The Baltics and a new way to travel (for me)

Last week I visited the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I’ve been interested in visiting them for a while since they have such a fascinating history, and they are three countries that are as similar as they are different. Lithuania in particular was interesting to me because the language, Lithuanian, is one of the oldest and most archaic of all the Indo-European languages. For this journey, for the first time in my life I actually booked an organized group travel via Intrepid. There are plenty of similar companies that offer such tours, such as for example GAdventures and WeRoad. […]

Valencia: Sci-Fi, Aquariums and Bats

About a year ago I made a resolution to spend at least a week every winter in a sunny place. German winters are brutally dark, and every year my SAD gets worse. Looking for easy destinations that are affordable and not to far, I landed on Valencia. I’ve been interested in Valencia ever since I learned that it has a science center that is often used as a filming location for sci-fi movies and TV shows. Originally, this trip was supposed to actually happen a week before Christmas 2023, but I got COVID—so I ended up escaping the dark German […]

the author on a horse

Back back on the horse

Long time readers of my blog might recall my post Back on the horse from 12 years ago. I recommend reading that post for some necessary background information on my history with horseback riding and owning my own horses back in the day. Well, by now it’s been a very long 24 years since I had my own horse, Daisy, and it’s been 12 years since I last rode a horse during the lessons I mentioned in my previous post on this topic. I didn’t actually continue to go riding at the place that I went to 12 years ago […]

From the Pacific Northwest to California

Have you every planned a journey really badly? I certainly planned this one really, really badly. The plan was to go to Portland, Vancouver and San Francisco. But due to ridiculously more expensive single flights, I decided to fly to San Francisco, stay a night, and then fly  to Portland from there. Well that was a bit of a nightmare. But let’s start from the beginning. I left Germany around 10am, and after a brief layover in Copenhagen, entered the 11 hour flight to SF. It was alright but the flight gave me a headache, and I was exhausted by […]

Uppsala, revisiting Stockholm and a Comic Con

It’s been many, many years since my first and only visit to Stockholm so far. I took the opportunity to visit it again by combining a trip to Sweden with a trip to Denmark to visit my partner and meet some of his friends at a yearly meetup they have. The first part of the journey was all on my own though, and I figured that if I visit Stockholm, I might as well also visit Uppsala, where I’ve never been before. On the day of my flight, I landed very late at 23:30, and then took a train to […]

East Germany and Revisiting Prague

During my time at design high school, I went to Prague on a class trip – twice, because back then I was in my wild youth phase and I spend more time partying than studying, hence I had to repeat a grade. Back then, Prague was an amazing experience. The city had such a cool vibe, probably what people in the 90s meant when they said “Bohemian”. It is Bohemia after all. In mid-July 2019, I wanted to revisit Prague, combining it with a trip to East Germany and Berlin. So I flew to Prague. After arriving, I went straight out […]

Five Places I Want To Visit

I love traveling, but one of the problems I have with traveling is that I can never really decide on new places to visit. In the past ten years, I primarily traveled to English speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand and Malta – and to many of them, multiple times. In fact, I’ve actually only been to non-English countries four times in the past ten years, which were Austria, France, Sweden and Finland (let’s not count the day trips to the Netherlands for shopping). I’m guessing that is because I just love […]

16.145 kilometers: Australia

Three weeks from now, I will be on a plane. That plane will take me to the other end of the world, 16.145 kilometers away from where I’m sitting now: Brisbane, Australia. There, I will attend The University of Queensland for one semester as a Study Abroad guest student. I have chosen this university because it’s one of the five best universities in Australia. Naturally, I have also chosen it because of its location: I wanted to go to Australia because a stay of several months is the best possible opportunity to get to know this country. Since it takes […]

The Year 2011

As usual, here is my review of this year. It’s been probably the most life-changing year since 2005, because I gave up my job and started university. January After a quiet New Year’s Eve at home with Fantasia movies, we shortly after started thinking about adding a room to our apartment – the attic above our kitchen would made a good addition once renovated. But now, one year later, we still don’t have a sale contract so we mainly use it as storage place for now. We finally got a new oven, after the old one died miserably. I created […]