I'll take you in my backpack

11/23/12 cups and dishes Rather than flocking to the nearest Best Buy or Walmart (they don't even exist here, and if they did I still wouldn't be there!) I went running in the opposite direction of Americans! I ventured off to the Tsuboya Pottery Festival and Kokusai Street (note: nowhere near the BX madness!) chopstick holders Tsuboya became a pottery village because of the quality of the dirt (perhaps they call it clay, I'm no potter). Because of this crafters started settling here, and up popped this little village of amazing artisans. The Tsuboya Pottery Festival was hosted at a local school in the outside school yard. On a beautiful day this would have been wonderful to stroll around. Unfortunately today was less than "beautiful". It was rainy, and that combined with this wonderful clay/dirt resulted in my shoes getting little works of art formed on them. I look forward to scraping it off tomorrow when it finally dries! It was really neat to se...

8/19/11 So I ventured about an hour and a half outside of Pittsburgh today to Mill Run, PA...definitely worth the drive! Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is a sight to be seen. The organic architecture is amazing. Breathtaking really. The home was literally built into a mountainside with a good portion of it hanging over a waterfall (much to the initial dismay of the original homeowners who had envisioned a home with a beautiful view of a waterfall). FLW's vision was very different, he wanted the home to be an entire experience of nature and that is exactly what you get when you walk through the home. There are elements of the outdoors throughout the home. It defies many of the "rules" of the architecture of it's time. I highly recommend a visit for anyone who is traveling to the area! To get there from Pittsburgh you definitely drive through some sleepy little towns, and you almost think that it's impossible that your journey will end in an amazing piece...