Berlin to Moscow

Hello to all from Moscow! A few days ago, I finished up a 10 day visit with my dad and Susie (my step-mom), traveling with them between Stockholm and St. Petersburg. Let me apologize in advance - this one's gonna be just a little longer than usual because I didn't have the time to write while I was with them. I'll try to keep things brief. The last month has been full of friends and family in addition to new acquaintances and, of course, lots of new sounds. Here's what I've been up to.

BERLIN, GERMANY - APRIL 6-11
I stayed with some friends, Phoebe and Oren, for a long weekend and then met my old old friend Josef for the night before traveling with him to his masters school in Giessen. I happened to be in Berlin for the first warm, sunny weekend of the year. It seemed like the entire city was outside: playing frisbee and drinking beer in parks, sitting at outside tables on the sidewalk, partying in the daytime in clubs on the river. Hibernation was over!

Highlights include:
- Seeing an experimental music performance, part of which was a training for a musical AI called Spawn. Spawn takes sounds as an input and then outputs sound with similar frequency bands and other sorts of patterns. E.g. if you give it a lot of glasses clinking, it will output something that sounds a lot like glasses clinking but is recognizably electronically created.
- Seeing Oren and Phoebe again.
- A farmers market.
- Biking around the city one day.
- Playing frisbee in the park.
- Dayclubbing on the river at the Club Der Visionaere.
- Exploring Teufelsberg tower, an old CIA listening tower. The reverb in the dome on the top is unbelievable.

GIESSEN, GERMANY - APRIL 11-15
Giessen is a very small college town. I wouldn't have made it there if Josef wasn't such a good friend that I only get to see when I'm on this continent. However, it was nice to have a break from the hectic big cities I've been in for the past few months.

Highlights include:
- Getting to spend time with Josef, catch up, hear about the art he's been making, see a run through of a new piece he's working on.
- Drinking appelvoi, a local specialty.
- Taking a nap in a cemetery (spooky!).
- A day trip to Kassel, the town where Josef was born, where I met a childhood friend of his.
- A dance party with all the art school kids that went until 6am.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - APRIL 15-16
I was in Copenhagen for about 13 hours - not enough to really get a vibe for the city. It was mostly a stopover point before I got to Stockholm to meet Dad and Susie. It was quite foggy and there were bikes everywhere.

Highlights include:
- Eating smottebrod, a local specialty.
- Meeting and walking around with Em and Liz, two sisters. We went to the Lego store together and had a lot of fun playing in front of the interactive screens.
- Meeting Maeve, an Austrian woman who is about to start studying in Malmo, Sweden. We were next to each other on the train to Stockholm for 5 hours but it only felt like 2.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - APRIL 16-19
I saw Dad and Susie for the first time since I left, six and a half months prior. Walking to the AirBnB and seeing my dad's face was a really joyous experience. On a more city-related note, Stockholm is the most bike-friendly city I've ever seen.

Highlights include:
- Seeing Dad and Susie again. I feel like I've mentioned this before.
- Eating Swedish meatballs!
- The Vasamuseet, a museum about a nearly perfectly preserved 16th century ship that was excavated from Stockholm harbor 50 years ago.
- Renting city bikes for a day to really explore the city. I think we did 20 or 25 miles!
- Seeing Karen, a woman I met in Lisbon (through a woman I met in San Sebastian, who I in turn met through a man I met in Bordeaux), who happened to be in Stockholm. And it was her birthday! Dad and I went out to meet her and bought her beers for the evening. I wonder what city I will meet her in next time.

QUEEN VICTORIA I, BALTIC SEA - APRIL 19-20
We got on a cruise ship for a night on the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and Tallinn. It was definitely not as ritzy as the Queen Mary 2.

Highlights include:
- The sunset over the water.
- A Mongolian circus act where someone shot an arrow into a target with their feet.

TALLINN, ESTONIA - APRIL 20-22
I had never heard of Tallinn before, but it ended up being my favorite city that we stayed in on the Baltic. Not too big, not too expensive, not too pretentious (but way too many souvenir shops!). I really enjoyed the mix of architectures - some buildings reminded me of other Baltic cities and the rest of Europe, and others were distinctly Orthodox or Soviet.

Highlights include:
- Becoming a pigoen whisperer and getting a pigeon to land on my finger.
- An orchestra tuning up in a cathedral.
- An orthodox church having a funeral service.
- A firespinner dancing literally 3 meters from our doorstep when we went out to get dinner one night.
- Dad getting his lips painted black in a restaurant called Naganaga by the owner of the place.

HELSINKI, FINLAND - APRIL 22-23
We had about 20 hours in Helsinki, so I don't have too much of a takeaway.

Highlights include:
- Seeing a huge white church with orthodox domes and huge church made of brick in a more European style within eyeshot of each other.
- Playing Ticket To Ride (one of my favorite board games) at a craft beer house.

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA - APRIL 23-28
Finally in Russia! I'm going to spend nearly two months crossing this massive country. The buildings in St. Petersburg are huge, sometimes taking up a full city block. The food is great, and unlike what I've read about other Russian cities, most people in the service industry speak English. It truly is the Europe-facing part of Russia.

Highlights include:
- Teaching myself to read Cyrillic. It was much easier than I expected - most signs are in Russian and English so I had Rosetta Stones everywhere.
- St. Isaac's Cathedral. It's just so beautiful.
- Seeing military exercises in the square near the Hermitage and the Military Academy.
- Treating myself to a nice dinner one night. I had beef tartar as an appetizer and a shot of Russian vodka in a frosted glass.
- Playing the piano in a Georgian restaurant.
- Strolling through the cemetery for all the victims of the Siege of Leningrad.
- Eating veal brains.
- Drinking horseradish-infused vodka. Very earthy.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - APRIL 28-MAY 02
Soviet architecture is so large - impressive and imposing. From Red Square to the Friendship of Nations to the City Hall just outside my hostel, I was constantly awed and humbled by the size and spectacle of the buildings around me. I met a Russian woman and a German woman who were traveling together in my hostel and spent most of my time in Moscow with them. I've never really had a conversation with a Russian before so seeing her perspective was always illuminating. It was great to feel that nations that have had such a history of war and struggle are just made of people, and at least some of those people just want to like each other.

Highlights include:
- Being in Red Square. I've heard so much about that place in the past 26 years that it's almost mythical to me. But it's real! I was there!
- Hearing a mass in the main cathedral.
- Sitting around a table and speaking with a man from China, a woman from Germany, a woman from Russia, a man from Uzbekistan, and a man from Chechnya.
- Meeting Levke, the German, and Vika, the Russian. Vika is from near Moscow so she had a lot of insight and places off the tourist track to show us.
- Seeing the Friendship of Nations, a monument/plaza/area to the glory of all the nations of the USSR.
- Wandering to a park on the First of May, a Russian holiday, with the intent of relaxing, only to find that there was a free local music festival happening all day.
- Eating borscht.
- Getting $200 handed to me by the man from China. He heard I was traveling for a year and thought I might need more money. I tried to refuse but he was quite insistent. Has that happened to anyone? It was pretty surreal.

I can see the end in sight, which is a very weird feeling. My frieghter to Los Angeles got canceled so I booked another that gets me in to Seattle on August 18. I leave Shanghai at the beginning of August. That's only three months from now. That doesn't seem so long, considering I left home seven months ago. It seems like I'm actually gonna stick to my guns and make it all the way around the world without a plane. That was something I was telling myself the whole way, but I always knew in the back of my mind that if things got too rough I could cut and bail. I don't think that's going to happen at this point.

The other day, Susie said I seemed much more grounded than I did when I left. That was a great thing to hear - much better than the opposite! It's funny, though, because I feel the same. It reminds me of that story about the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water - we don't notice change that happens gradually over time. In certain ways I feel more myself than I've ever been but I don't know if that's simply because I don't have to go to work and just get to spend all my time doing exactly what I want to do. It does breed happiness, that's for sure.