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On vacation, I just take crappy selfies with my cellphone, leaving the serious photography to klik. She takes much better pictures anyway. So here’s the first part of a short report of our vacation, told in crappy selfies.

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I like learning new things: I have broad interests and I enjoy expanding my horizons. And there are enough free online courses and MOOCs that it’s really easy to dip your toes into something new for free and without a lot of up-front commitment.

So the course “Japanese Culture Through Rare Books” is right up my alley, in the intersection of my ( Read more... )

We’ve started planning our vacation for 2019. At the end of March, we’ll be flying to Tokyo. After a few days there, we’ll rent a car and drive to the coast near Enoshima.

And after that, Hakone and then onwards to the Fuji Five Lakes area. With a bit of luck, we’ll make the most of the cherry blossom season…
Crossposted from my blog. Comment ( Read more... )

So, every once in a while, I get a question from a colleague or acquaintance about vacationing in Japan. We have been there quite a few times ourselves, and it’s a big country, so people want to know where to go and get some “insider tips”. Often, people have already done some homework, and they can point to some trips prepared by tour operators.
I ( Read more... )

We've decided to take another vacation in Japan! The last time we went there, in 2013, we ended our trip on Kyushu, the western-most island. While we were there, we visited Yufuin, a nice hot spring village, and Mt. Aso, basically a village within the crater of an active volcano. But we were dependent on the public transport (we had a JR Rail Pass ( Read more... )

I love the persimmon. A good, ripe persimmon has a lovely texture and a soft, sweet taste -- but not too sweet. Various local supermarkets have them in at the moment, for a good price, so we have acquired quite a mountain of them ( Read more... )

As I wrote earlier, I am a backer of the (now succesfully funded) kickstarter campaign for Golden Sky Stories. So this week I got a link to the pre-release PDF of the book, and I have since read through the game. (This is "only" the main book -- there will be supplemental material as well, which was unlocked by achieving the various stretch goals ( Read more... )

On Monday, we returned from our vacation to Japan. On Thursday we went back to work, which wasn't easy...
During our trip, I kept an eye out for pin badges of the places we've been to, as a souvenir. I got quite a haul this time!

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Some of these have already appeared on Twitter, some not.

( Picspam )