Walk the Earth
This is still a work in progress.....Like many people, I love to travel. I’ve always been passionate about foreign cultures, languages and landscapes and I have spent a good deal of time exploring the world. When I was five, my family took a trip to our ancestral home of Winterthur in Switzerland. After I graduated from High School, I spent a gap year living in Köln, Germany and moved to the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin not long after the wall came down. It was at this time that I began to travel extensively. While at the University of Colorado, I spent two years as an exchange student at the Universität in Regensburg. Afterwards, I wandered around Europe before going to work for a Swiss company in Lucerne on the shores the Vierwaldstaettersee. I speak German fluently and have spent many semesters studying Arabic and Farsi at Pacific Arabic Resources. Over the last twenty years I have been exploring South East Asia and the Middle East. In 2008, I travelled overland from Istanbul to Cairo and the journey had a profound effect on me. I wasn't prepared for how wildly different the Middle East would be until I crossed over the border from Hatay, Turkey to the sprawling metropolis of Aleppo, Syria. The first person I encountered when I got off the bus was a young man who approached me and hurled a barrage of questions at me in Arabic. At the time I hadn’t bothered to learn any words in Arabic. It never occurred to me that I would not be able to find someone who could speak German let alone English. Although I could not parse the exact words of what he was saying, I knew exactly what he meant in Arabic when he laughed out loud and said with incredulity, “You are an American who came here to Syria and you don’t even speak a word of Arabic?” This prompted a number of his friends to rejoice in the spectacle of my speechless embarrassment. In that moment, I felt a powerful desire to be at ease in a world that felt so very foreign and uninviting. The city of Aleppo became a transformational stop on my journey and the Middle East has become one of the most exciting regions of the world to me.
Middle East
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| Iran 2015 | Syria 2008 | Lebanon 2008 | Iran 2009 |
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| Egypt 2013 | Morocco 2012 | Jordan 2008 | Iran 2010 |
In addition to travel, I love outdoor adventures like skiing and scuba diving. Some of my favorite places to dive are Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Maldives. In 2003, I summited Mt. Aconcagua via the falso polacos route. Furthermore, I have always been fascinated by aviation and have a thoroughly nuanced and fully functional understanding of aircraft and aircraft operations. Part of the reason I love to travel so much is because I love the journey to far away places as much as those places themselves. I am also an avid fan of the San Francisco Giants and the San Jose Sharks. In my next life, I will be reborn in Warroad, MN.