sarahsnowchic

I first fell in love with ceramic mosaics and started a habit out of photographing doorways and archways on a trip to Morocco 6 years ago; a fascination with what i now have come to know as being synonymous with the Andalusian area of Southern Spain.  The Moorish architecture in these parts describes the berber-islamic influence of Northern Africa across parts of Spain and Portugal dating back to medieval times when the Moors were dominant across the Iberian territory also into France and as far as Italy.  The style of an inward-focussed Riad; where the rooms open into an internal atrium space and often into internal courtyards, and fountain-filled gardens, lends itself to beautiful characteristic elements of horseshoe arches, domes and decorative tile work that would become the focus of my photographic exploration.                                       ...

If you arrive in Paris over a long weekend in Summer, your trip-advisor top ten might be thrown into disarray upon finding that many of the attractions are closed on Sundays, Mondays, some Tuesdays.. the first weekend of the month oh and much of August.  But not to despair, where previous mid-winter trips might see you escaping the unfriendly frost losing hours inside the Louvre immersed in anthropological study of the origins of mankind, starting in the basement of ancient civilisation onward to the masterpieces of Italian renaissance making your way into the 19th Century...perhaps never to come up for air except to seek solace from sleet inside lesser known indoor galleries and shopping strips... Paris in Summer is made for exploring and while historical and cultural ventures are a must, incorporating market visits, canal walks and outdoor activities should create a completely different but equally memorable adventure altogether. On this most recent visit, I made it...

Catchy huh?! (skip ahead if you want to get to the dot points ;) Ok, so how to know if you've worked in too many snow retail jobs and for too long?  You create something of a mysterious moonlighting persona; completely gratuitous and self-serving under the guise of a benevolent snowsports social service ideology; aspiring to educate the climatically and geographically challenged towards reaching the dizzy ethereal heights of snowchic status in the mountains.. and in the meantime you derive great pleasure from writing exaggeratedly about it on your blog long after everyone else has stopped reading. ❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄ ❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄ ❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄ I'm meant to be updating my travel blog.. and since Japan in February a lot has happened relevant to a nomadic globe-trotting blog-writing existence that i almost don't know where to start. So i haven't. Is it ironic that now that i find myself unemployed on the other side of the...

In some ways this should have been the first blog entry I wrote… if chronology was my forte that is…. which it isn’t, but a blog entry about Japan has always been on the cards since way back when I was a wee 15 year old venturing overseas on my own for the first time and head first into the regimented schooling system and a homestay sure-fire initiation into the obsessive insular pop culture crushes, crazy fashions and unique everyday antics of teenage girls in Japan.   For four months, I lived and breathed boy band teen idols Kinki-Kids and SMAP, drowned in foreign calculus and complex geometry but bathed in the awe inspired by my English dictation lessons… At the end of my stay, I would say I was essentially fluent in the essentials of language.. or that of a teenage girl in Japan in any case… “daijyoubu”, “kawaii” “hoshii”, “sugoi desu nesu ne” and “looso socksu” were necessities.. translation; “all good” ,“cute”, “I want one” and “awesome aren’t they?!” oh and t...