I am postdoctoral researcher currently residing in Germany. My home town is Cape Town, but I have lived in several places in South Africa. I enjoy long walks in new cities , and especially enjoy discovering secondhand bookstores, art galleries, museums, and local food. I am a keen conversationalist with a broad variety of interests. A confessed bibliophile and cinephile.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Mainly to travel and meet local people who will be able provide local knowledge

Interests

• books
• literature
• poetry
• music
• history
• art
• cinema
• film
• museums
• theology
• philosphy
• bookstores
• literature and philosophy

Music, Movies, and Books

1. Music

From the classical side of things, the list would be unbearably long, but pretty much anything by Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, and Messiaen. However, this is a hugely abbreviated list.

For the more contemporary side of things, my standards would be something like Led Zepellin, ELO, Supertramp, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Queen, David Bowie, John Coltrane, and Arcade Fire. Again, these are the ones off the top of my head.

2. Movies

The list would be too long, but here are some of the films that I have enjoyed immensely:

Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, The Third Man, Ugetsu Monagatari, Tokyo Story, Rashomon, Persona, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Psycho, Vertigo, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, The Godfather, Blue Velvet, Goodfellas, Mulholland Drive, Pulp Fiction, No Country for Old Men, There will be Blood, Three Colours: Blue, Memento, Satantango, The Turin Horse, The Silence of Lambs, and so on.

3. Books

My favourite novel is Herman Melville's "Moby Dick".

In terms of writers more generally, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Gustave Flaubert, John Updike, Fyodor Dostoesvky, W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Denise Levertov, Virginia Woolf, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Celan, Evgeny Vodolazkin, Jorge Luis Borges, John Banville, J.M. Coetzee, and Thomas Ligotti, are a few that come to mind.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Italy, Namibia, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, United States, Wales

Countries I’ve Lived In

Germany, South Africa