The frustrations of being an American learning a second language and an analysis of the roots of culture shock.

An unexpected wedding turned into an unexpected reunion with a castle I had visited 15 years prior.

I took the opportunity to visit the family I had met back in Turkey for a week in the city of Tirebolu.

Once a year the head Systema man from Moscow goes to Augsburg, Germany to do a seminar. Here is my list of near-harrowing experiences corresponding with my attendance there.

A childhood of playing RPGs and reading nothing but fantasy novels finally payed off when I found this castle.

A barrage of activities ranging from tutoring chemistry, building storage racks, hiking and playing life-sized foosball in Tirol, to moving, neodymium magnets, and systema.

If I told you that I ended up butchering an ostrich on a farm in south Bulgaria, would you believe me?

I couldn't conceivably pass up the chance to find one of the few remaining real shepherds in Europe. This ended up being one intense week.

An unplanned trip to Slovenia ended up turning into a construction site. I never imagined I would build a house in the area my great-grandfather immigrated from.

A small taste of the bureaucratic idiocy I had to endure in my endeavors to attain a residence permit in Austria.

I had chance to get a first-hand recollection of the Romanian revolution while in Cluj-Napoca. This is my recount of it.

The owner of my first destination in Romania also owned an old East German car called a Trabant. This is an email to my dad in an attempt to figure out how to start the damn thing.

The blacksmith ordered a new power hammer and I had the opportunity to get it into the right place in the workshop.

A chance to go to Croatia to fix a boat more or less fell in my lap during my stay with a blacksmith in Austria.

Many varieties of foods have largely vanished from our plates as food corporations grew and the consumers' rationale plummeted, leaving many to have to engage in investigations and self-sufficiency simply to provide themselves with proper nutrients. However, this is an old variety of beans you can avoid.

I was always irritated with myself that the thought of butchering an animal made me queasy; eating meat and not killing the animals yourself doesn't fall very short of hypocritical. I had a chance to correct this during my stay at Al Ma'awa.

Al Ma'awa was the name of the farm I was helping out at near Melk, Austria. Herein lies two brief altercations involving culture shock and common-language barriers.

I wouldn't exactly describe my arrival as fraught with peril, but it included enough public transportation to give my American mind a scare.