Bardiac

Well, embarrasingly, after going on and on about how I love onigiri (and I do), I learned the real way to open them the other day. It'...

I have real problems pronouncing a couple sounds here. Ryu, for example. It means "dragon." The problem is, when someone says t...

I talked another teacher into playing tourist with me today (it didn't take a lot of convincing), and we went to the Fushimi Inari Shrin...

As I mentioned before, I brought my student some chocolate cookies from Nara; they're called basically "deer droppings" cookie...

I was reading a forum I found yesterday, for foreigners living here, and got to thinking about how very many people have written about livin...

I was walking home from the grocery store today when I was reminded of car parking. You see, the first day I got here, the staff member who...

Another cold day, snowy and wet (but still not as cold as the Northwoods!), so I took myself to the imperial city main train/bus station to ...

I spent most of last week meeting with students about their drafts before their peer editing day on Friday. Mostly, our meetings were helpf...

Over the Kamagawa (aka the Kama River; "kawa" means river, and gets pronounced "gawa" in certain combinations), there...

Yesterday, we spent the whole class working on thesis statements on the board, and making bubble maps for the essays. I think just under ha...

I'm basically a lazy person who doesn't much like to cook. So fast food is a good thing. Except when it's not. You know, when...

On older buildings around here, I've noticed what I thought were thatched roofs. But today, I learned that they're not thatched, th...

My first days here were pretty overwhelming. Some other faculty folk took me to Kyoto, and showed me the Chion-in Temple area, helped me bu...

The Yahoo thing when I checked my email has a link to an article about what your car says . It's stupid. So I've decided to explai...

About 10 days ago, I asked some of the faculty with more experience here for a suggestion for a field trip, and they suggested something cal...

I got home yesterday, after a long day wandering through and around temples and shrines in the imperial city, flipped on the computer to qui...

Reading the journals for yesterday's class was fun, as much as any sort of grading can be fun. One of the things that made it interesti...

Some bird names are just great. Click to see a larger picture, look towards the center. There's a bird with a greenish back, and a bri...

I had a most delightful lunch today with a student who will be visiting NWU next semester. S had come to talk to me last week (but just bef...

My Host City is bordered on the west by a large river, and near the city center, a smaller river joins the large one. I'd been told abo...