Spent the weekend in Kanghwa-do with a friend. I have never been one for the usual tourist destinations so many of the highlights of the island listed in tourist brochures went unseen. The highlight for me was the hike on the first day through some hills on a small country road in the south of [...]
I haven’t had a chance to blog much about it but I made a trip of almost a week to Cheju-do. The original purpose was for a Fulbright researcher conference where all the junior researchers presented on the progress of their research but I went early with one of my fellow researchers because the conference [...]
I spent a few hours in the Shandong provincial library here in Jinan this morning to pass the time while I waited for an appointment with a professor at Shandong University. After spending less than ten minutes to get a one year library card for 15RMB (Using my Chinese name 林蜀道, American passport, writing down [...]
This weekend, I started a complete rewrite of my personal homepage, which is long overdue. I designed the last one back in 2000 and some of the text there still reflects this. Also, for a long time now, my homepage at konrad.lawson.net has not been showing up in the Google database at all, and I [...]
On my way back to Seoul after two weeks or so in the United States I looked through the past year’s worth of pictures, calendar events, diary entries, blog postings, audio recordings, and emails—the historical archive of my life in the year 2007. What kind of narrative can be constructed from the mountain of fragments [...]
While descending some stairs into the Shinchon subway station here in Seoul, Korea this evening, I was stopped by a boy perhaps five or six years old. Blocking my path, he smiled brightly and said, “안녕하세요” (a Korean greeting). I waved to the kid and replied with the same, “안녕하세요.” Hearing my reply, the boy [...]
The first of January is a rather arbitrary time to talk about new beginnings, especially for students whose lives revolve around the academic year. However, the beginning and end of my academic year tend to be much busier so I suppose now is best time to reflect on all that has happened in the past [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Today at a rice porridge restaurant near my apartment Sayaka and I overheard some interesting code-switching going on at the table next to us. A woman was struggling to feed her three children, two of which were being less than cooperative. Sometimes she would speak full sentences in Chinese, but with an accent that at [...]