Welcome! “Where Bloggers Live” started out kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…with bloggers! We all like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes, interests, and lives, so every month this wonderful  family of amazing women shares their work-spaces, homes, towns, and thoughts, with posts based on specific prompts. It’s been so interesting over the years to see the different ways each of us interpret the topics.

I thought at the end of the year we could do a little wrap-up of our favorite posts/events from the year…and I’ve had Quite the Year! From double eye surgeries, to the loss of my sister :-(, two trips to Japan, leaving Korea at the end of my visa, staying in California, Florida, and Texas…and ending up back in Japan for the end of the year…it’s been a LOT.

I’d have to say my favorite trip was my 4-day adventure in May to Fukuoka. I had to physically leave Korea (and my student visa) to return as a “tourist” on a new 3-month visa. Since I couldn’t fly yet due to my eye surgeries, my only recourse was a ferry to Japan. It was sort of a whirlwind trip right in the middle of bad news from back home, unenrolling myself from Korean language school…and between eye surgeries one and two.

But in the middle of all the chaos was this shining respite in JAPAN – a place I had heard of for so long from my mother. Not necessarily in spoken word, but in the things we lived with – all her furnishings, art, housewares, etc, brought back to the US from their time spent in Yokahama in the 1950s.

My sister was still a child when she and our parents lived in Japan, long before I was born. Interestingly, despite being the one who actually lived there, she never shared the deep affection for Japanese culture that both my niece and I somehow inherited. And now my daughter, as well.

Still, making this journey just a few days after she passed away, I had her heavy in my heart…and being in this beautiful place that I’d dreamed of for so long…made for a very emotional trip.

One of my main destination goals was to see the giant reclining Buddha at Nanzoin Temple. It was (for me) an exhausting hike up a seemingly never-ending incline. When I finally got to the top, and was able to sit and catch my breath and look at this wonderous statue…all my emotions just released and tears poured down my face as I sat surrounded by tourists, families, and vloggers filming.

That was certainly one of my most emotional moments of the past year…as well as a memorable blog post for me.

Two other favorite posts were 1) the continuation of my “best seasons to travel to South Korea” series and 2) a brief history on Korea’s cherry trees. Both focusing on spring…specifically cherry-blossom time, such an iconic season in the country. I was just coming off my first eye surgery and wasn’t really supposed to be up and out yet, but I had missed cherry blossom season the year before because of my knee injury, I wasn’t going to miss it again!

I made two outings to the Hapjeong area to photograph some streets known to have beautiful cherry-tree-lined streetscapes. I was a little blind and looked monsterish, but the trips were worth it to me as they resulted in some of my favorite pictures of 2025.

Hope you’ll take a look at my friends’ blogs as well and revisit some of their favorite memories from 2025.

PS – the new, adorable Where Bloggers Live graphic at the top of the page is courtesy of the generosity, talen, and hard work of Em at Dust & Doghair! Thanks, Em!

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Sally at Within a World of My Own

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