Searching for Tao

So this post is a little late, but I did promise Noreen that I'd write something before the week is out. My parents came to visit last week, all the way from Kelowna, BC. It was wonderful to see them walk off that plane, and exciting to be able to show them the life I'm carving out for myself here. I lived in Ottawa and Toronto for about six years and with the exception of a brief visit from my father (and surrogate uncle) in my final year, I never really had the opportunity to share what my life outside of BC was like with my parents. This time however, the experience will be a little more thorough.

For the most part, their first experiences with the Netherlands was rather similar to my own: The instinctive aversion to the sound of Dutch, getting screwed by the NS (transit authority) payment system, and surprise at the low cost of food -- though my father did note that the Dutch appear to wrap every damn thing in plastic.

For tourist destinations, they mostly relied on me to point out the interesting sights in the city. Obviously, they wanted to visit the Red Light district (where my mom noted the absence of male prostitutes: "All I'm asking for is a little equality damnit"). At my suggestion, they checked out the Erotic Museum and giggled at some of the exhibits, and they also made a point of visiting somewhere-not-amsterdam. Since I live in Bussum, they decided to visit Utrecht, where they spent the day wandering through the old city and apparently marvelling at the soup in a cafe there.

They had the opportunity to meet and spend some time with Christina as well, which was prety neat. They all got along, and my parents were pretty impressed with her. I have a few nice pictures of Christina trying to explain my smartphone to my dad.

I suppose the other highlight for their trip was the Keukenhoff, a sort of Dutch Playland for flowers. Imagine walking for hours through gardens of sculpted flower beds: colours, and perfume pretty much everywhere. It's kind of a big deal here. Personally, it didn't do much for me, but my mom was pretty tickled :-)

Unfortunately, that week was mostly about them exploring the Netherlands on their own, since I had to do the day job thing. I wanted to ration my vacation across the year this time, so I only took one week off for their being here: this week. You see, after they left my apartment in Bussum on Monday, they went to Barcelona, and at this very moment I'm on a highspeed train to Paris where I'll be meeting them for some touristy goodness. We'll check out all the Paris stuff, take some pictures, and then head onto London, and eventually to Dublin. It'll be nice to get away from the day-to-day stuff and really do the vacation thing with my parents again. After all, the last time we did that... I think I was in high school.

Anyway, the entire visit is being catalogued online in pictures. If you're into that sort of thing, you can head on over to my G+ gallery.

I suppose blogging in general took a big hit in 2011 eh? I mean, everywhere you look now, people are using tumblr, Facebook, or even Google+ for blogging these days, and the old-fashioned site-as-blog has more or less evaporated. But I've always been part futurist and part luddite, so I've no intention on following suit. This blog may have become sparse over this past year, but it's still the one place where I can post anything I want, on any topic I want, and still retain control over my content. I'll likely keep this up and running right until Diaspora becomes more portable/accessible, or some other similar project comes along and does a better job.

But this post, I couldn't skip out on this one. It's the annual recap post. It's like the Christmas Card I never sent to anyone that recaps what's happened in my life this past year. Like all of its predecessors, it's a long one, so you might want to grab a beverage ;-)

An Unhappy Start

2011 started out pretty down for me. I'd been laid off from my less-than-enjoyable gig at Work [at] Play and had, on the advice of my good friend Chris Rhodes, decided to take the opportunity to look for work in Europe. I had moved out of my $1300/mo apartment in Vancouver's West End, and into my grandparent's basement in Delta, and was actively looking for work overseas: France, Germany, and the Netherlands were all candidates, and Japan & Korea were both pie-in-the-sky hopeful locations. I got three interviews in Europe, two in Munich and one in Amsterdam, and from them, two offers. Unfortunately, I didn't much like the prospect of those offers, and the 3rd company wasn't interested (I wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about Perl). I was unemployed, in debt, and living in my grandparent's basement. I was 31.

But then Shit Got Real

Things started to look up though after I had an interview with a Dutch company who offered me a gig literally 15minutes after the phone interview. They offered to handle my visa and arrangements for my initial lodging, and wrapped this in a six month contract for a rate that seemed reasonable. I was set. I was moving to Europe.

I said my goodbyes to my friends, and then to my family, packed all of my worldly belongings into three bags, and got on a plane. It wasn't scary, rather I had gone into that "autopilot" mode I have, where the future is committed, there's no sense in worrying about it. In retrospect though, I'm still surprised that I managed it with so little stress.

Money!

Just when I thought that money was going to get super-tight, I stumbled into two $5k cheques: one from the Canadian government, a tax refund for the six years I'd been putting off doing my taxes, and the other for my involvement with TheChange. Together, these two helped pay off my growing credit card balance and finance my move into a new, unfurnished place here in Bussum. Kids, never let it be said that money is the problem. It's not. If you line up everything else, it always seems to work out.

Five Weddings in Five Cities

Then there were the weddings. Jesus Christ people, did you all have to get married all in the same year??? I'd missed Annie & Desmond's nuptials back in 2007 and will regret it forever, I wasn't going to let that happen again with some of the closest people in my life. Shawna & Michael had their ceremony in Yeosu, Stephen & Irena had theirs in Toronto, Chrystal & TJ had a reception in Vancouver, while my brother & Shawna got married in Kelowna, and Noreen & Craig rounded out the year with their wedding in Honolulu. If you're curious, that works out to roughly 35,653kilometres (about 1/10th of the distance to the Moon), about $5507CAD (before carbon credits, Mother Earth hates me) and 26 days off work (105% of my vacation)... and I'd do it again. Each wedding was an exciting experience and a milestone in the lives of people I love. I can think of no better way to have spent my time and resources this past year.

Politics and Missed Opportunities

Somewhere in there, Canada got a new King government, a new NDP Official Opposition (yay!), and the Green Party saw it's first MP elected (more yay!). Politically, it was a HUGE year in Canada and I really felt left out of it all. There are days, on this side of the Atlantic, that I feel like I gave up on a life I could/should have had when I left Toronto, or Vancouver, and I wonder if it was the Right thing to do. What would it have been like to work with Adriane Carr on her campaign? Could I have helped enough to see her take a second seat? If I'd stayed in Toronto, could I have helped keep Ford out, or even just helped another candidate take a council seat? Would I be running for a council seat in the next election? I suppose that the biggest lesson learnt from this year so far has been that each decision commits you to walking through one door to the exclusion of others, and that commitment requires a certain acceptance of this fact.

Rounding it all Out

I ended the year with a trip home for Christmas with the family, paying off my student loans, and closing my account at CIBC. I entered 2012 100% debt-Free and unsupportive of big banks. I even managed to ditch Facebook.

The bulk of the rest of the year was filled with weekend trips to different cities and towns around the Netherlands, a pair of trips to London and Paris, a short romantic relationship with a lovely girl that turned into a wonderful friendship, and a few more friends on top of that -- all of this wrapped in a cloud of shell shock, excitement, and frustration that comes with living in a new city, new country, new continent, and new culture. It's been good for me I think, and I'm glad I've made the decisions that brought me to this time and place in my life.

Matt & Shawna got married this weekend, and I got to be the Best Man. It was a beautiful ceremony and the reception was a lot of fun. For those of you who might be interested, the photos are up on Google Plus, since my own image gallery is... well it sucks. I need to make a bunch of changes to it and frankly I've got more fun things to work on right now. But yes, the photos are up there and they're public, so you don't need an account to see them.

I wanted to post my speech for the couple here though, if only for my own records, since this is the one body of data I tend to keep tabs on. A file called "speech.txt" tends to get lost :-) Big props to Melanie who helped me with it, and to the happy couple who inspired it.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name's Daniel Quinn and I'm Matt's brother and Best Man tonight.

When contemplating what to put into this speech, I initially thought I might pepper it with fun stories about what a bad kid Matt was, but I'm not going to do that. Don't get me wrong, Matt was a Very Bad Kid growing up, but all of those stories are just stories that outline a singular truth about who he is:

Matt does what he wants, however he wants to do it.

He will not be dictated to, and he will not be advised. He doesn't follow rules that he hasn't tested by breaking them at least once, and instead charges headlong into the world with a map drawn only by his *own* past experience. Often he'll run clear into walls, fall down, get up, and run at that wall again and again and until it comes down. Matt was the kid that mashed puzzle pieces together to make them fit. He does things his way, or not at all and I've spent my life wishing I could be as bold as he is.

...it's probably better that it didn't turn out that way though, Dad's hair can only go white once.

Now that he's found Shawna, he's still the same headstrong smartass he's always been, but in her he's found a partner. Someone who puts up with his attitude, but doesn't give him a free pass, and has shown time and time again that she'll be right there with him barrelling through life, shoulder to shoulder with Matt, knocking down whatever stands in their way. Alone, Matt's a force to be reckoned with, but together these two are unstoppable.

Shawna is exactly the kind of person I always wanted to see with my brother. She is patient and smart, enthusiastic and wilful, and genuinely gets Matt on a level that few others do. And so I'm thrilled to welcome Shawna to our family.

Congratulations to both of you.

If you're honestly curious about the technical details of Multiple Sclerosis, don't read this blog post. Read the exhaustive Wikipedia article instead. Same goes for the CCSVI treatment. I'm going to try to simplify it here in my own words/understanding.

MS is basically a disease which sees toxins in the blood stream build up in the brain, leading to a degradation of the nerves connecting the brain to the spinal chord. This results in reduced mobility, significant pain, and eventually near immobility. A debilitating disease, those afflicted often can't work, walk, or in extreme cases even hold a fork to eat. Within the western scientific community, the cause is unknown, and there is no cure. Also, my aunt has it.

Now the deal with CCSVI. A few years ago, there was this vascular surgeon named Paolo Zamboni whose wife was diagnosed with MS. The romantic that he is, he devoted his life to finding a cure, and in 2008, he claimed that he'd found one. As a vascular surgeon, he looked at MS from a perspective of blood flow as opposed to a neurologist, who typically approaches MS from the brain. Zamboni found that in most of the MS patients he examined, the veins from the brain to the heart were constricted, leading him to believe that his was causing a backlog of iron deposits in the brain leading to MS. He performed a simple operation of re-expanding those veins and lo-and-behold most of the patients got better.

Now there's more to this of course. There's a lot of criticism for Zamboni's results: claims that it wasn't sufficiently scientific, that the numbers and proportions of sick vs. control were inappropriate -- all good criticism and there are new tests being done along the same lines all over the world now.

Now here's where things get sticky (and anecdotal). As horrible as MS is, people aren't waiting for additional clinical trials. This discovery was made in 2008, and here in 2011 we're still waiting on the scientific establishment to give the nod. MS patients all over the world are frustrated and angry, and a lot of them have been getting the treatment anyway -- with amazing results.

As my family is directly affected by MS, we've been following this "Liberation" or treatment for some time now. Canadians can't get it here, as it's still not a sanctioned procedure, so we've been looking overseas. Ameds Centrum, one of the most prominent hospitals in the world for CCSVI is in Poland, and they've been doing this procedure for about a year now. You fly in, they pick you up at the airport in an ambulance, rest you at a hotel and do an MRI the next day. If in fact you have the aforementioned vein constrictions, They can do the vein re-expansion in a few hours and then you're monitored on-site for another couple days. Costs vary depending on the amount of expansion done (if you need stents etc.).

My grandmother managed to contact one of the patients who had this procedure done, so we went to meet her on Vancouver Island this week. I must tell you, scientific study aside, CCSVI appears to work. Before her trip to Poland, this woman suffered from dramatic loss of mobility. She could walk, but only against a wall, and only very slowly. Bending down wasn't an option, turning her head made her sick and dizzy, and her concentration was vastly diminished as well. But now you wouldn't know she ever had MS. She walks, she talks (a lot), she can do squats: 100% mobility. Her cognitive response is right back where it should be, she is a changed woman. She even claims that she felt the effects almost immediately: before the procedure, she couldn't hold a fork, but 10minutes out of the operating room, she was clenching her hands into fists repeatedly. She was totally amazed.

I'm writing about this because I want to share this woman's story, and the controversy surrounding this new treatment. I also want to point out that drugs with known damaging side effects are actively being used to treat MS symptoms in this country, while there's been little or no movement on CCSVI. Dangerous drugs have somehow managed to be pushed through to the pharmacy counter in record time and yet a relatively low-risk procedure like this somehow still requires more study. The aforementioned patient voiced her sincere distaste for both the MS Society and her neurologist, and while I understand the need for careful controls on new drugs and procedures when it comes to public health, I can't help but share some of her frustration when it comes to the apparent double-standard in this case.

If they can clear their backlog of requests, my aunt will likely be going to Poland for CCSVI this year. It may not do anything, but given the low risk involved, and the potential for getting her life back, we all feel that it's a good choice.

I was considering going for the melodramatic and starting this post off with something like "I am in hell", but honestly, I can think of far worse places to be than in Kelowna. That's not to say that I'm a big fan of this place, or that I'd ever choose to live here, I'm just trying to keep things in perspective.

My parents have gone away for a few weeks on a much needed vacation, and since I'm not working at the moment, I offered to house-sit for them. My reasons for this weren't altogether selfless: I needed to get some isolation as well.

Living "on the coast" (that's what they call Vancouver and the surrounding areas here), I was too close to a lot of distractions. I have a social circle there, and living with the grandparents takes a toll on my sanity. I wasn't getting a lot done, and I wasn't really doing much in the way of thinking regarding my Where To Go From Here question either. Now, here in Kelowna, alone in an empty house with only an SUV to shuttle me around, a bubble in a tiny town full of bubbles, I find I can't really get away from myself and what must be done.

So far I've been pretty productive. I've taken the opportunity to learn Android, something I've been meaning to do ever since the O/S debuted a couple years ago. I'm progressing nicely and may even have my cartographic app ready before I finish up here. I'm also applying for work in a variety of exciting places: Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, London, even Prague. The progress is slow however. Most companies prefer to hire locals (for obvious reasons) and it's tough to overcome that bias... if I'm even given the chance.

Nonetheless I'm in a unique position to be patient. There's a lot of work out there, I just need to learn how to access it as a foreigner to these places.

Before she left, my mother asked the all-important question: "What do you really want? What's your ideal job?" After talking about it some, we settled that at this point in my life, the location of the job is more important than the job itself, though I know from past experience that my work must be respectful and interesting if I'm going to enjoy my life in any city. I want the kind of work where understanding the language and local customs of somewhere interesting is part of the job. Maybe I don't *need* to live overseas to find that. I suppose my ideal job would be one where I could live in Toronto, but spend a rather large amount of time in some of the cities mentioned above.

Anyone know how someone with my skills can find work like that?

Anyway, I'll post again soon when I have something to show for my last few days of Android education.

So now that I'm unemployed, I suppose I have time to catch up on stuff here. There are a lot of posts I've been meaning to save here, and there's no time like the present to post them all. I'll start with the recipe for my grandmother's chicken soup.

My grandmother (on my mother's side) is the Chef-as-Matriarch of the family. Since I was a kid, she's had the family over for these massive European-style feasts. 4-7 courses, turkey, pork roast, cabbage rolls, roasted vegetables, soup, green salad, egg salad, pie, cake, and sometimes crème caramel if it was my grandfather's birthday.

All of these are amazing, but what she's known for, practically worshipped for in this family is her soup. Below is the recipe for her sour soup. For the most part, the mechanics are the same. You can swap out the stewed tomatoes for any kind of meat you like. The key is the first line, those vegetables make up the base that's used in all good soup. This incarnation is my favourite though. The sour cream step make everything fabulous:

• carrot, parsnip, celery, onion (one of each, she calls this "miroquois")
• Sauté in pot with oil until the onions are translucent
• Add ½ a can of stewed tomatoes
• Add 2 tomato cans worth of water
• Add salt and pepper
• Simmer until veggies are done (about 15minutes)
• Take 1 big tbsp of sour cream and combine with a small amount of broth and mix until smooth and return to pot.
• Add parsley for taste
• Add some noodles

Now that's the recipe, but I've yet to actually make it work. I suppose now I have some more time to experiment.

So the launch didn't happen as planned. Due to an absence of a few features, Annalea wanted to push back the date to May 15th and I had a hard time arguing with her on that one. The fact is that the site is very featureful and frankly, I just don't have enough time to invest in it to get it all the way to 100% done. As it is, we'll be launching on the 15th with a fraction of the features she wanted to have from the start.

One truth about web development though is that these things never go they way you plan them. Plan for a Facebook-like site and you'll never get there because the investment of time, energy and money is just so high that the site will never get off the ground without going live (at least partially) at first. So I'm not bothered by the fact that we've cut a number of features -- it's normal, and we'll launch on the 15th with something that's both useful and pretty.

This weekend, I'm up in Kelowna with The Fam. Bowing to pressure from the parents, I've brought Stephanie with me to finally meet them and it was a little rough on her but she's managed admirably. The full family showed up for dinner though, which was more of a surprise than she was probably prepared for, but she seems alright. Most of you reading this blog know that my parents are pretty cool people, but it's rough your first time out if you're in the Girlfriend role, and she seemed to do alright :-)

As for how we got here, yes, I drove. Some of you may find it hard to believe, but I am in fact a licensed driver, capable of traversing rain, snow, and hail-drenched highways -- a feat I was forced to perform yesterday, on a moonless night. The highways were really quite scary, but we did fine, so a big :-P to the doubters out there :-)

We've got one more half-day here tomorrow and then we're heading back home. I have to get some work done in that time, but tonight I think I'll just get some sleep because I'm really quite tired. Steph's hopped up on candy at the moment though so I may have to kick her out of the room. As a closing note, I'm sorry that I've not been posting much in here lately. I've just been too overrun with work to do on these three fronts. I'm not going to abandon this site, but it's likely that I won't be posting as often as I have in the past. I do have a private post up though for those who are interested :-)

My grandmother just sent this to me with the added request that I distribute it to those in my own networks. I can agree with the sentiment and so I'm doing just that. It's about time that Canadians recognised that our place in this world is more than "America's Hat":

I am old enough to remember when the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway was debated and ultimately opened to navigation in 1959. Construction of the 306 km. stretch of the Seaway between Montreal and Lake Ontario is recognized as one of the most challenging engineering feats in history.

Discussion with the U.S. had been ongoing over the past thirty years but in the end they decided not to participate in such a major undertaking. Canadian public opinion was pushing our politicians to go it alone and in July , 1951 Premier Frost of Ontario publicly asked the United States to “Please, get out of the way and let us get on with the job.” The Federal Government followed within days and announced we would build the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was a time of Canadian pride. The United States then decided that they would participate in the building of the Seaway and the project went ahead.

I tell this story because I wonder where our Canadian pride has gone. We were a much smaller nation in the 1950’s but we felt we could do it. Now it seems we must ask the U.S. to make our policy on climate change, auto emissions etc.

Shirley Quinn,
Armstrong, B.C.

I noticed a number of people posting on Twitter today with the tag #10yearsago and it got me thinking of my actions over this past decade. I started asking questions like what was life like for me back in 2000? What's changed in the world, and what's changed in me over the course of these ten years? More than anything, my father's voice keeps coming up, telling me how life moves so fast. "Blink", he says, "and you're ten years older", and he's exactly right.

Ten years ago, I was still living with my parents in Langley. I claimed to be an environmentalist, while driving 33km to and from work every day and was dying to get the hell out of this province and into the world. My understanding of who I was, and what I wanted was still quite fragile, but at least I was beginning to comprehend that knowing these things was important.

Since then, I've run away from this place and seen the world -- admittedly only few pieces of it, but more than many people around here bother to see in a lifetime. I've lived in the biggest city in Canada, embraced volunteerism and politics and furthered my understanding of the answers to those two important questions.

To be honest, it's hard not to look back on the last ten years of my life and not be pleased with my experiences. I've made a good many mistakes (even made the same ones more than once), but on the whole, I think that I've done good for this world and been true to myself and those I care about. I've learnt more about who I am and what I want than I thought possible, and have no doubt that there's still a great deal more to take in. If my next ten years are as rich as the last, I will be a lucky man.

My concern however is rooted in my father's voice. Indeed, this time has passed quite quickly: I remember having lunch with my father days after 9/11 like it was yesterday, and some days it feels like I'd only recently abandoned Vancouver for a bigger, better life in Toronto... How did I do all of that in just ten years? How much time is left?

There is a life that I want out there, a person I want to be -- is there time remaining to become that man, to build the life I want? Is it folly to try to do both at the same time, or even to convince myself that that life can be achieved? And what if the needs of the various parts of that life are in conflict? When 2020 rings in, and I am 40 years old, will I be able to look back on these next ten years as favourably as those that just passed?

It's a hell of a thing to ask so much of a mere passage of time, but this is who I want to be and what I want out of this life. It may not happen. It may all go sideways. But the path will be mine.

It's true. I'm still alive, though I couldn't blame you if you'd considered otherwise. I've been neglecting this blog of late. Actually, I've been neglecting most of my life lately but soon, very soon, I shall have a break and I wanted to get this Long List of Stuff out of the way before that happens so here goes:

Carmen

A little over a month ago, I attempted to expand my cultural horizons by taking in My First Opera at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I accompanied Margaret, Dianna, and Aisha to the show and like good opera-goers we dressed up pretty for the night, then quietly mocked the yahoos who felt that jeans and a tshirt was appropriate.

For my part, I can't say that I really enjoyed the opera. (Sorry Diana). I didn't hate it either though. Frankly, it didn't do much for me at all. I found much of the music frustratingly simple when compared to a symphony or even broadway show, and the characters completely unbelievable. The emotion they conveyed (quite brilliantly I admit) didn't make any sense when the story seemed so trivial. I guess Opera just isn't for me.

I still have trouble getting over the fact that they would hold something like an opera in a venue that doesn't really lend itself to acoustic projection. The QE Theatre, while quite functional as a normal theatre, doesn't hold a candle to the acoustics you find in The Orpheum, yet they hold rock concerts in the latter and opera in the former. This makes no sense to me.

Choir

Not too long after my night at the opera, I went to my first choir practise in years. Simple Gifts, a local amateur choir run by Ieva Wool and for the most part, I liked them. The people I sang with had talent, the director was patient and helpful and overall everyone in the room seemed to really enjoy the whole experience. The only negatives were the average age of the singers (~50ish) and the fact that the practise was held on Tuesday nights... I had no idea how tiring a regular weekday practise from 7:30 - 9:30 would be, but it was.

I had the opportunity to try out the choir for two practises before I decided whether or not I was "in" or not, and the decision of whether or not to keep going came down to a simple gut feeling: I was just too tired. That is, the idea of going to choir on Tuesday felt more like a responsibility ("you're going to like, this so you have to go") as opposed to a joy ("yay! choir!"). I chalked it up to the general energy level of the choir (dear gods I miss Mr. Rhan sometimes) and my own energy reserves at the end of my work day. I just couldn't give anymore, so I declined to join.

If my situations changes for the next "term", I'll drop in again and give it another go, but for now, I just didn't feel like I was getting what I needed out of it.

The Super Secret Project

My father is an Idea man. Much like myself, he has new ideas all the time, though the difference between us is that his ideas are usually profit-driven while mine remain the betterment of mankind-types. His latest idea however has been snowballing into a full-blown project and will likely launch this year. Through the life cycle of his this beast, he's been coming back to me asking questions about how he could do "x" and I would work out with him roughly how everything would work... well it's time, now he wants me to build it.

I've done some research and it looks like I'll be installing Gentoo Linux on one of these running a really cool Python script I wrote that captures mouse clicks and logs stuff to the database and then pushes said data over the Internet to a master server via one of these things. It's gonna be fun.

Korea and Japan

And now for the big one: I'm going to Korea on Saturday and then to Japan on the 14th, then home by the 22nd. It's gonna be frickin' cool. My friend Susan, who's currently teaching English in Daegu, Korea was looking for company for a Japan trip and I jumped at the chance (finances be damned!). The way I see it, Japan is too foreign a country for me to be comfortable exploring on my own, and frankly, few of my friends have the money or the interest in making the trip. This opportunity was too rare to pass up... and so I go!

It looks like th total cost of flights, trains and accommodation will be in the neighbourhood of $3000CAD which may sound crazy high but you have to remember that it is the other side of the world -- the two trans-Pacific flights alone make up 50% of that sum.

It'll be fun to hang with Susan though -- we never spent enough time together when we were both in Toronto, so this will give us time to catch up :-) She has her heart set on a traditional costuming thing that they do regularly in a park in Tokyo, and I'm really stoked about both riding the subway in there and visiting the Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto... no, I don't know if they have tours, but I don't care. I just want my picture in front of the Nintendo sign :-)

I'm currently taking orders for stuff people want me to bring back, so if you want on the list, just drop me a comment. Also, if you think that there's something I should see out that way, let me know and I'll try to add it to our itinerary. The cities I'll be in are: Seoul, Daegu (maybe), Tokyo, Kyoto, Okinawa City, and Naha.

Alright, I figure that makes up for my rather long absence. I'll try to be more studious when I'm blogging on the other side of the planet :-)