Exploring since 2003
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When we moved to Munich in 2024 I wanted a bicycle, but I could never settle on which one to buy. An e-bike, a nice hybrid, a folding bike? The choices were endless and the whole thing felt overwhelming, so I did nothing. I never got one at all. Which was silly, because I’d always […]
My father turned 70 last week. We gathered in Norwich to mark it, and somewhere between the cake and the catching up my mind wandered back to a 5-day walk we took together almost ten years ago. In 2016 I walked the Kumano Kodō Kohechi (熊野古道・小辺路), one of the ancient pilgrimage routes through the Kii […]
Chen organised it as a surprise, which she is far better at than I am. All I knew was that we were heading south for our anniversary, into the green middle of the Izu Peninsula (伊豆半島). In an ordinary year the destination would have been well beyond us. June 2021 was not an ordinary year. […]
I’m behind on posting this given we’re well into spring, but I wanted to share some photos from winter in and around Munich. We had snow on and off until early April, which was magical save for one unfortunate accident. Isar River We live not far from the Isar, which flows north from the Karwendel […]
The escalators in Munich’s U-Bahn are bidirectional. Not one up, one down: just one, and it goes whichever way the first person to step on it wants to go. If someone’s riding down and you want to go up, you wait. There’s no override, no priority lane. You just stand there until it’s your turn. […]
This is my first short story. The places are real, and some connect to things I’ve written about before, but the events are mostly not. It’s a little Murakami-inspired and I wanted to try writing fiction built on top of memory. The night before I left Hong Kong, I dreamed of a river. In the […]
I’ve been a WordPress user since 2004. My personal blog has run on it ever since. I’ve set it up for friends and family, watched it evolve through every major phase, and never seriously considered leaving. WordPress powers nearly half the internet, depending on how you count. But over the past few years, the strain […]
Tōhoku is the part of Japan that most Japanese think of as countryside. The six prefectures that make up the region stretch across the northern third of Honshu, where the cities thin out and the mountains close in. It’s a place of deep winters, summer festivals, and a beauty less polished than you’ll find further […]
Pictures of pale pink cherry blossom are all over Instagram again. Sakura season in Japan gets me every year. The whole country looks up at the trees for a week or two. People gather under branches with bento boxes and beer. Office workers sit on blue tarps in parks at lunch. Blossoms, sky, and a […]
After Mt. Haguro we headed by train to Akita City (秋田市). We had both been feeling under the weather all week and I had a migraine. I think we were just tired after a couple of weeks on the road. We stayed for two nights, with a quiet day in between visiting museums. The Akita […]
