A Troy in Tokyo

What't that? Another blog that's not an hour after the last one, and yet not a month after it either? It's almost like this blog might be functioning as initially intended for once... Saturday night at the dorm we had the welcome party, which brought all the residents, old and new, into the multi-purpose hall for lots of food and drink, which culminated in a beer pong tournament and then evolved into hitting the nightclubs of Shibuya. Except I didn't go clubbing, because I had an early wake up on Sunday. That was because Sunday was the end of the Kamakura Festival, which is held in the old Samurai capital of Kamakura, which is in Kanagawa Prefecture, right next to Tokyo, and incidentally a stone's throw from where I used to live in 2011-12. What really appealed to me about this festival, which runs for a week, was that Sunday was a day of Yabusame, or horseback archery. I had been to Kamakura before in October 2011 with my AFS chapter, also to see Yabusam

Hulloo! Been a while! I spent most of March in New Zealand for a mix of research/spring break/time in the sun, which was well received (I was getting awfully pale in the Japanese winter!) Rather than giving a play by play of the month in New Zealand, I thought I'd throw a photo montage up instead before filling you all in on the current goings on now that I'm back in Tokyo: I had the privilege of photographing my friend, Perry Crous, at his Barrister and Solicitor's Admission Basically when I wasn't doing research in Wellington I was with friends and family, mostly in Nelson, but a little bit in the North Island as well, venturing with Perry up to Castlepoint, where we made friends with the wildlife and gazed upon the Pacific. Lots of craft beer was had, some photographic techniques played with, dogs played with, galleries visited, and general shenanigans had. Back in Japan, I arrived at the end of