September happenings

Before September ends in an hour and a half, I wanted to get a few photos put up about the beginnings of fall. Since generals are over, I feel like a giant weight has been lifted from my shoulders, and I feel like I'm actually enjoying this East Coast fall for the first time. It's like I'm seeing clearly and breathing more deeply and I know that I'm having more fun.

Case(s) in point:

-Going up to NYC

-Exploring random parks in central Jersey: 

-Hosting parties at our apartment

-Hanging out at corn mazes and pumpkin patches

-Watching the Downton Abbey movie (which Sam crashed a Relief Society activity to watch)

-Making borscht for the first time in years. 

-And, for me, just being reminded of how beautiful Princeton is, especially in the fall. I feel like I'm watching fall come in slowly and sweetly, and I love how autumn looks on Princeton. Just how I love how autumn looks on me. 

how about sunrise land?

One of the perks of being a U.S. historian who attempts to study "U.S. and the World" (whatever that means . . . but seriously. No one realllly knows what that means), is that you sometimes get invited to Global History conferences, and sometimes those conferences end up being in Tokyo.

And it so happened that was my luck earlier this month. I got to attend a Global History Workshop with students from Princeton, Freie Universität Berlin, the École for Social Sciences in Paris, and the University of Tokyo.

To be honest, before the conference, I was a bit nervous about how my paper would be received, plus just being nervous about traveling by myself to a country where I didn't know the language and which felt just so far away from home. But it ended up being one of my favorite conferences I've been to so far. I received excellent feedback on my prospectus, I got to meet some really wonderful professors and students from other institutions, and I got to see the beautiful country of Japan.

I realize that none of my pictures actually really show the conference. But I promise I was there, and that the conference happened . . . I just figured that bright street lights and shrines were much more interesting than pictures of conference tables. 

[Pictures of different-flavored KitKats are also more interesting than conference rooms.]

[As are pictures of iced cocoa, aloe and grape juice, and beautiful cookies.]

As part of the trip, we also went to a super fancy resort hotel in Nikko and had a very fancy kaiseki meal (a multi-course haute cuisine Japanese meal), where we wore yukatas, sang karaoke, and the next day went to the Toshugu Shrine in Nikko and saw this beautiful red bridge (the Shinkyo Bridge) that is on the list of one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. 

[Outside Nikko]

[Dressed up for dinner]

[suuuuuuuppppper fancy meal]

[Toshugu Shrine]

[Shinkyo Bridge. My pictures do not do it justice. It is such a bright vermilion and the water was so blue and so clear. It was absolutely stunning.]

[(almost) the entire Princeton group] 

Next time, I'm bringing Sam. And in the meantime, I'll watch bill wurtz's "history of japan" ad nauseam, since that's apparently the kind of humor I like, even though I know it's wildly oversimplified.