Your Own Answers

Your Own Answers

If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of...
Polluted Categories

Polluted Categories

Truthfully, I was unsure of how I may process my semester-long experience in Shanghai during my time in Japan. At first, I thought it may be best to separate these two experiences in fear of producing a negative judgement through an unfair comparison. In part I still...
Food, Landscapes and Friendships

Food, Landscapes and Friendships

We’ve crossed the halfway point of our time in Japan. The big blue sky and it’s many blushing shades, fully tummies and happy tastebuds, and seeing big smiles on the faces of new friends are my treasures this trip. Thankful for...
With Nature, Not Against

With Nature, Not Against

While international travel always brings one into contact with new foods, new people, and new ways of life, the diversity of our world is never so striking as the moment where you think, this would never happen where I come from. I’ve had a couple of those moments in...
What Nature Means to Me

What Nature Means to Me

It has been almost two weeks since our class got a second prompt to think about and write about. That prompt went like this: what is the natural landscape of Japan like? As soon as I heard that prompt, I said to my professor, “isn’t it hard for us to find natural...
Mountains

Mountains

Throughout our time in Japan so far, we have had the privilege to experience everything from Tokyo rush hour to the inner workings of a rural Japanese sustainable farm. Throughout all of the changes that we have gone through, one thing has remained constant: the...