Jake

Jenya and I met Jake at a coffee shop on St. Catherine’s street in Montreal. He was studying French while Jenya and I were loudly speaking Russian at the next table. He struck up conversation with us in Russian, and it later turned out that this was just one of the many languages he speaks. The very short, uber-condensed story is that Jake has traveled all around the world with the aim of learning languages. He’s been to a whole ton of amazing places – the Central Asian Republics, most of Middle East, North Korea (as a U.S. citizen. amazing.), down the east coast of Africa, Mongolia, Afghanistan, South America, India, etc. etc. It would take me a while to list every place, so suffice it to say that his “Where I’ve Been” map on Facebook looks pretty great. He’s easy to talk to, and he’s open to experiences and people and he struck me as being fearless. I mean, I suppose we all have fears, but he didn’t seem to let those get in the way of his travels. He was also quite a good listener, and he managed to not fall completely asleep while I theorized epiphanies and quizzed him on the relationship between justice and the law. Anyways, we ended up going to a jazz club together, and then hung out at a cafe on St. Denis (my favorite street in Montreal) until the sun came up and the metro started running again. Right now, he’s far away, attending one of the top graduate schools in the U.S. …one day, I hope to meet him in Brazil so that we can learn Portuguese together.

Oh, and, can’t believe I’m putting this on my blog but… ;)
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