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 need to know […]

(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 […]

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 unsettling […]

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 the overgrowth […]

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 […]

When I heard that the Queen’s Birthday caused classes at the University of Otago to be canceled on Monday, 1 June, I knew I wanted to use the extended weekend and travel somewhere in New Zealand I’d never been before. I’d already visited Queenstown, the country’s mountain-rimmed adventure capitol on the shores of stunning Lake […]

Hong Kong is the birthplace of dim sum. For the five months I was there, I was lucky enough to go out for it at least once every two weeks. It was available everywhere- from the five-star hotels downtown to random street vendors. Yet the best dim sum I’ve had to date was for a […]

This picture was taken when we went to Northern Ireland, in Belfast. It’s one of the multiple “Peace Walls” put up in various cities to separate feuding Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. Visiting the walls themselves was profound–it made the chasm between the disparate groups in Northern Ireland a reality. What was most poignant to me […]