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China, Pt. 2: Politics, Racism, and Being Gay
To understand anything about China, you have to know a little bit about its history. China occupies one of the longest continuously inhabited spaces on the planet, and currently has a population of nearly 1.4 billion. China was governed under dynastic systems until the turn of the 20th century, and it was only in 1949…
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China, Pt. 1: Accommodations
First, let me preface all of this by saying that an entire country is not defined by one city; neither is China mono-cultural or monolingual, despite what Chinese government entities might have you believe. I do not, in the following post, mean to generalize over all of China, over all Chinese people, cultures, or cities.…
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The Liberal Mafia
“You’re very handsome!” the driver repeated in Chinese, rolling the window down to let the tropically humid air in. “Thank you,” I said again, without a clue how else to respond to such a statement. In the front seat, my supervisor spoke quickly with someone on the phone, and to my right, the female version…
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Shove our shackles
It’s always painful to leave your favorite people behind, and I’m going to seriously miss my colleagues (and the few others I’ve managed to befriend here), but if I never had to return to this place again, I wouldn’t complain. I’d probably put on a banana hammock and dance through the streets. The past nine…
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Interview with Barney JC of Autoheart
Last March, I had the opportunity to speak with Barney JC, member of the London-based music group Autoheart, alongside singer Jody Gadsden and piano man Simon Neilson. At the time, they had released their first album and an EP, but had dropped off the radar for a few months while working on their second album, which…
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Tabetaifun
Since probably no one but me gets this pun, I’ll explain: “I want to eat (it)!” In Japanese is “tabetai.” Typhoon is written like “taifun” in Japanese. So it’s like a typhoon of things I want to eat. Get it? Haha, I’m hilarious. *・゜゚・*:.。..。.:*・'(*゚▽゚*)’・*:.。. .。.:*・゜゚・* I saved all the food porn for now! …
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Feel All the Things
I wasn’t going to write about the train journey back to Tokyo, but I had too many interesting revelations while reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, and a few interesting conversations with Yuuki. Iwate saw us off with some less than ideal weather, clouds hanging darkly over the sun and a light bit of…
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Life is good
My week in Karumai has been fantastic and fascinating beyond compare. Now I was finally doing what I loved– staying with locals not in a capital city but in a place that was more analogous to the small city life I’ve been used to. The household is multigenerational, with Kyoko’s mother and father living with…
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The Great Railway Bizzare
So there’s this cool thing in Japan called the Seishun 18 Kippu, which is a group of if tickets you can buy for the national rail system. With one ticket, which is about 2370 yen/$20, you get all day until midnight to use as many of the national railways as you like, which service most…