Tellus

During my regular life (meaning, not living in Rome on a semester abroad), I overburden myself. I thrive when I am over-committed, so I work multiple jobs on top of being a full-time student. So I told myself that going abroad would be time for me, and I would focus on relaxing and just having […]

This photo was taken at Korea’s iconic Seoul Tower, also called Namsan Tower. I waited specifically till after my program ended when my mother and uncle would visit me to go to Seoul Tower.  I wanted to share this experience with my family because of what this tower represents and show them the beautiful view […]

Before coming to Spain, I had started to have an interest in food.  My father had always been very talented at cooking and despite the fact that he was born in Japan, had always had a special love for Italian food.  I went to Spain without any idea of what Spanish food would be like, […]

Anyone who has gone to Germany will tell you that each city has three things to offer, a church, a palace/castle and a town hall. We visited the Stuttgart Palace on a wonderful summer afternoon, had ice cream in the city center and ate Döner. Walking in these fountains next to toddlers and Germans. This is a […]

{Post 3 from blog} Ok, so I left off explaining some of the cultural differences that I have seen so far in Prague along with a brief overview of what I had been doing. I am now settled into my flat and it has been a blast! My flat mates are hilarious and we have […]

View image In Marseille, we found a tiny secret little community on the coastline that you could only find by going through a door and down some stairs off the side of a coastal road. There we found a small harbor scattered with brightly colored boats. Climbing the cliff, you could see out for miles, […]

  It was my last week in Amman, Jordan and the thickest sandstorm I’d ever seen blotted out the sun and cast eerie shadows across the rocky desert outside my office window at the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Swiveling back around to my desk I caught the eye of Osama who was laughing at […]

This entry is written in response to the first question posed by the office of international education on the blog question worksheet: What did you assume before you left that you are not finding in your host-country, host-culture and/or host family and friends? Discuss why you think you made those assumptions? Throughout my French courses […]

This entry is in response to the 3rd question posed by the office of international education: What have you done to learn about your host-country’s culture? What parts of the culture are you learning about? What do you feel you are missing? What can you do to explore the parts you feel you are missing? […]

This is not a particularly striking photo, I know, but the memories that this photo invokes for me are striking. In late January 2009, along with sixteen other Willamette students who were also spending the semester in Ireland, I spent four days in Connemara, Ireland, which is a gaeltact, or Irish gaelic-speaking region. We were […]

Rīga is bitterly cold in the winter. It was -18° Celsius (just under 0° Fahrenheit) in late January when I got off the plane in Latvia and walked across the tarmac to the gate, still wearing the jeans and T-shirt I had on when I left Seattle. The next three weeks only got colder. On […]