Category Archives: Posts

That Weekend in Nagano, As Evidenced by iPhone Notes

Though it has spent a year tumbling around in my head, everything in this post is entirely true.

Hakuba, Nagano.

Hakuba, Nagano.

I’ve got to write a blog post about this weekend I thought, watching Yuu Koyama steal fried chicken off his father’s plate.

It was breakfast on Sunday morning.  Yuu Koyama was disrupting the cold, silent and nearly empty hall with casual English cursing that his father only vaguely recognized.  He was taunting his father by eating his food and moving his plates away from him.  It was December 21st, 2014.

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Lessons from Traveling Alone

Recently I traveled alone to the island nation of Taiwan.

Me pointing at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

Me pointing at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

In beginning my solo adventure I remembered posts from my former Japan sidekick Rob Milchling’s blog, where he often spoke about traveling, often alone. He has taken many solitary trips around the East Asian region and beyond. I never actually read most of his posts about traveling, perhaps out of jealousy that he was blogposting faster and more efficiently than me, but I assumed these entries’ existence meant I had many lessons to learn on my own upcoming trip.  I was right.

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Korea: According to Ji Yeon

Golden Week is vacation time in Japan. During this nationwide string of holidays in the first week of May I had the opportunity to visit South Korea, with my friends Ian and Seth.

Me, Seoul, Seth.

Left to right: Me, Seoul, Seth.

Korea has a rich culture. The food is delicious, the history is fascinating, the landscapes are stunning, and the girls are beautiful, even if they weren’t all that interested in talking to me. South Koreans may not be happy, however, with the simple fact that the most memorable experience of the trip for me was a daytrip to see the Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ, and the weird country to the north of it. With my own eyes, I looked upon North Korea.

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Simple Pleasures

Catching Up:

I’m not famous. If you care enough about my doings to visit this blog, you may have been aware of my recent birthday.  And if you’re my Mom, you’re probably aware it was March 22nd… which isn’t so recent.  Yeah, this blog post took awhile.  The gifts for entering my marathon year came in many forms, but they can be boiled down to one word: change. And it all came from the people around me.

Nipponbashi, Osaka.

Nipponbashi, Osaka.

Normal life is resuming for me in Osaka, Japan.  My 26th birthday came during the peak of the abnormalcy (LibreOffice says that’s a typo, but if normalcy is a word, so damn well is abnormalcy), and it surpassed expectations by about ten thousand percent.  So here goes the most narcissistic story I’ve ever written, a post about my own birthday, as a grown man.

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On the Merits of Long Blog Posts

I love to write.  So long as my dreams survive I will think of myself as a writer first and a teacher second.  As a writer, I must call into question the purpose of my own blog.

Please stop crying, it’s here to stay!  But observing other blogs and struggling under my own high standards, I must ask myself several questions.  What am I to post here? Shall this website share my greatest adventures?  Should it tell just you about my day?  About Japan?  Must this blog be restricted to only the most interesting editorials I can write (even if I did, would my opinion count for anything)?  Am I expected to somehow mix my life and my opinions into one intriguing daily post?  That’s my greatest fear.  How can I make a routine day interesting?  What is life?

TimeMeMeMeOn the other hand, these high standards of publishing have left this blog empty.  My training buddy Rob has a blog full of his life’s adventures.  He writes interesting things and he has a large following.  But I’m forced to ask myself if I only enjoy reading it because I know Rob well.  It’s well written, but I probably wouldn’t have started, nor would I have continued, unless I knew him.  That begs another question: who is this blog for?  Surely, it’s for you.  But is it also not for future readers?  What am I?

I write this overly philosophical piece because I have a huge post forthcoming.  I’ll do my best to make sure it’s consistently exciting and relevant.  But a lot of it is a personal journey that one must feel a connection with me to appreciate.  It feels as if something is compelling me to recount the struggles and triumphs of the past few months.

It may take me years to figure out what’s worth publishing on the blog, or what’s better submitted to a newspaper, written in a postcard, or scrawled in my private journal.

The forthcoming epic is about my recent birthday celebration. And since I’m not famous, if you’re reading this, you probably wished me a happy birthday and still care to at least try to read it.  For that, I owe you my gratitude.

Whether you’re interested in the material on this blog or the egomaniac who writes it, I sincerely thank you for reading, will all my heart.

@gregnasif