I was well on my way to spending a lazy Saturday reading on the couch but the wonderful weather outside convinced me I should hop on my uncle’s bicycle and go for an afternoon ride. I have blogged a little bit about some of these delightful afternoon rides that I took to Mosterøy and Rennesøy [...]
A friend pointed out an article about the Yasukuni issue, “The Uneasy Sleep of Japan’s Dead” by the Washington Post’s conservative commentator George Will which I found deeply problematic. I find the article to be a short but good example of a particular type of writing about Japan’s relations with its neighbors and the sensitive [...]
There are many complaints about how students these days are increasingly using Wikipedia as a source in their papers and other writings. There have been some cases where the media has been caught using them. However, I was surprised to find out how openly Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper would reveal the fact they had used the [...]
I’m waiting for my flight to Stavanger here in the beautiful and extremely expensive Oslo airport (Bottle of water: $3.17, Strawberry Yoghurt $2.70, Small Cheese and Ham Roll $7.77, etc.) and reading today’s Dagbladet (I think it is usually considered a somewhat leftist Labor party supporting and populist paper). In a series of articles entitled [...]
I spent a few hours napping in a departure lounge of Frankfurt airport this afternoon waiting for my Oslo flight. Sitting behind me was a middle aged Japanese man, an engineer of some kind who works on those traffic computers found in cars. He is off to Oslo on a business trip and it is [...]
I just read in today’s Aftenposten that you can ask Norwegian librarians, via SMS, chat, or email, pretty much anything you are wondering about and they claim they will answer within a day. Here is the small article which announced this service: Lurer du på hvor langt det er mellom Røros og Trondheim, hvorfor myggstikk [...]
I’ll be hosting the 6th Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well – Korea on August 8th! We are looking for good posts on Asian history posted around the internet in the past month or two. For more details, check out the Asian History Carnival homepage. Please nominate postings for the carnival here. If [...]
My favorite language teacher here at the SNU language program (the same teacher whose stories about student stereotypes and protest culture I talked about in an earlier posting) told us a few interesting things about dog meat in Korea. Again, this posting probably won’t be anything new to those who know Korea well but life [...]