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unreal asia
Did you travel in 2025? In 1998 I went to Europe for the first time. Until that moment of stepping off the plane and riding the train into London’s Victoria Station with my giant backpack over my shoulder, Europe was an abstraction in my head. It was this place I had heard about over and…
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the japan files
What excited you most in 2025? It turns out there are two subtly different terms for non-Asian people who find themselves with an interest in Japan: one can be a japanophile …or one can be a weeaboo (or weeb). Both are similar terms, but like anything we do in this crazy culture of ours one…
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japan-oramas, one
November has ended, and on the last weekend of the month I time travelled across sixteen timezones, arriving back home before I left Tokyo. Weird, huh? Our flight left Narita airport at 18:30 on Saturday evening and we arrived in Edmonton at 16:20 the same day. International travel can mess with your mind… and your…
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japanese, part four
Sayonara, but not forever. My class is done. My flash cards have just one more flash or so left in them. And I’ve definitely got Google Translate loaded up on my phone. As it is looking, forty-eight hours or so after writing this I’ll be sound asleep in Tokyo… y’know with the math on time…
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did I mention vancouver?
It has actually been a couple months since we took a spring trip out to the west coast and spent a five day long weekend in Vancouver. It wasn’t so much that I forgot to write about it, only that I wasn’t blogging much back even two months ago (having not yet rebooted this site)…