About Steve

If you’re reading this, it’s because of one brilliant man’s crazy crusade to teach a bratty little kid Japanese. When I was in 4th grade, the school district where I grew up in Maine launched an ambitious (and, at the time, utterly pioneering) k-12 language program. Every student, every year, would have a trimester each of French, Spanish, and…wait, in Maine?!…Japanese from kindergarten through 5th grade, then choose one of the three to focus in from 6th grade on. I thought this was ridiculous, since they cut the funding for my beloved “Gifted and Talented” program to pay for it, and made no attempt to disguise my disregard for the program in 5th grade. Despite that, a man named Naoto Kobayashi, who came all the way from Japan to launch this program at Hall-Dale, stuck with it. He became a mentor and a friend (certainly more than I deserved), and in 1998, owing more or less entirely to his perseverance and dedication, I was one of a slew of Hall-Dale High School students who made the ~6000 mile journey to Aomori, Japan for a month-long visit.

It may be cliche to say “traveling abroad changed my life,” but it did. I had never been further away from home than Disney World prior to that, and – though in many ways I was utterly, utterly inadequate to the task of absorbing it all – I fell in love with Japan, and even more so with travel. Since then, I have been like a junkie chasing his next fix. My drug of choice is the feeling you get right before you’re going somewhere you’ve never been. It’s the same feeling I got on Christmas Eve as a kid. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.

I started this blog primarily as a way of recapping my experiences as a participant in the “Young Turkey – Young America” exchange, a program created by the U.S. Department of State and administered jointly by the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University. From there, it has grown into a platform from which to recap my various travels (as well as occasional commentary on politics and public diplomacy).

I hope you enjoy what you find here – and if you do, please comment or drop me a line!