Tellus

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 […]

It’s strange. During my days abroad in Germany I got to really know this particular landmark known as the Wasserturm or the Water tower in English. It actually looks really nice in the surprisingly hot German summer. Everyday I passed by it on my way to class. In the beginning I found this building quite intriguing […]

Going to visit Fushimi Inari Shrine at night was one of the most breathtaking experiences I had while in Japan. Wandering up the mountainside between thousands of torii gates, my friends an I were almost the only ones there. Pure silence except for the sound of footsteps. I doubt I’ll ever experience such a solemn, […]

Prague is a city which celebrates the harmonious interaction between history and the present. Living in Prague opens your eyes to the importance of the past in defining a nation’s culture and identity. The city’s architecture and memorials not only honor the country’s predecessors and heroes but commemorate the beginning of the nation. The Charles […]

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 […]

In London, History greets you at every turn. Literally. There are monumental locations galore: Westminster Abbey, in which a myriad of historical figures are buried; the Banqueting House, at which Charles I was beheaded; the British Library, housing manuscripts written by Dickens, Milton, Darwin, and Handel; Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms; the Tower of London, where […]

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 […]

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 […]

One of the coolest things I did on my time abroad was actually going to Scotland and Spain during our Spring break. Scotland was gorgeous and Edinburgh was a really neat city and had a lot to offer from great pubs to hiking to Edinburgh Castle itself, which was actually more like a museum than […]