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Teukgang the cat decided to adopt a Korean college and come and go in classes as he pleased.

Sidetrack Adventures drives out into the desert and tells the tale of the now gone Mojave phone booth. Once it was re-discovered, it started a flood of non-stop calls from people all over the world and spawned 2 movies.

Each year on January 16, the town celebrates the traditional Luminarias festival. Purportedly held for five centuries, the origins of the festival trace back to a ritual purification to preserve the health of the horses in the village. Bonfires are lit in the central streets, and horses jump through the flames, with the smoke intended to protect the animals from disease.

I went to Inamo (in-am-oh) in London about a decade ago; and it was one of the first restaurants that had projection mapped tabletops. The idea really caught on with custom projection mapped dining experiences like Le Petit Chef around the world.

Here’s an interview with Julian Church who was a founder.

Here’s an older interview with one of the original co-founders

Traveling in Japan is one of the safest, most fun experiences I have had. I love visiting and traveling in Japan and have nothing but wonderful experiences. But like any place, there are seedy folks out to get your money. Seedy areas in Japan are usually easy to spot and can easily be avoided. However, scams in Japan are kind of interesting and worth knowing about so when your warning radar does go off, you can more readily identify them.

Ever go into a bar and walk out with a bill for $27,000? You might in Japan’s more famous red light districts. Bottakuri is the practice of scam pricing where you may only have 2 or 3 drinks and find out you spent hundreds, or thousands, of dollars. The first drink might be $10, but they won’t tell you the second and onwards is $100 each. Even worse, there is a good chance that you might get drugged and wake up with thousands of dollars in charges on your card. This has happened enough that the US embassy has issued warnings about the practice in Kabukicho for years.

Are you an aspiring influencer? You can also run into problems with the yakuza if you start filming in red light areas they control – and you will find yourself extorted for money and may even find yourself surrounded by police on the take.

Drug possession is also a very quick way to land yourself in serious hot water. Japan has a zero-tolerance policy – there is no distinction for personal use. Possession is immediate arrest. If you have a run-in with the police or are identified by an informant that you used drugs – police may force you to have a urine or blood test. If you fail a drug test, that counts as possession. Even if you took the drugs a week ago in your own country.

You will be forced to sign a confession and run the serious risk of years of jail time. Even with the most lenient sentences where you sign a confession, you’ll likely spend a minimum 21 days in jail and then be deported with a 10 year to life re-entry ban. There is no fooling around. Your embassy can do little to help you. Marijuana jail time can reach 7 years and harder drugs up to 10.

I loved traveling in Japan. Cindy and Dion have a wonderful youtube channel where they quietly tour amazing places in Japan. I love how they simply edit together the experience without talking/voice overs and simply capture the sounds of the experience with mellow Ghibli-like music.

Instead of brash and loud over-produced influencer videos, it feels very much like many of my solitary trips that I would do. I love just letting them run in the background and soak it all in.