Hello!

My name is Paula. I'm 18 years old. I love travelling, meeting new people, reading, making music and lots of other stuff.
The upcoming weeks I will be interrailing through Europe with my friends. We'll be visiting Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Venice and some places in between.
Our group is 8 people total, but I'll probably be couchsurfing with my two friends Dore and Joline. The three of us would love to meet some nice people and learning a bit more about the places we're visiting.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

When I was a kid, my mother and I have had a lot of couchsurfers over and have couchsurfed ourselves too. I always loved to meet all these new people from all over the world who all had their own stories and cultures they shared with us. And whenever we were the guests I was always blown away by how hospitable everybody we met through couchsurfing was and how much it added to the trip to know people who knew the surroundings and knew what to visit and that sort of stuff.
Needless to say, I have a lot of good experience with couchsurfing and now that I'm old enough and on the brink of a new trip to foreign countries, I would love to pick up couchsurfing again.

Interests

I absolutely adore music. I once played the piano, but right now I'm mostly playing the guitar and ukulele. I also love history, even more if it's about a place I'm visiting at that moment.
I'm also always interested in different cultures and their philosophies and political views.
Of course I'm also always in for playing a game or just chatting about anything.

• culture
• books
• politics
• board games
• music
• history
• philosophy
• ukulele
• local history
• local culture
• rome

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: This is an impossible question in my opinion. My taste in music varies from the loud/metal type of music to Adele to hiphop/rap musicals, so really there is no choosing a favourite for me...

Movies: I absolutely love Dead Poets Society, Detachment and La Grande Bellezza

Books: This is probably an endless list but I'll try to narrow it down a bit. Some of my favourites are Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the All For The Game series by Nora Sakavic, The song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and The realm of possibility by David Levithan

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

When I was fifteen years old I went on a trip to South Africa to visit projects and volunteer. I had to earn the money myself, which I did in about seven months. We went in a group of about nineteen teenagers and we visited very varying projects (some were orphanages, others were a school for hearing-impaired or a project for sexually abused children).
I learned so much on this trip. I got to meet a lot of amazing people, but I also got to see a bit of the world that was -and is- hard in a lot of ways, but also beautiful in others. I got to see what it's really like over there. I got to learn the assumptions we make that are right, but even more the amount of assumptions us Westerlings make that are completely and utterly wrong.

What I Can Share with Hosts

I can share a bit about what I have experienced and learned in life. I can share a bit of the Dutch culture and my experience with other cultures.
Of course I can also share a good time and I'm looking forward to doing so very much.

Countries I’ve Visited

Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Mozambique, Romania, Scotland, South Africa, Swaziland, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Netherlands