Traveling

13 October 2025

New York Nostalgia

Eight times I’ve been to New York in my life so far, and I feel the relationship that I have (or had) with this city has taught me a lot about life. Today when I think about New York, I get mildly overwhelmed at the thought of so many people and so much noise, but back when I visited, I really enjoyed this city. But let’s start at the beginning. My first visit to New York was in 1997 together with my mother. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, barely a teenager, and I definitely didn’t speak much […]

17 June 2025

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. […]

9 February 2024

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 […]

17 July 2023

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 […]

29 April 2022

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 […]

15 November 2021

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 […]

22 July 2019

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 […]

12 September 2015

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 […]

5 June 2011

In the QI audience

I’ve been planning my current trip to London since January, so naturally I continuously kept checking out cool stuff do to while I’m there. One of the things I checked out was applausestore.com, which is a platform where you can apply for TV studio audience tickets. And I got extra lucky – after applying for the waiting list, the reserve list and the actual ticket list, I got a priority ticket to the show QI! Yay! Unless you’re not British or a total Stephen Fry fanatic, you might be thinking “huh?”. QI (Quite Interesting) is a panel quiz show hosted […]