CURRENT MISSION

Get my feet wet

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Spending a summer in Beijing, I met a group of Mongolian traditional singers. They invited me to visit them in Inner Mongolia, so I couch-surfed there for a while. They took me camping in a big yurt they rented where the owners slaughtered a sheep for us, and they sang all night.

Interests

• cycling
• camping

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies:
Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman - the long version)
You Can Count on Me (Lonergan)
Breaking the Waves (von Trier)
Dancer in the Dark (von Trier)
Badlands (Malick)
The Thin Red Line (Malick)
Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick)

Books:
Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies
V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
William Faulker, As I Lay Dying
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (a strange choice from her body of work, I know - but once it sunk in it really got me)
Alice Munro's stories
Haruki Murakami - hard to pick a favorite
Naguib Mahfouz, the Cairo trilogy
I have to admit, though, that this serious reading thing is kind of in hiatus now that I have a toddler. Right now I'm reading the third book in the Harry Potter series in French.

Music:
Very eclectic tastes. Right now I'm singing a lot of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell to my son and learning to finger-pick on the guitar.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Childbirth was pretty cool. Also, when I was in China I rode a rented bike for 2 days in the rain, by myself, from Beijing to a remote section of the Great Wall. While I was there I met a group of people who had come by bus with their danwei (work group). They offered me a lift back, and even squeezed my bike onto the bus. (I know, I know - it's not *that* amazing. Childbirth was, though.)