I got her face shape, her smile and her voice, but I could never compare to her courage and strength. My mother has a really bubbly personality, that you couldn’t guess she had a very rough life.
Her father died when she was 8 years old. Because of the tragedy, her mother broke down and became […]

These are just short spans of the very LONG hiking trail at the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine in Kyoto. This shrine is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice. The 4km trail is covered with thousands of these orange torii (gateways), offerings made by worshippers - this explains those markings […]

Aunt Kris became mentally incapacitated since she was ten years old. From then on my grandmother patiently took care of her, with the occasional help from her siblings who happened to live next door. As my grandmother grew older, it became a lot more difficult for her to take care of my Aunt […]