When I travel through a state or country, I enjoy unearthing famous residents. I would think Siberia would be home to quite a few interesting characters. The list includes Boris Yeltsin, Catherine the Great, Vitas Bering, Rudolf Nureyev, Dmitri Mendeleev, Grigori Rasputin, Raisa Titorenko Gorbachev, Kim Jun Il, Yul Brynner, Boris Godunov, Genghis Khan, and Ivan the Terrible. As a young teenager in high school, I learned much about Mendeleev. He is credited with formulating the periodic table of elements. He created his own periodic table of elements and used it to correct the properties of some already discovered elements and to predict element yet to be discovered. But perhaps most importantly, he was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, where he formulated the new state standards for the production of vodka. In ... read more

I said slot canyon, not slot machines! A slot canyon is formed by the wear of water rushing through rock. A slot canyon is significantly deeper than it is wide. Some slot canyons measure less than 3 meters across at the top, but drop more than 30 meters (100 feet) to the canyon floor. Most slot canyons are formed by sandstone and limestone rock, although granite and basalt canyons are also found. But only a small number of creeks will form slot canyons due to the combination of the characteristics of the rock and the regional rainfall. The largest known slot canyons are in Australia, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The majority are in the Wollemi Wilderness and are difficult to access. In the United States, the largest concentration of slot canyons are in ... read more

We took a taxi after breakfast to Morika Tofu Shop on the very outskirts of Kyoto. Our cab driver did not know how to get there. He had to call in to his station to get the coordinates for his modified GPS. Even, then, he said he had never been there. But he did agree that it was the best tofu, in that Morika-san is widely regarded by everybody as the champion tofu maker in all of Japan. So, we engaged in quite a discussion with our taxi cab driver, his broken English, my broken Japanese. And many hand gestures, voice inflections, smiles and laughs. We drove and we drove, ringing up a huge taxi toll as we went along. We moved from dense inner city, to semi suburbia, to almost country. We turned down a ... read more