Author’s note: this is a follow up to my piece “Working to Live or Living to Work?” And if you’ve not seen “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” this is my spoiler alert! One of my favorite movies of the…
Working to Live: Walter Mitty Edition
Author: Zachary A. Marx
Zachary Marx is currently living and working in Munich, Germany. He graduated with a degree in Political Science in 2006 from the University of Tennessee, and continues to bleed orange. So far, his vagabond lifestyle has brought him to five continents, and twenty-eight countries, with extended stays in China, Japan, and Korea. He started 80couches.com in February of 2011, with the ultimate goal of using it as the premise for couchsurfing around the globe. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. He can be reached by carrier pigeon, smoke signals, telegram, and via the Interwebs, at zachary.marx@gmail.com.
Legoland
The Danes have a great deal to be proud of. They’re the World’s Happiest People. They have a high level of social cohesion, equality, and standard of living. They have some of the best restaurants in the world. They thumbed…
Working to Live, or Living to Work?
Americans generally feel a close connection to their European brethren for a variety of reasons. We share many of the same Enlightenment values (e.g. freedom of speech), most American families have ties to Europe through heritage, and our strongest military…
Ready for Football in Bavaria
Lessons from Nowhere: Oruro, Bolivia
Perhaps it is harsh to call a city of a quarter of a million people “Nowhere” straight from the outset, I know I would be duly offended if and when someone refers to my own similarly sized town of Knoxville…
The Strange Places I’ve Called Home: Part 3, Knoxville
Check out my first two parts of my “Strange Places I’ve Called Home” series: Milwaukee, and South Florida. At first blush, Knoxville seems like an odd fit for a boy like me. It is conservative and religious, and I am…
The Strange Places I’ve Called Home: Part 2, South Florida
Part 1 (Milwaukee) of “The Strange Places I’ve Called Home” series can be found here. In the history of the U.S., Has there ever been a more iconic city linked to a particular decade than Miami was to the 1980s?…
Lessons from Nowhere: Punta Arenas, Chile
At various points throughout Patagonia, we had declared ourselves to be at “The End of the World.” Clearly our perceptions were flawed, as there was always somewhere further down the road to go. But by the time we reached Punta…
The Strange Places I’ve Called Home: Part 1, Milwaukee
Authors Note: The idea of this series of posts came about during the usual mind-wanderings induced from a combination of a lack of caffeine and the blur that is my morning commute on the Munich public transit system. Between chapters in…
The Strange Places I’ve Called Home: Introduction, 1982
My birth year is naturally misleading, seeing as I only experienced roughly 10 days of 1982, though “experienced” might be a generous word to use, insofar as a newborn baby doesn’t experience much of anything beyond the feeding/pooping/crying/sleeping cycle. While…
Taxation without Representation
Over two-hundred years ago, the phrase “No taxation without representation” became the battle cry for an increasingly numerous and increasingly unsatisfied group of British citizens living on the North American continent. Although the reasons for the incipient revolution was far…
Finding Dog
In the beginning, Man created gods. The gods were jealous, capricious, and spiteful. In fact, the gods were a lot like Man, but that’s quite besides the point. The gods quickly made a hash of things. They started requiring man…