Today marks the 9 month anniversary of me closing on my house and becoming homeless. It is also the day that my old college roommate Sean will be appearing on Jeopardy. Sean and I were the backbone of the Macalester College Bowl team. We were the first and only team to ever beat the faculty. …
I found myself in Tokyo without a place to stay. The hostel I was staying at was booked for the weekend and every other hostel I could find online in the Tokyo area was also booked. This was a condition I found during my entire stay in Japan. It didn’t make for very good seat …
I am writing this on my laptop at a cafe at the Po Lin Buddhist temple in Hong Kong. The Po Lin temple has the largest sitting Buddha statue in the world. I’m sitting right underneath the guy as I type this. (Three cheers for open wifi connections!) The only way back to the subway …
First, let me say that there is no way I could visit this place and not use this as a headline for a post. Impossible. Second, I’ve been sneezing almost non-stop since I’ve gotten here. I have some sort of super hay fever. Perhaps it is some variant of SARS or the bird flu. I …
If you are going to travel through Japan, there is really only one way to properly travel between major cities: The Shinkansen, or as it is better known in the west, The Bullet Train. The Shinkansen is a high speed train that links up most of the major cities in Japan south of Hokkaido. If …
The first thing you must know is that I’m writing this in short sleeves….with a window open. The next thing you must know is that Hong Kong is really an amazing place. It is an assault on the senses. The only place I’ve been which is comparable to this is Manhattan. Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei are …
Tomorrow I’m off to Hong Kong in the morning. My stay in South Korea wasn’t all I had hoped due to the weather. I still have a lot of things I’d like to come back and see some day. Today I was supposed to go to the DMZ. The tour group I was with drove …
I’m freezing my ass off here in Korea. It got down into the lower twenties today (about -4 to -5 C). Thankfully, the place I’m staying is literally a block away from two of the places in Seoul I wanted to visit. My “cold weather clothes” consists of a t-shirt, a long sleeve t-shirt, a …
I am posting this from my iPod touch via an open wireless connection at the Seoul train station. For probably the second time on my trip, (Tahiti was the other) I’ve decided to cut things short. Rather than spending several days working my way to Seoul, I just came here directly. It is just too …