CURRENT MISSION

My mission is to have fun and stay interested.

ABOUT ME

I am fun loving. I like meeting new people and doing weird or silly things. I have traveled to more than 40 countries, usually for a long time. Going slow and meeting people is the way to travel. When 'away,' I try to learn languages and understand the people I'm visiting.
I also love the arts. My job is a teacher at a university. Teaching is a great job. I even teach a class on travel writing. Ask me about the course if you're interested in knowing how it works.

PHILOSOPHY

The purpose of life is growth, and the purpose of growth is more growth.

我为什么加入 Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Participation is the name of the game. Why would you watch when you could take part?

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I am still learning to surf, but I am happy that couches are now surfable objects. Before the internet, I was passed from family to family when traveling through Jordan, which seems like a couch surfing experience.

兴趣

Everything - specifically toys, people, good times, books.

• arts
• culture
• writing
• books
• traveling
• socializing
• surfing
• teaching
• emergency services
• languages
• mountains

音乐、电影和书籍

Movies - I recently saw and liked The Guard. I like anything well-written and well-acted, although that means I like relatively few movies.
Music - is music to my ears, especially the music they play on public buses here in Zhuhai.
Books - "Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading." I love books. Now I'm reading Let the Great World Spin. Actually, I moved to China because I read and liked so many of the contemporary Chinese writers I could find translated into English.

我做过的一件不可思议的事情

I teach a class on travel writing.

This is an essay I wrote on travel which includes some amazing things:

Going Someplace Else
There are two parts to any escape: the going and the someplace else. Mostly I travel for the same reason that Ishmael went to sea – it drives off spleen and prevents me from deliberately stepping into the street, methodically knocking people's hats off. Travel means getting away, going someplace else where the cares and concerns of the everyday world are no longer automatic – be they automatic because we’ve been ground into a rut or because the daily grind rubs us the wrong way. Travel offers something new. We say goodbye our particular worlds and hello to the wider world because we want to be changed. The perspective from which you navigate life is no longer automatic.
In Morocco in 1995, I asked someone else for directions, but an attractive young woman in a denim outfit knowledgeably told me what I wanted to know. A confident, young, modern woman in Morocco? Why would that be a surprise? Because I was more ignorant before the encounter than after. This is another reason to travel. In between seeing sights, we might actually learn something.
Being elsewhere opens us to a world of possibilities. If you’re from Bombay, there may be noting noticeable, let alone magical, about a typical Indian street scene. But for me, a New Yorker, India went from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again every five seconds. Ten years ago a leper showed me a tin bucket on the stump of her fingerless arm, lilting, “Please sir, it’s Christmas.” At first I felt revulsion, fear, and horror. A leper isn’t a sight, but neither is a leper the opposite, something to be hidden, avoided, and omitted from memory. I gave her some rupees; she gave me a funny, Dickenseque feeling I re-experience every time I think of her. I’m enriched in a way that never could have happened if I’d stayed home. Jackson Heights is delightful too, but it isn’t India.
Like Yogi Berra, I wouldn’t sightsee anyplace that has too many tourists. Travel, for me, is the search for some sort of authentic experience. Mostly this means I prefer experiences over sights. I’d rather see things as they are than a sanitized view. After crossing from Bulgaria to Romania on a ferry distant from the usual tourist routes, customs kept my girlfriend and me for an inordinately long time, much to the amusement of the gypsies for whom we had demurred to smuggle cigarettes. When we were finally allowed to make our way into the country, a machinegun toting guard called out to us, “Have fun at Dracula’s castle.”
This was more enjoyable that the vampires we met shortly after, getting robbed twice in our first 24 hours in the country, and both times by corrupt transit officials. That did not sour us on the country or the people, although it made for a jarring transition. Also unnerving was the mentally-handicapped dwarf sharing our train compartment who kept shouting, “Sibiu, Sibiu, Sibiu,” our destination. Sibiu is a breathtakingly beautiful, medieval city set between the Fagaras and Cibin Mountains. Experiences, even the bad ones, don’t preclude enjoying sights.
Also sights seem somehow reduced by their name to something you just look at; therefore something you could ‘virtually visit.’ That’s merde. (Pardon my French.) The insecurity of being someplace else belies this, as do the strange odors, sounds of unknown origin, or different concepts of personal space. We might be able to feel sympathy for a culture we learn about remotely, but the connection is so much more tenuous. Take a visit to Kentucky Fried Chicken as an example. I could do this in my city, and probably online; however, one steamy summer evening in Shanghai returning to my hotel after a long walk up a pedestrian plaza, a woman asked me to buy her some KFC. Amused, I agreed. (I like to buy locals meals, since breaking breading is a good way to get to know people. Also, if you can manage to take the time and spare the expense to get to someone’s country, that in-itself is fairly ostentatious.) In line, the woman thanked me and called me ‘elder brother,’ which was worth its weight, not in gold, but certainly in soggy chicken.
In Vietnam, I went somewhere in the countryside to visit the family of a friend – a family of amazingly kind people who worked as butchers, at one point shaving a slaughtered hog with a pink disposable razor to ready the meat for market. I was the only non-Asian in town, so after a few days the police sent a scout to investigate my documents. I had only a photocopy of my passport, since the original was still in Hanoi under scrutiny of the visa-extension authorities. The local police were unimpressed, fined me, and told me to get on the first bus out of town. This was after I had ‘bought them breakfast’ and was forced to ‘admit my mistake,’ while sitting under the gaze of a gigantic picture of Ho Chi Minh. I’m sorry if I embarrassed my friend or her family, but I certainly enjoy thinking about the experience. The policeman even had a menacing way of smoking, as if he were about to carefully use the ember to elicit further confessions. You can’t ride that at Disney World.
Travel should by definition involve enrichment; it is a leaving of the known and a getting-to-know of the new.

教，学，和分享

I know how to live with being embarrassed or afraid.

I travel like Rolf Potts !
You are a travel legend in the making, with a sense of adventure that will lead to hundreds of fascinating stories. Locals all over the world will give you special nicknames, and almost all of them will be complimentary.
What type of traveler are you?
Take BootsnAll's Travel Quiz to find out.
I also used Pott's essay on how to write a travel essay in my travel writing class!

我游览过的国家

Belgium, Cambodia, Canada, China, Egypt, England, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Macao, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palestine, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Wales

我居住过的国家

China, Thailand, United States