CURRENT MISSION

Enjoy my return to student life!

ABOUT ME

After two and a half years teaching English in Slovakia and France, I've decided it's time to go back to university..I want to learn as much as possible about French language and literature, with the eventual aim of working as a translator.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Unfortunately I can't host at the moment as I don't have my own place...I hope to be able to in the future though, and for now I'm keen to meet CSers!

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Not much yet - I joined a couple of years ago and have met some lovely people but still haven't surfed or hosted. Still planning to get more involved one of these days...

Interests

Reading, writing, spending hours in bookshops (even, to the bemusement/irritation of friends, when the books are mostly written in Slovak), learning Slovak, singing, football, politics, seeing new places, meeting new people, late-night Skype chats with old friends, walking, musing, mooching, drinking black-tea-with-milk, eating cheese, good conversation about any of the above topics.

• writing
• books
• literature
• singing
• cheese
• walking
• drinking
• politics
• reading
• soccer
• languages
• language exchange
• beaches
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: this could take a while. Shakespeare, Donne, Austen, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Baudelaire, Yeats, Hardy, Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Woolf, Auden, Greene, Larkin, McEwan. I'm finally getting round to some more contemporary fiction after three years immersed in our literary heritage...the last novel I read was Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth', which I had been meaning to read for most of the decade since it was published. It was worth the wait!
Music: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Faure, and assorted pop/rock stuff including Elbow, Coldplay, Belle & Sebastian, The Low Anthem, Simon & Garfunkel, Camera Obscura, Guillemots, Jeff Buckley.
Films: vaguely arty French films, when I'm feeling highbrow; cheesy romantic comedies when I'm not; and many things in between.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Stargazed on a deserted Welsh beach in December..Been walking in the Tatras mountains in the snow. These are the first two things that spring to mind, and I see the common feature is: the cold! I must be a northerner...

Teach, Learn, Share

I teach English and am learning French, so a language exchange would be great! I could also teach you some basics in Slovak if you wanted to know them...

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, Slovakia, United Kingdom