CURRENT MISSION

While places tend to look all the more the same and travelling becomes fast and easy, I try to find the soul of a place and travel in slowmo.

ABOUT ME

I'm a passionate traveller, but don't want to consume one country after another. I am looking for an individual link with a region and try to avoid short transit stop-overs, airplane-travel and easy sight-seeing. I love travelling by bike, train or foot, surprises, meeting old and new friends at the edges of the world and - as a journalist - researching on the ground. What else? I'm a vegetarian, wanna-be-downshifter, book- and language-lover and like good company (buena onda people).

PHILOSOPHY

"We seek a lower standard of living for a higher quality of life" (graffito in Christiania)

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

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.

Interests

falling off slacklines and climbing/boulder walls - and (most recent passions) ski and surfboards

• books
• photography
• vegetarian
• traveling
• bouldering
• cycling
• skiing
• rock climbing
• journalism

Music, Movies, and Books

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

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

www.christina-felschen.com/en/photography

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Burundi, Chile, Czech Republic, French Polynesia, Georgia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Vatican City State

Countries I’ve Lived In

Argentina, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, United States