This blog was started in June 2005 at the suggestion of online friends, originally as a political ranting/commentary space, in an era of President George W. Bush's "Either you're with us, or you're against us" mentality. Over the years, I used this blog as a primary vehicle to connect to concerned, well-intentioned people around the US and the world.
As I expanded my longtime passion, travel, to include visiting some of the folks I had met in the blogosphere, I have changed the focus of this blog, to be more of a travelogue. Although I had traveled extensively as a teenager and as a college student, extreme financial difficulties around the turn of the millennium had forced me to give up traveling, until these new friends gave me a new excuse, alongside some business trips.
This switch firmly took hold during late 2008, when I called Seoul, South Korea my home for 3 months. Although visiting some of the greatest cities in the world for a weeklong fling is great, making one of them an actual home is a profoundly different experience, and I wanted to savor and document the feeling for a long time. (I now consider my "hometown" to be Seoul rather than Los Angeles.)
Seoul was my destination on a previous occasion as well; it was 1994, and it ended up being special as I could run into many fans of my then-favorite singer, Mariah Carey. Even better, I ended up meeting Mariah herself in New York City later that year and pass on the news - that was my first big accomplishment of my travels. I am looking for ways to add lots of new, unique memories via my travels; 2009, for example, had me become a German Autobahn speed demon before ending up in Salzburg, Austria, to retrace some scenes from The Sound of Music.
Politics remains a fair game for discussion here, but primarily in context of my travel observations, such as explaining why nationalism is a leftist ideology in South Korea (as opposed to rightist as in everywhere else), or the tendency of Italian drivers to treat all rules of the road as mere suggestions.
It is much nicer traveling around, especially abroad, now that George W. Bush is history, and Barack Obama has made history as America's first nonwhite President. I hope to continue on traveling, and share my insights here.
