How to Survive 'merka...

From London I flew home. It was sad, but at the same time it's been very cool. The return has of course been eased thanks to the people here who make my life awesome.



Anne Marie and I went wandering. We stumbled across some kind of festival, shopped for books, and took pictures in some random abandoned train cars.


Nothing like a pool when it's going to be 103 on Friday...


Then we welcomed Kassi back from Greece! Good times :-)


Celtic Fling anybody? Yes please.


Or perhaps the Stemapunk World's Fair with my best friend ever Cassie?

Even doing work can be fun. Does your workplace have an insane dog like this? Didn't think so. Bastard jumped out of a car the other day, while it was moving!! How insane is that?!

Alas, it seems the focus of this blog must shift.

Sometimes one must just face the facts. I'm no longer in Japan, and my traveling for the forseeable future will be somewhat limited. It shall be painful, but the next year will have me tied down rather thoroughly in central Pennsylvania.

I dream though, and not small. I spend hours upon hours combing the internet for fascinating places to go and cool things to do. I find doing this fascinating, so I thought "If I can't go places, perhaps I can bring some of the vicarious wonder in a distilled form to others". So I am somewhat excited to turn my little hobby of planning fantastic things out on a map (no I seriously have a push-pin map) into an educational and interesting experience for all. Look forward to this new distilled and humorous format in a regular form in the future. I hope it will be a positive move. Please for the love of god leave your feedback once it gets going so I can make this good.

Leave comments and suggestions in the comments.

Stay stoked,
DeLue

K.I.S.S./Leaving on a Jet Plane

I haven't posted on this blog since November.

Depressing no? And I now realize why. It takes hours upon hours to post the absurd lengthy posts I was doing and upload 30 or 40 photos of questionable quality. Plus all that trying to be clever AND grammatically correct at the same time is a damn chore!

So I've got a new approach, and here it is:

1 - More reasonable numbers of photos (less time uploading...)
2 - Better photos (both in quality and in meaning, I could be doing better anyway)
3 - More succinct prose (words can suck it)
4 - More frequent posts (duh)

We'll see how this goes!

Commence!

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Quick update on my situation! No longer in Japan, now in Birchrunville, PA for the summer, then back to Gettysburg in August. Gone vegan, so maybe awesome food stuff this way cometh?

More I'm sure will be made clear. I need to catch everybody up to what's going on so I've decided to do so in three parts: "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "The Long and Winding Road Home", and lastly "How to Survive the Return".

Leaving was sad, it sucked, but I'm happy to be home as well, so all in all it's just part of the journey of life. I have by no means left Japan for good, I made the most of my return, and things are good back here. Alas, however, we shall begin with a look back... The photos are awful, but the moments were the best.



This brave Canadian taught me to snowboard. By this I mean he said "try to fall backwards, not on your face, and just do what you see in all those Shaun White videos"... Still, it was an amazing weekend in Nagano.


The best Halloween ever! I'll be telling my kids this story over and over...once they're 30...

The best Seminar House ever forever.


Aya is like a Ninja. And she's Japanese, so I'm pretty sure that's a fact.

Really really cool people. 'nuff said.


This place was awesome. All you can drink 22:00-5:00? yes. I think I shall let Scandinavians coax me into drinking too much thank you.

I worked for a few months where Takuma lived his whole life. I had to get us home because he couldn't figure out the subway. But I did introduce everybody to delicious delicious fried rice balls. mmmmmmm
It was nice to see snow again, but the Floridian was really far too excited about frozen water... xD

Sweden, Canada and Iceland: awesome people and cold weather come from here.


Then I got to meet up with Bill for new years in Tokyo! Yes!

The insane Swede, the beautiful Icelander, and the crazy American they loved to get wasted. Scandinavia is just a really bad influence on me....


More awesome Canadian. Seriously there were like a billion of them. Canadia is apparently just a beautiful land full of awesome people.

There was only one awesome Icelander, but Karolina Warrior Goddess, daughter of Asgeir made up for that by being epic in every way possible. She has 5 livers and has instigated an epic battle atop mount Fuji between two drunken Americans for her love. Which I shall SOLIDLY win.


Badass roommate. It's always nice to have a guy with 7 memorized kanji dictionaries for a roommate while you're trying to learn Japanese. Plus he's got a motorcycle and taught me a judo takedown... How much more badass can you get?

In case that wasn't enough, all of my friends signed my snowboard... That's going on my wall to be cherished forever.
I figured it had to end properly, at the end. The last photo I took in Japan, the ever-lovely Airi was the coolest RA ever and we shall hang out very soon!

The land was amazing, the language fantastic, the culture mesmerizing, the food delicious. I enjoyed Japan, but what I enjoyed most of all was the amazing friends I made while I was there, and that was the hardest thing about leaving. Luckily this is only goodbye for now. No worries everybody! I'll stop off in Iceland, England, Germany, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Canada, Brazil, Switzerland, and all of the various prefectures of Japan soon to see you all again.

Until then,
Stay Stoked