The travels of Justin

The safest way to visit the Chernobyl “dead zone”

From a Tricks of the Trade article that has now spawned it’s own Tricks of the Trade website: Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re [...]

First class survived – barely. Our teacher has a PHD – presumably in economics – and has been teaching this course for 9 years. He seems like he genuinely likes the subject material, and knows it well, but what a boring class. I think he may have been a bit nervous for the first day [...]

Yes, today is the first day of school. Nothing like coming home from a trip, having to spend $500 on books, and realizing just how broke you’re going to be for the next four years. My first and only class today is Microeconomics and it won’t begin until 6 PM. Unbelievably, I don’t have a [...]

Well we made it home, finally. Our flights from Bangkok to Tokyo and Tokyo to San Francisco went very smoothly, but our final connection caused us much grief. You see, our plane was stuck in Los Angeles (LAX) while the aiport was having several security problems. One of the problems turned out to be simply [...]

Quite a good day today, despite having to leave the beach this morning. We woke up in a rainstorm. Before leaving our place, we stopped at our favourite restaurant and the owner actually shared the recipe for the Hat Sak Hiew Prawns. He even gave up a package of tempura mix, just to be sure [...]