I’ve been in Berlin for about a week now. Germany is the 4th country I’ve lived in during the past year (Canada, India, US, Germany). I say this not to brag, as moving around is fun and interesting but too much of it gets tiring after a while. Would have been nicer to space out my travels more. Maybe I’ll compensate by settling down somewhere boring, like Salem, Oregon.

So I left on Nov 3 and got here on Nov 4, just as the polls were opening in the US. I had this notion that I’d go on cnn.com in Germany and hit refresh over and over again, then when the results were announced, Germans would flood the streets and and celebrate in a prominent public place and I would join them and hoot and screen and be proud. What actually happened is that I didn’t sleep on the plane, spending 24 hours awake, then crashed for 13 hours. When I woke up, I was in a hurry to get to work and completely forgot about the election until my co-intern Tao Ni offhandedly told me that Obama won. “Oh”, I said, groggily. No clue if there was a mass German celebration.

I’m doing an internship of sorts with Patrick Baudisch, who used to be my boss at Microsoft Research in Redmond. He’s now also a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute / University of Potsdam, where I am joining him. The lab is pretty empty now, just Patrick, Tao, and I, and part of my duties will be to help set up the infrastructure for future students.

My first impression of Berlin is that it’s…sparse. I was expecting somewhere a lot more crowded, with packed sidewalks and subways and traffic jams. The funny thing is that the city is very dense, at least compared to North American cities, and there’s small stores everywhere. And there are a lot of people on the streets at all hours. I know this sounds kinda contradictory…maybe Berlin is more decentralized, or the sidewalks are wider, or Germans are quieter. The weather has been cloudy with zero sun, and occasional light drizzle. There’s public transit of all possible types (trains, above/under ground metro, streetcars, buses) which come frequently even late at night. They are very smooth, comfortable, roomy, clean, and quiet.

During the past month and a half or so I made a few trips and took pictures at (links to flickr) San Francisco, Monterey/Point Lobos, Seattle, and Boulder. Of these few hundred pictures, only one is in my opinion breathtaking:

Point Lobos, CA (Granite Point)

Pictures of Berlin to hopefully to follow.

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Sorry for the delay. Should I keep this blog up since I’m not in India or Europe anymore? I wonder who’s reading this blog anyways…if you’re still reading, write a comment!

That’s right, I’ve moved to exciting Redmond, Washington, where I’m doing another 3 month internship with Microsoft Research working with Patrick Baudisch.

Prior to that, I spent 2 weeks back in Oregon doing my taxes for the first time (US and Canadian). Ugh.

Prior to that, I got tired of traveling and spent a few day’s at Emma’s place in Switzerland doing practically nothing. Like watching TV and surfing the web. What does tired for traveling mean? How is this possible? Well I spent 4 months in India and 1 month in Europe by then.

Also, the internship I’m on was up in the air. Until I got the job. Then I had to wait over Memorial Day Weekend for a Microsoft “relocation specialist” to contact me. At which point I had the pleasure of saying “I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, and I’d like to fly home tomorrow”. And so it was.

So now I’m in Redmond, living the in the suburbs (!) and driving a car (!), a Pontiac G6.

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The sound of yodeling echos across the alps rankling the cows as they graze on their mountain pastures, cowbells donging; they munch their grass, digesting it with their 5 stomaches in order to make milk, which goes into swiss milk chocolate and cheese for exorbitantly priced fondue that’s paid for from money withdrawn from swiss bank accounts.

Not really, but there are some surprising things about Switzerland. Like the fact that you can only do laundry at certain times, that apartments have to have matching doormats, and baby names have to come from an approved list.

Things I’ve done:

• Got an insider’s tour of the UN
• Stood at the bottom of a glacier
• Saw 30 waterfalls in a day, many over 1000 feet, some inside a mountain
• Eaten fondue
• Slept with 2 cats
• Watched Colbert Report for the first time in 5 months

The Alps is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. The pictures don’t do it justice at all. Even with the top 3/4 of the mountains shrouded in clouds the valley I was in still had sheer cliffs on both sides 1000+ feet visible. There was a place in the valley where you could look around and see 5 waterfalls going down the canyon walls. The quaint german-looking houses and cows enhanced the scenery. I went 5 minutes off the cable car onto a side trail and it wasn’t touristy at all. Standing at the bottom of a glacier with tons of ice floating above me was both terrifying and exhilarating. There was a mountain stream running perpendicularly that came from meltwater from a higher-up glacier that made a tunnel under the first glacier. Amazing.

Thanks Emma!

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Things I did in Brussels:

• Visited a fountain museum. Can you believe one actually exists?
• Ate lots of french (cut) fries
• Got a haircut
• As you can see in the photos near the end, I hung out with a very sane, trustworthy looking guy.

Thanks Jan!

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