Tellus

I get off the bus in the middle of Vienna. All the signs are in German—I don’t speak German. I look at the string of letters on the street sign, look down at my map trying to find where I am, where I need to go. Problem with maps, though, is you [...]

(In Irish, there is no specific word for “hello.” Instead, one greets another person by saying “Dia duit” or “God be with you.” The second person responds by saying “Dia is Muire duit” or “God and Mary be with you.”)

While walking through the city of Cork, I noticed this statue of the Virgin Mary behind [...]

In the middle of Old Town Shanghai, there is a garden called Yuyuan and on the small lake lies a teahouse only accessible by a bridge of “nine-turnings.” As I walked up the stairs into the tea-rooms, I felt as though I was entering a completely different world. This was not the China I had [...]

This photograph was taken mid afternoon of Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands of the coast of Galway, Ireland. We were standing in Dun Aengus, a prehistoric fort built right up to a cliff edge with a sudden and severe drop into the ocean. This photo, taken from that cliff edge, demonstrates the [...]

After heading back from exploring an abandoned castle on the Corrib River (in the outskirts of Galway, Ireland), I came across this forgotten shed in someone’s backyard. It really struck me that something so plain and unremarkable could transform into something so beautiful. I loved how the gate had become so tangled with [...]

This is one of the many messages written on the Peace Walls of Belfast, Ireland. Graffiti throughout Ireland interested me but the single wall we saw held the most intricate and powerful images by far. For me, our trip to Belfast was unique in that the historical struggles of Ireland were immediately present rather than [...]

Of all sites in Prague that I went to over and over again due to showing visitors around the city, the Lennon Wall was the one that never, ever got old. This was partially due to the accidental hilarity when we arrived at the Lennon Wall and my visitor would remark that the entire time [...]