On a weekend trip to Seoul, I was chatting with my friend's Korean girlfriend, who was posing the basic get-acquainted questions. Where are you from? How long have you been in Korea? How do you like teaching ESL? Standard, of course, but one stopped me short. "So what are you back home?"

I couldn't think...

Something Yellow This Way Comes

For weeks, my Korean friends had been warning me about yellow dust season. 

"Do you have a face mask?" they ask, wielding their own surgeon's masks in Hello Kitty and Louis Vuitton prints. "Do you have a jacket to wear? And glasses?" They cringe as they speak. "The dust...

As a traveler, I love taking photographs. While scenery and landscapes are well and gorgeous, my favourite pictures are shots of local people in everyday activities. To me, these photos are intimately telling of a culture; an old woman selling live eels in a market; men playing checkers in a shaded...

Anyone who goes overseas for long periods of time runs the risk of waking up in their exotic surroundings and finding themselves (gasp!) bored. It's a guilty feeling, to be bored abroad. You assume you're being idle, and not taking full advantage of your circumstances. But to live and work and set up...

My new job has me commuting across town three times a week, and my iPod has been getting a lot of exercise. I've discovered that I often associate certain songs with certain people, or places, or periods of my life. There are some songs that, while not affiliated with any concrete memory, always get...

I've been excited about Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd for months, and last weekend, I finally saw it. The film was true cinema escapism, a fusion of some of my favourite things; Johnny Depp, dark comedy, singing, and London. 

But as we learn in Todd's opening song,...

.... if you're creative and a bit too amused with your own sense of humour, you make a movie. 

This is what my travelmate and I decided to do as a timekilling little project on our Trans-Siberian trip from Beijing to Moscow. Pre-trip, I had picked up a secondhand copy of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot," which...

I rarely get homesick. Sure, there are moments in my travels when I think, "yes, I'm ready to go back now," but these thoughts are always more epiphanous than sad. But for the past three weeks, I've had a stubborn cough and flu that just won't go away, and I've never missed Canada more.  

Here in...

Matt reached across the table to hold my hand, his eyes glassy but nonetheless affectionate. "This will be great, a real romantic dinner."

I smiled back at him, trying not to wince at his raspy breathing. "I can't wait." 

There was a pause as we looked in each other's eyes. "You did get all your shots...

Living in Korea, I must confess that my understanding of the culture comes primarily from teenagers. More specifically, I've from the Korean teenagers to whom I teach conversational English, five nights a week. 

I know a lot of teachers who loathe this age group. Me? I love them, with their stubborn...

I would be a rich, rich woman if I had a dollar for every time I've heard a fellow traveller say "the bathrooms in (country x) are dis-GUST-ing!" 

Now, I'm a pretty messy person myself, but this tolerance for the unclean can be a traveller's asset. In dodgy bathroom situations, a when-in-Rome attitude...