Héliette : I'm a high school teacher, martial arts instructor and have been a couchsurfer for 10 years (previous profile here: https://www.couchsurfing.com/users/312351). We're preparing a trip to China. I've been to India and Nepal working with Tibetan refugees and leprosy patients, spent two years in Dominican Republic, one in Great Britain, visited Turkey, Morocco, Haiti, Argentina... Europe... and lately South Africa. I speak fluent English and Spanish, I love sports and arts, and above all I love meeting people and sharing experiences. Arnaud and I share a lot of these tastes, but he's also a maths and IT genius (don't tell him I said so!). He's new to the world of travellers, but having started with Nepal there's no stopping him now !

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Because we love meeting people. It's what travelling is all about. You don't meet people when you check in hotels, or not in the same way.
We want to share this with our 4 year old daughter and our baby son. Our main project for her is to get them to love people too.

Interests

Heliette: writing, photography, sports, games.
Arnaud: reading, playing board games.
Alix: catching the cat for a cuddle, giving a kiss to everyone she meets, and "reading" all the books she can get. Tends to say 'blablabla' and be surprised you don't understand her 'English'.
Landry: 18 months old explorer, everything that is new interests him.

• board games
• hiking
• martial arts
• castles
• roleplaying games
• larp
• medieval
• mountain hiking
• spartan race
• cthulhu mythos

Music, Movies, and Books

You'll see that on our shelves. Which are, by the way, collapsing under books and CDs. Both of us are definitely Pratchett fans ! We read and Heliette writes science fiction / fantastic / sci fi books, but we're also fans of literature in general.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

"Amazing" things done :
- I drank a Nepali cocktail made of honey, dried fried oily yak cheese and strong alcohol with a straight, mildly smiling expression ;
- fought a krait in South India with a stick (the krait was stuck in what was supposed to be a bathroom) and won without killing nor getting killed.
- Survived about nine marriage proposals while travelling alone in Morroco and managed not to use my taekwondo skills to knock my pretenders out.
- Was lovingly kidnapped by all the women in a Turkish village : they refused to let me go until I had married the neighbour's handsome cousin, learnt to knit and adopted the whole family. I diplomatically countered the propositions : I would learn to knit but teach them taekwondo ; the cousin was certainly handsome, but I was still too young to accept such a flattering proposal ; as for adoption, no problem !
- Arnaud managed NOT to get sunburnt in Nepal, which is amazing indeed as he got sunburnt in Ireland once... in October.
- We saw a leopard and wild dogs in South Africa - which seemed pretty amazing considering that both animals are so rarely observed.
- Our honeymoon was a sled dog expedition in the Great North. People thought we were mad.

Teach, Learn, Share

Héliette : Teaching languages is my job... but I can also share a few things about nature, history, and naturopathy. And I'm curious about.. well, just about anything. Arnaud and I love roleplay and original games. We both practise taekwondo (I'm a teacher), I'm training to be a qi gong instructor. I'm also deployed on humanitarian emergency missions with the ERU teams of the Red Cross.
Arnaud is a geek. He says he'll find more things to say later on, and if he does you can read his text with a Monty Python imitation of a French accent.
If you come home and like games of all sorts, we have over 30 of them. And great tea. And nice chocolate.

What I Can Share with Hosts

A sense of humour, anecdotes, and cultural references when they come home, plus a great number of hiking paths of all sorts and levels. And food. How could we forget food?

When we travel, we love learning about the places we visit, but usually we've done our research first! And we love being surprised.

Countries I’ve Visited

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Germany, Greece, Haiti, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Dominican Republic, France, United Kingdom