Celebrating big holidays like Christmas in a foreign country always comes with a mixed bag of emotions. Some expats, especially in their first couple of years abroad, will rush home every major vacation. Others do their best to ignore it and treat it like any other day. And some, like me, do their best to celebrate it any way they…
I will be the first to say that this post has nothing to do with travel or photography. I was recently going through some old files and I came across a list of bad translations that my students had written for an assignment where they had to interview someone. The interviews were harmless stuff, but the students were lazy and…
About a month ago I saw a notice for a sumi-e workshop in Nara with a well-known sumi-e artist, Christine Flint Sato. Eager to try my hand at some traditional Japanese crafts, I signed up. And on a warm November morning, I found myself grinding a sumi stick on an ink stone in a workshop with about 12 other students.…
Falling Off the Map 