Stok and Matho: A Kingdom and a Living Ceremony, Twenty Minutes Apart The driver quoted me three thousand rupees for the day. Stok, Matho, four to five hours, dropoff back at my hotel. I had a feeling he was padding it a little. The union sheet for the same loop runs closer to two thousand, …
Thirty articles. That’s how long it took to walk through every step of buying a cheap house in Otaru — from browsing akiya banks to filing taxes as a foreign homeowner in Hokkaido. If you’ve read all of them, you know more about this process than most people who’ve actually done it. This last one …
Read more “The Case for Otaru: Why This Might Be the Best Property Decision You Ever Make”
The Kumari is a living goddess, the incarnation of Taleju, a form of Durga worshipped as the protector deity of the Malla kings who once ruled the Kathmandu Valley.
I’ve spent 28 articles telling you why buying property in Otaru is feasible, affordable, and maybe brilliant. Now I’m going to tell you everything that could go wrong. This isn’t the part where I hedge my enthusiasm with a paragraph of disclaimers and then reassure you everything will be fine. Some of these risks are …
Delhi will overwhelm you if you try to do it like a checklist.
The Japanese bureaucratic system is simultaneously the most frustrating and most functional I’ve encountered in decades of living in other countries. The forms are incomprehensible. The process is rigid. And when you come out the other side, you have health insurance that actually works, a tax ID that unlocks the entire digital government, and a …
Read more “Health Insurance, Residency Registration, and the Bureaucratic Maze”