Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

There are many good ways to remember and share the memories of a trip. Plenty of people take pictures of sights and food, many others record videos of the sounds, the people, and their reactions, and a few, like yours truly, write down thoughts and reflections in prose. But these remembrances cannot fully do justice to how wonderful or awful a trip was. For all the audiovisual and mental recollections that can be registered and replayed, the tastes and smells of the place cannot. Plenty of storytellers try to do their best job to verbalize the olfactory and gustatory; none can beat the real thing.

"It does not seem like you have native pronunciation" seemed straightforward enough. This is an excerpt from an email from a leading online English language school in Japan, rejecting my application to become part of its roster of part-time tutors. The application itself was simple: I had to submit two separate 30-second video recordings of myself, respectively explaining an idiom and giving a self-introduction. For the evaluator, that one minute of talking, plus my visual looks on camera, was enough to determine that I was not suited for their clientele of many beginners who could not even tell apart accents.

There is something incredibly different about going to the gym in Malta compared to Japan . It is not just that the Maltese gym has a nearly even breakdown between female and male members. But it is how the female gym enthusiasts in Malta dress and behave. many show up only in a sports bra and tight figure-hugging leggings, revealing ample cleavage and their round bottoms for all to see. Many of them, clearly active on Instagram, would pose in front of the many mirrors of the gym, accentuating their flat abs and muscular legs for photos to be shared later online.