ABOUT ME

I'm that guy who meets people on trains and plains, sometimes on the street. I'm rarely alone for long. I'm a huge language nerd and if I don't speak your language yet, I need to learn a tongue twister at the very least. (I'm a halfway decent parrot.) I like cooking, baking, fermenting, and otherwise preparing food, and am not put off by recipes that take a month or two. I bind my own notebooks and make calendars and birthday cards.

I've lived within an hour North, South, East, and West of Manhattan, but never took the plunge. I'm currently living in Berlin, which is three times as cheap and four times as fun. My mother and three of my brothers live on a small farm in Southern Israel with chickens and a field of medicinal herbs. I try to make it there every year or two. My father, stepmother, and my other brother are all musicians, and I occasionally play piano despite my enormous inferiority complex.

PHILOSOPHY

Live and let live. Nowhere is out of reach.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Hosting and surfing. Spreading the word. Almost all of my friends in Berlin are Couchsurfers, and we go to meetings fairly often, especially the Language Exchange on Mondays.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've hosted and surfed off and on since I joined the site way back in 2005. I've had some great connections, and a few times I've hosted a Couchsurfer I'd surfed with, and vice versa--a true exchange.

Interests

languages, poetry, music from everywhere and always, (I have a soft spot for big band jazz from the 20s and 30s), photography, treating strangers as if I knew them already, making homemade pasta, brewing mead and hard cider (it's been awhile), sewing, anything you're interested in

• chickens
• poetry
• photography
• dining
• cooking
• recipes
• baking
• gardening
• traveling
• survival
• music
• jazz
• piano
• surfing
• languages
• language exchange

Music, Movies, and Books

*MOVIES*
Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulin, Harold & Maude, Waking Life, Triplets of Belleville, die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, Man With a Movie Camera, Science of Sleep, May, The Dreamers, Aventurera, The Philadelphia Story
*MUSIC*: Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom, The Shins, Devendra Banhart, Crosby Stills Nash Young, Simon & Garfunkel, Edith Piaf, Ravi Shankar, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake, The Postal Service, Of Montreal, Man Man, Django Reinhardt, Milton Nascimento, Gnarls Barkley, Mahmoud Ahmed, jazz from 20s-40s, Emerson Lake and Palmer
*PROSE*
On the Road, The Crying of Lot 49, Demian, Siddhartha, Atlas Shrugged (though I totally disagree with Rand), anything by John Irving, sci-fi like Heinlein, Asimov, Finney and the Ender's Game series, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Dharma Bums, Brave New World, The Blue Nile, Cat's Cradle
*POETRY*
Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, Walt Whitman, Ron Padgett, Jeffrey McDaniel, Heather McHugh, Mary Oliver, Bob Hicok, Ann Waldman, Jason Schneiderman, Ron Winkler

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Pyramids. In Egypt and Mexico.

Poisoned myself by tasting a plant that looked like one I recognized from home. Then threw up for hours.

A wild chameleon climbed all over me on the ruins of an ancient Philistine city.

Teach, Learn, Share

I can teach you snippets of languages I know and learn same. Would love to learn recipes from wherever your travels began, or survival skills, gardening, music. Share: stories, food, poetry, travel experiences, craft skills.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, Czech Republic, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Germany, Israel, United States

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