CURRENT MISSION

Well right now I'm trying to learn how to golf. Felt in love with that game

ABOUT ME

I was born in Simferopol, Ukraine during the perestroika. When I was 3 my family moved to Perm, Russian, my dad's hometown. Later on, when I was 13, my brother and I moved to Valencia, Spain to live and practice at a tennis academy. Afterwards, when I was 17, I moved to the US to go to college and play for school's tennis team.

My friends would categorize myself as talkative, open-minded, funny, easy-going, reliable, responsible, smart, interactive and so on. However some of them would also probably say that I'm little bit arrogant and too demanding, to an adequate extent obviously

PHILOSOPHY

I'm conservative towards myself and liberal towards others. That means that I always set goals for myself and work hard to achieve those. I know that if I want something I have to work for it. I also believe that I get what I deserve, doesn't matter if it's a good thing or a bad thing. At the same time I believe that all people in this world must be getting same set of opportunities. If a person chooses not to use the opportunities given then it's his/her fault. The problem is that people around the world get different number of chances and some don't get any at all.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

When I was 16 I went to play tournaments in Cairo, Egypt in June. The tournaments went awful – I lost in every tournament and didn’t play well at all. While playing in these tournaments, I heard from somebody that there were two upcoming tournaments in Tunisia, and so I decided to go there in order to rehabilitate. By the way I had very little money left, no visa, and didn’t even send the application to become a part of the players list. So here my adventures began.
The first trouble came on the way to the Cairo’s airport – the taxi got a flat tire. After running about a quarter mile with a luggage, I made it to the airport barely on time. The airport was a complete disaster and mess. People were everywhere. Nobody could tell you where to go. Everybody was yelling. Women passed passport checking in closed booths because of the prohibition on showing their faces. The airport wasn’t much different from a central market.
When I finally found a registration desk, they surprised me by saying that I was not allowed to go to Tunisia without visa (I already returned my ticket back to Russia and didn’t have enough money to buy a new one). They also told me to go talk to someone somewhere. I pretended I went somewhere to talk to this somebody and in 5 minutes came back saying I’m allowed to go, but then the guy at the desk told me the registration had ended. I started yelling at him and that made him agree to register me. I’m going to be honest, at that moment I really freaked out. I haven’t mentioned that my travel began with a guy from Honk Kong who went back home after 2 days of this and following craziness.
So the next stop was Tunisia’s airport. Obviously, when I arrived the guys at the passport check were really shocked by the fact that I flew in without having a visa and were questioning me for few hours about the purpose of my visit. So I waited at the airport for about 5 hours to get my passport back. The guy who was travelling with me got pretty pissed.
The troubles just kept rolling. We arrived to the capital’s airport at night on a national holiday weekend. Obviously we didn’t have a booking in any hotel, so we started looking for one. I think we went to about 10 hotels before we found the one where we could stay for a night. The next day the other guy and I had to make it to the town where the tournament actually took place. We figured that taking an unlicensed bus costs about 2 dollars instead of 20 for a licensed one, but there was a risk that a car will get pulled over. If it did we all would have to pay extra in order to bribe a policeman. We selected the first option. It was a disaster. First of all we, had to jump in with our entire luggage while the cab was slowly going (I never figured out why the driver couldn’t wait for us). The minibus was way overloaded – it was packed with people pretty much sitting on each other’s laps. Nobody sat on my lap because I had my luggage there which weighted about 50 pounds. It was way over 100 degrees outside, and the only a/c in the car was a “rolled down window.” The driver smoked, and the worst thing was annoying Arabic songs playing as loud as the car would allow.
After 2 hours of this hell, we made it to the town. We went to the official hotel of the tournament and figured nobody at the front desk even heard of this upcoming tournament. It was August, the tourism season in Tunisia, so all of the hotels were packed. There was no way to find a place to stay in a touristic town during the high season. Fortunately, we found the tournament’s director. I’m saying fortunately because the tournament wasn’t supposed to start for 4 days, so nobody was at the tennis club. He found us a place to stay (some townhouse owned by his relative) for 30 dollars per night per person. It was a little too pricy for Tunisia, but we didn’t have any other option.
The next morning I found a place to call to my parents who were kind of surprised I was in Tunisia. They were already getting a little concerned about me because they hadn’t heard from me in about a week and couldn’t get in touch with me. When I got back to my room, I found my roommate packing because he got tired of all the things going on and decided to go back home. His parents, after he told them the story, bought him a ticket on the next flight to Honk Kong and made him go back home. So I got left alone. I told the president of the club that I couldn’t afford paying 60 dollars per night, so he invited me to stay over at his house for free. His house was on the shore.
That night I went on the beach and sat under a tent, looking at the stars and the waves I thought how incredible it would be to win this tournament after the stuff that had happen to me; and I did win. It was only doubles, but still. In singles, I lost in the second round of the main draw after passing the qualifications. For me, it was a great showing after my horrible performance in Egypt. During my first match I was losing badly and, as usually, that was happening because of my fear of losing (comic, isn’t it?). I was behind, but then I thought there was no way that after all the stuff that had happen to me I’m going to pack to go back home after the first round, and so I overcame my fear.
The president allowed me to stay at his house only until he found some other place for me to stay. He found a hostel located right by the tennis courts. The price was 5 dollars per day. The room had a bed, a window, and a closet, and that was it. It had no a/c and it was over 100 degrees the majority of the daytime and over 80 degrees during the nighttime. So, I had to keep the window open in order not to choke. The problem is that it was located on the main street of the town, so every night all the way until 2 in the morning people would celebrate marriages by singing and dancing right underneath my window. At 5 in the morning, the horn at the mosque sang the morning prayers. In other words, I had no sleep for 2 days and gathered energy for the last matches strictly from drinking energy drinks.
At the tournament I met a massage therapist who gave me a massage for free. This detail is important for this story. I also met these cool Spaniards who I later on met a few times in Spain. With one of them, I won the doubles tournament. He is currently playing for TCU and invited me over to visit him. After the first tournament I played the second in the capital. That one went smoothly and I did fairly well. I met a lot of people and enjoyed the time spent there.
My dad’s birthday was rolling over, and so I wanted to go back to Russia to see him and my brother before he went to the US for his freshman year at the college. It turned out that there were no direct flights to Russia and the cheapest would cost me about 1200 dollars. Obviously, I didn’t have that much money, so I decided to stay an extra week and go straight to Spain after that. I had to stay for an extra week because my visa into Spain would start only in a week. I went back to the place where the first tournament took place. I went to the same hostel to get a room. On my second day there, I decided to go to a beach and just sunbath. While waiting for a bus I met the massage therapist from the first tournament. She stayed with her sister so she kindly offered for me to stay at her place. She had a big house, so there was plenty of room. I stayed there for the rest of the week. I spent a lot of time talking to her parents. Her mom was Danish, so we had a lot in common. This family fed me for the entire week and Djihane (the girl) gave me few free massages.
After this week, I went to the airport to fly to Spain. The guys at the customs were kind of shocked because they gave me a one week visa to play the tournament and I ended up staying there for three weeks. I had to pay the fine, but it was all good because the president of the tennis club wrote a letter giving me an excuse for breaking immigration laws.

Interests

Sports, science, books, debates, languages, meeting new people, exploring the world

• books
• singing
• performing arts
• dancing
• running
• drinking
• clubbing
• flying
• traveling
• cars
• drawing
• coding
• snowboarding
• sports
• tennis
• golf
• engineering
• entrepreneurship
• languages
• science
• tourism
• beaches

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: anything, but for the most part classic rock
Movies: Revolver, Lucky # Slevin, Rocknrolla, the Shawshank Redemption, etc. The last one that I enjoyed watching is "Seeking a friend for the end of the world."
Books: Russian classic literature, Sci-fi, adventures, professional literature (economics, finance)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Flying a light sport aircraft; using a small, unauthorized, intercity taxi minivan in Tunisia

Teach, Learn, Share

Teach: languages (Russian,English), accounting, finance, tennis, snowboard
Learn: coding, cars, investment banking, neurophysiology, languages. Everything that is related to financial engineering, consulting, entrepreneurship, science, philosophy.

Countries I’ve Visited

Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Russian Federation, Serbia, Spain, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Russian Federation, Spain, Ukraine, United States