Satrapi's Persepolis. Oh, and "The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton would be an inspiring one for most CS-people!films: Berlin-Sinfonie, Les enfants de l'Olympe, La Strada, 8 femmes, La Méprise, Das Leben der anderen, Soy Cuba, Amores Perros, Dogville, Viaje en Motocicleta, Noviembre - and most films by Chaplin, Solanas, Almodóvar, Kleinert, Herzog, Tykwer or the Krefeld 'Sputnic' collective