ABOUT ME

I'm a pretty calm, easy going kind of guy. I spent a few years out of college doing social work for a charity before I really got hooked on independent traveling. Since then I've become a kind of roving English teacher, fitting legs of travel in between 1-2 year jobs before starting over anew in a fresh country. These days I mostly work in kindergartens with 3-4 year olds during the week and spend my weekends with my lovely girlfriend (also a roving ESLer) exploring Japan.

PHILOSOPHY

visited 28 states (12.4%)Create your own visited map of The World or Like this? try: Sea Level Rise

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Right now I'm just hoping to use this site in the future to meet new people in new places. Unfortunately I live in a tiny box-style Japanese apartment, so I don't really have any room for hosting people. I sleep on a futon on what's basically the only available piece of floor.

Interests

I like listening to audio books on the walk to work every morning, playing games with kids, learning how to cook (far too late in life), and spending a comical amount of time looking at maps and teaching myself new geography.

I'm kinda hooked on the nerdier aspect of travel as a fun use of time. I collect guidebooks and spend hours building ever more epic(theoretical) trips to do sometime in a hazy future.

• books
• cooking
• drinking
• traveling
• hiking
• boxing
• cartography
• teaching
• geography
• social work

Music, Movies, and Books

The Motorcycle Diares & Zombieland. Iron and Wine & Brazzaville. The Dark Tower & A Long Way Gone.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Meteora, Greece: Hiking along the pathways between red-tiled monasteries perched on top of unlikely spires of towering sandstone. I followed this by getting lost in a thunderstorm on the way back to the town below, crossing fields and woods and eventually stumbling into some poor guys vineyard.

Antigua, Guatemala: My first time alone and my first time in the third world. I had arrived in the middle of the night so I only saw my environs when I left my lodgings the next morning. Everything was low roofed buildings colored in various shades of ocher and red pastel, punctuated here and there by the epic ruins of colonial era churches. They jutted out, all empty archways made of heavy stone and cut with fine embroidery. The city rested in a jungle-clad valley ringed with volcanoes. I guess I'm going a little bit overboard on the description here but it was the first time alot of my budding aspirations really sunk home, so it was important to me.

Wadi Rum, Jordan: A day spent driving around a red sand desert in a dilapidated land cruiser. The spaces between were filled with brief hiking jaunts through small rock valleys, drinking tea in a sand-flecked wind, watching sunset turn mellow reds into poisoned-looking sun burned earth. This was followed by a night tucking into lamb and rice cooked over an open fire by our Bedouin hosts, and star-gazing under a planetarium sky.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Belize, Cambodia, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Netherlands, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Japan, Taiwan, United States