The Travels of Päivi and Santeri

JamHouse offers shared housing in Tokyo and Kyoto with Japanese roommates. It is an excellent opportunity to get to know locals, especially people who are thinking out of the box.

Our two favorites in travel literature are Jet Lag’s Molvanîa and Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues . Molvanîa travel guide is an excellent parody of travel guidebooks. Molvanîa is a fictional country, “untouched by modern dentistry” as the book describes. It is, of course, situated in godforsaken East Europe, which is a most convenient base for mythical stories. The book is a rare treasure among travel literature’s usually dead-serious genre.

Visiting Antai-ji Zen Monastery in Japan, learning sitting meditation (zazen) and working on the rice fields. Travel story with photos. The temple of the Antai-ji Zen Monastery is called Hondo. The sitting meditation (zazen) is done there as well as the Buddhist rituals such as Monk promotion. In those rituals the main entrance is used, otherwise the side door.