The thing about being a writer is much of what you produce gets completely buried on your hard drive and in notebooks. But I discovered this short piece the other day, and reading it brought me right back to four years ago in Chiang Mai. Where I was the same same but different. October 2010 I learnt… Read More Same same but different in Thailand
I’ve just started watching La Mappa Misteriosa on ABC iView. Each episode of the series is less than ten minutes and it’s compelling viewing — no mean feat for a program essentially designed for learners of Italian. It’s a clever interactive drama that mimics the experience of cultural immersion. The introductions are in English, and English punctuates each… Read More Exploring Italy with La Mappa Misteriosa
I don’t know when I first heard about WWOOF — Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Although the movement is more than forty years old, I probably learnt about it around the time when we all seemed to become more interested in the true cost of agricultural industralisation. I started to meet people who were involved with organic farming and… Read More My diary of a week on an Italian farm
To be perfectly honest I remember almost nothing about my long-ago visit to Avignon, a pretty but sleepy medieval town in the south of France. I never imagined I would return, let alone to attend the city’s major performing arts festival, Festival d’Avignon, and its fringe, ‘Le OFF‘. Although the festival is now in its… Read More Festival d’Avignon et le OFF, the biggest theatre in the world (‘Le plus grand théâtre du monde’)
Years ago I saw The Spanish Apartment and thought it was an amusing but morally questionable film. Maybe I was a little sheltered but after I watched it I remember thinking, “Is this really what it means to be on an Erasmus?!” Well, given that I’m at least ten years older than the characters in… Read More A long goodnight kiss to Belgium
Given that making new friends seems to be one of my favourite pastimes, it’s little wonder that I’ve been enjoying myself here in Leuven. I said in a previous post that I wanted to write about all these new international friends, and lately I’ve been reflecting on it in the context of making friends in… Read More Friendship and loneliness in Leuven
I’ve spent the last hour writing my parents a card in Vietnamese, with the constant help of a Vietnamese dictionary to ensure that I get everything correct. I’ve never learned how to read and write formally so don’t know how to do it that well. Even though I am totally wiped out after four very… Read More Postcard from Hanoi
The Travels of Elephant Woman 