Golden Week Hiatus: New Posts Coming Soon!

As many of you know, we just finished Golden Week here in Japan, which partially explains my lack of updates. But on the plus side, I just returned from a fantastic trip to… Read More →

Places in Japan: One Fantastic Day in Historic Takayama

Reesan from loneleeplanet has started up a new blogging festival called J-Festa to showcase the best of Japan, and this month’s theme is “Places in Japan.” I thought I would use the opportunity… Read More →

Wordless Wednesday #20: Buddha is Watching You!

This photo was taken near the public computer at the Zenkoji Temple Inn in Takayama, Japan. This place is a Buddhist temple that also serves as a hostel—and evidently, it has a good… Read More →

The Temple of Heaven

My attempt to sort and process my endless supply of China photographs continues, and today’s installment is the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. We spent a few rewarding hours wandering around here on… Read More →

An Afternoon in Asakusa

Predictably, my rate of blogging has decreased considerably from the start of the year—I’ve gone from 5 posts per week to barely being able to muster up the time and energy to meet… Read More →

Narita, Beyond the Airport

So, as many of you know from experience, Narita is the site of Japan’s main international airport. It’s also surprisingly far away from Tokyo. I remember coming into Narita for the first time… Read More →

Ginkaku-ji and the Philosopher’s Path

So, this post is actually about a trip that I took a while back—during my very first weekend in Kyoto, in fact. The CLS/KCJS folks arranged a trip along the Philosopher’s Path (… Read More →

Arashiyama

やっぱり(As expected), I’m behind on posts. The time is just flying by! At this point, I have less than three weeks left in Japan. We only have about a week of classes left,… Read More →

Hello from Kyoto!

It’s been such a busy week! On Monday, I moved out of the house I’d been living in for the last three years, put most of my earthly possessions in storage, and got… Read More →

First day of language classes…

It went well, but I am so so so so tired. I woke up around 4:30 am (partly because I’m not fully adjusted to Japanese time and partly because that’s when the sun… Read More →