9.19.2007

Greek EFL Teacher beaten by police

Another blogger that I link to, Teacher Dude BBQ in Greece, just published some pictures of the election campaigns there. He moonlights as a photographer, too. Got quite a talent, so its hard to pin him down as one or the other. Allegedly, he was bruised and scraped by riot police while taking some of his pictures. Please visit him to show your ESL/free press/photography solidarity.

His post about the blog response to his published evidence of the beatings have brought a lot of people to his site and an interview with local media. I think it goes to show that our published entries can go anywhere once we hit the "publish" button!

9.14.2007

Meet some of my friends

I haven't posted for a while because I've taken a few trips (Bay Area, Monterey, Santa Cruz) that have pictures waiting to post, but they all require stories that I have to sit down for a while to tell. With my new teaching job, those moments are preciously few. So I'm spending my Friday evening to sit down and tell you about some of my blog friends. This is a "shout out" and "big up" to all those people's blogs that I like to read and an attempt to share them with you, too.

This first one is Geoffrey Philp. We met in cyberspace while I was blogging in Japan. I'd subscribed to a feed of caribbean blogs to keep up with news on the ground over there. Geoffrey had recently written about a soccer match he'd played with Bob Marley. I wrote a post about it, he found it, and we began a dialogue which has continued on and off to this day. Geoffrey is an author who lives, writes, and teaches in Miami, Florida.

Pickeled Eel is another interesting story. I don't know how I found his blog, but he writes about his travels, like me, but on a bigger scale of audiences. I was surprised to find out that he's currently on location in Iraq now. Check out his blog for some interesting footage and narration.

Red Squirrel is a linguistics student at Moscow State University. I think we met through the mybloglog feature that puts the pictures of registered users in a panel when they've visited my blog. Its a great way to make blogging correspondences a little more personal. Maria writes about her studies, interactions with Russian language, culture, and people. All of these things I miss since I studied at St. Petersburg State University ten years ago.

A recent blog friend I've made is Ulla. We actually met face to face via my friends Travis and Joy Long, who also happen to run their own blog about home improvement after 9-5 jobs in Pacific Grove. It was actually the first live conversation I'd had in a room where everyone else kept a blog. We got to talk shop for a few minutes, and its from Ulla that I got the idea to link to more blogs and make more comments on others blogs. An interesint thing about Ulla is that she's an Icelandic-American who runs a design company with her sister and blogs about cooking.

Hippie Gypsy runs an interesting blog musing about whatever comes to mind. She always has something kind to say.

And one last blog that I enjoy peeking in on from time to time is "Back to Living in Paradise". Lee is an expat American living in Belize. She's just dodged her second hurricane in as many week. She's got a great sense of humor and writes about the Caribbean life that I miss from my years in Jamaica.

Countries I have visited

Where I've been in the USA