My third year student's graduation, that is.

Graduation is a subject that is, in many ways I think, too near to me to be considered completely without emotion.  It was only ten months ago that I was getting my diploma and walking across that long stage at Wittenberg.  So it's understandable, I think, that watching these kids, no, these young men and ( Read more... )

Lets see, what's been going on with me....

Well, last weekend I went to Minami's culture festival out at some convention type place in Morioka.  It was a fun time, seeing all the student's artwork, watching a tea ceremony and listening to the brass band play.  Afterwards, I went out with one of my JTEs, meeting his wife and daughter, and seeing ( Read more... )

This past weekend I went up with Geoff, Lauren, Ra and Amanda to see the Sapporo snow festival.  It was an awesome spectacle, with giant snow sculptures and streets lined with ice statues.  Amanda picked me up last Thursday evening and we spent the night at Ra`s place, which was awesome.  To get to Hokkaido we took a ferry, which I thought was ( Read more... )

So for about a week and a half now, I've been trying to keep a dream journal.  I began this project after I had a very unsettling dream, very vivid and narrative in the extreme.  It was an... unpleasent dream for various reasons, and so I wrote it down in order to try and get it out of my system.  This quickly expanded to encompass writing down all ( Read more... )

I wish I had peanut butter.  

And so my trip came to an end and I returned to Japan.

I think, in a way, this (drawn out) recollection of my trip was a good and necessary thing.  It helped me remember a lot that the last few days had obscured.  The good bits of the trip, to go along with the bad.  Not all of it was the bitter draught that I found myself tasting at the end.

I ( Read more... )

This entry is going to be a rough one, on my end at least.  I apologise in advance for the fact that it's a downer, to put it mildly, and I also offer a disclaimer that the contents behind the cut may contain descriptions of violence of a nature that I find abhorrant.

We decided, on our first full day in Phnom Phen to visit the Killing Fields as ( Read more... )

Over the course of the next three days we visited a host of different temple sights.  I could take another three or four entries just to describe them all, but I shall attempt to be brief(er) and hit the highlights and give some general impressions ( Read more... )

I left off last time with the beginning of our taxi ride into the dark interior of Cambodia.  I had expected the drive to wind through over grown jungle and along the edges of rivers, something exotic and practically dripping adventure.  My expectations were... shall we say... not fulfilled.

Instead, we all clambered into the 10 passenger van and ( Read more... )

We awoke the next morning, bright and early, and by early I mean like 4:00AMish.  We quickly checked out, arranged a taxi to take us to the train station, and then off we went, zooming into the Thai night/early morning ( Read more... )