copenhagen

i can't say anything bad about copenhagen since my desk neighbor is danish... i visited a museum where i enjoyed sculpture for the first time. (the burghers made another appearance, too!) and saw this memorable quote about women: "stupid, perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching" (baudelaire). i walked around for six hours on sunday and ate three servings of danish danish. all my guide books said the little mermaid statue was small and disappointing, but she was quite lovely! the hippie town christiania was not my thing (surprise), but the rest of the city was cute. i missed the opening of the christmas market at tivoli by 3 days, oh well. overall the weekend wasn't too taxing. maybe i'm tiring of these solo travels through the capitals of europe, but i don't think i've hit even half the countries yet!

stockholm and berlin

i'm back to my weekend travels now that the beautiful weather's over in zurich (the temperature dropped 15 degrees right on november 1 - this country can be really eerie with its punctuality). recent stops: stockholm and berlin! and since i'm so tardy with these blog posts, i should point out that my picasa web album is kept much more up to date and you can subscribe to it via rss here. (thanks, h)

stockholm reminded me of zurich (but COLDER) - scenic and walkable, a couple nice tourist attractions, but i got my fill in my two days there. the people really are tall, blond, and possessing perfect english.

berlin put me in a weird mood with all the stuff about the wall and communism. but it also made my heart soar with the pergamon altar and the inside of the reichstag dome, which is undeniably star trek!

the happiest place on earth!

(or one of them anyway) my favorite weekend excursion yet: disneyland paris! hee hee, so much for becoming more european. it was soooooo delightful. mostly identical to the original disneyland except for lots of stuff being in french, with a few new things to check out. (do they have buzz lightyear laser blast in anaheim too?) there's also a companion park, walt disney studios, that's an exact copy of universal studios so i could get my fill of "i love movies!" feeling for the year. hooray!

one tidbit from the weekend: one day while eating dinner, we were wondering why there were so many (literally) screaming kids outside. we weren't close to any rides or anything. when we finally went out to check, we found a monsters inc. "scream-o-meter" right outside our restaurant. sigh!

moscow

as i mentioned, i was in moscow for a couple days. i didn't really like it. traffic is amazing and amazingly unpredictable, there are huge ten-lane thoroughfares all over the city (oh stalin!) making it unpleasant to walk around, and most of the landmark buildings have that communist feel -- trying to be great but ending up somehow hollow, like they were either trying too hard or their artists weren't as talented as they would/should have been. the only thing i went a bit crazy over was taking pictures of st. basil's cathedral. i definitely thought that building was special!

plaster casts

i'm usually not that interested in sculpture at museums, mostly because i don't know how to appreciate it and partly because i feel like it's not that special to see *the originals* since exact copies can easily be made. (e.g. 'bird poop david', who is much more accessible than the real guy) i'm in moscow, and at the state museum of fine arts, they have plaster casts of lots of famous statues. (see photo quickly taken while the guard's back was turned) i was like, hi david! oh hi venus! hi belevedere torso and caryatids and panting horse head from the acropolis! (i felt very cultured at recognizing them until i read a website on this topic and realized there were tons of others that i had no idea were famous...) i'm used to seeing rodin copies everywhere, but this struck me as really weird. at first i was like, this is kind of sad. they didn't have any great statues so they just copied a bunch. but then i thought, hey, the russians get to see all these great sculptures from museums around the world, all in one place. so as long as they admit that they're all copies, what's wrong with that? i still think it's a little iffy, but am leaning towards thinking it's a good thing.

active weekend

it took four days before i could walk normally again after last weekend! sure, everyone in the office was either laughing at me or giving me funny looks, but i love the feeling of being totally worn out.

on saturday i fulfilled my longtime wish of visiting the italian part of switzerland, ticino. a few of us did a bike ride from bellinzona, ticino's capital and a cute little town that was my favorite part of the trip, to locarno, a lake-side resort town where we picked a restaurant that left us with the impression that ticinese food is more swiss than italian. (boo) ticino is a little too far away for just a day trip, but you know me.

on sunday, a coworker organized a klettersteig trip. you wear a harness and attach yourself to a cable running up and down some steep crag, and the farthest you can fall is the length of cable between points where it's bolted down - about 4 meters at most. i loved the going up part - the height was scary but thrilling, and it wasn't like anything i'd done before! but the down part totally killed me to the point where my legs were getting quite wobbly, and even when the klettersteig part ended i had to walk downhill so slowly that we missed the last chair lift down... so had to hike another hour and a half down the mountain... at the end, i kept saying how happy i was to be sitting down again, and everyone thought i didn't like the trip much since my best memory was of it ending. but i'll definitely go again! i hear there's one where you climb up and there's a friendly cable car at the top waiting to take you down...

holy moly

i thought i was getting used to swiss prices, until i ran into $23/lb tomatoes the other day. yowsers!!! (they were good, but not the best ever.)

too much flying

i'm just recovering from a stretch of 14 days where i flew on 8 of them. eek. that's enough flying for now.

highlight of the travels: b&k's wedding! woo hoo! worth visiting chicago for, though i will hold an eternal grudge against that city for having the worst street signage ever. california is of course the best, but it was even a relief to come back to suisseland. anyway, enjoy this random candid photo that i happen to like a lot.

maaaltaaaa

malta is a tiny speck of an island south of sicily, and it's a good thing there were discounted flights there last weekend, otherwise i might have missed it on my quest to visit all the countries is europe!

it's nice and hot there, an okay beach destination but it also made me realize how well-preserved bermuda is. (the one car per family quota really keeps that island beautiful.) the most exciting thing about malta is their ancient temple ruins, including the oldest free-standing ruins in the world! older than stonehenge or the pyramids -- i love that stuff. also, the neighbouring island of gozo is supposed to be the island of calypso from the odyssey. gobble gobble gobble (that's me eating this stuff up).

three little things

1. it's not european travel, but i went to bermuda the other week, woo hoo! (that's me driving a boat)

2. emabarrassingly, i was interviewed for the google korea blog.

3. even more embarrassingly, i took advantage of a rainy swiss national day to cut some video footage that's over two years old... (apologies to wham)

frogs

i've recently discovered that people are very amusing when you ask them what noise a frog makes. this is especially entertaining when asking a german speaker. ask the next one you see!

the frenchies go down at last

whew, i can go back to the rest of my life now! i was hoping for germany to go all the way, but preferred the italians over the french in the end. and in case you think i've stopped traveling, i haven't! four asians came together from four different countries to watch the germany-sweden game in munich -- woo hoo! (pics; more pics) i had to watch today's final in america, so i missed out on the italians honking their way through zurich's streets in jubilation. but it was nice to fully understand the commentary for once. every time i'm in the us or uk, i feel this pleasant surprise at being able to understand the people around me. darn those swiss with their unlearnable dialect!

world cup fever

(is the blog dead? no! it just fell asleep for a while.)

switzerland is the place to be this year for suckers for international competition such as myself. first, the winter olympics just south of here, and now the world cup hosted by our northern neighbor. what fun! instead of waking up in the middle of the night to watch the games with spanish commentary like last time, i get to watch the games at work in the right time zone with commentary in german, french, or german with a swiss accent! hee hee. it's sucking up all my time, but at least i can still laugh at how seriously i (and all the swissies around me) take the wide-open situation in group G (korea and switzerland are in the same group!). in brief: down with france!

springing forward

it's springtime in zurich! we just changed our clocks last night so the days are gloriously long once again. and the weather has been very swiss, changing to balmy springiness right on schedule. i loved the winter, but find myself equally thrilled with the first signs of spring. i'd forgotten how much i can be moved by seasons. (maybe i'm not cut out for california after all.)

apples

one thing i noticed in a few of my euro friends is that some of them, when eating an apple, eat the whole thing. that's right, no core remains to be thrown away, just the little stem (which is very clean and inoffensive in the trash, unlike apple cores). even the seeds are heartily munched and swallowed! after being initially horrified, i was intrigued by this waste-less custom. so i tried it and now i've been converted to a full-fledged whole-apple-eater! i just wash them a bit more thoroughly than before. and it turns out the seeds are yummy -- they taste like almond extract (it's the cyanide). highly recommended for fans of almond pearl milk tea!

going east

i managed to pull myself out of vienna and spent one day in budapest, so i made it to eastern europe after all! (though i've since learned that hungary is the last country in the central european time zone so some people don't consider it eastern europe.)

buda! pest! it was foggy but still quite lovely. i think i was a little euro'ed out by the time i visited, so i wasn't terribly wowed by the city. but looking at my pictures four months later, i'm belatedly impressed. i ended the trip at the terror museum, which has all sorts of contemporary exhibits on the nazi and soviet years. it's absolutely depressing and doesn't conclude with any kind of redemptive "we really appreciate the beautiful freedom we have now" ending -- it just sends you to the exit making you feel like killing yourself. so that may have slightly dampened my impression of the city. also, it was the first place i've been where the language was a complete mystery. but everyone has such nice things to say about budapest that i think i'll have to go back and spend more time there some day.

and since i'm four months behind and it will be impossible to catch up, this blog will skip all of my december adventures (summary: first ski trip in the alps, europa park, company christmas party (and still beating all challengers at ping pong while slightly inebriated), freiburg, and plenty of glühwein) and i'll finally be in 2006. until next time!

oscar night!

i may have lost many of my old values by now, but one thing that hasn't left me yet is my obsession with the academy awards! yes, they did start at 2 am over here and ended at 5:30, but i found one other nutso to share the fun with and just got home from a night of brownies, muffins, and cheering for reese and ang. time to go to sleep now! i need to try to make it in to work by noon tomorrow...

vienna calling

it was mid-november, and i had one weekend left on my eurail pass. i wanted to make it out to eastern europe at least once, so here was my chance to try again for budapest. (okay, really i was thinking, oooh i can go to vienna again while supposedly trying to get a taste for eastern europe by visiting budapest.)

no surprise: it was great! i ran around visiting a bunch of things i missed last time: a veg restaurant, a little museum, mr. hundertwasser's buildings (not impressed), a main shopping drag, a new coffeeshop. but the highlight was that it was the opening weekend of their christmas market! so much fun -- i ended up going to ones in germany, switzerland, and austria before the year was up. they're terribly kitsch-y and sometimes bizarre, just my thing! for example, there will inevitably be several booths selling enormous gingerbread hearts that people wear as huge pendants around their necks. i love it when people are weird in inoffensive ways. and the best part is this yummy mulled wine that i couldn't get enough of all winter. hee hee!

well, i'm back

so much for trying to catch up on blogging during my sojourn in the states... but i hope to catch up in the next two weeks, as i won't be doing much of interest while i'm glued to the tv watching the olympics. after using my tv just once in my first six months here, i've decided it's time to figure out the channels now that i have a reason to watch. luckily, i found a french station covering the games after suffering through swiss german for a couple hours.

it was so nice on the flight over when they started doing everything in (at least) three languages again. ah, back to switzerland. in the office, there are lots of new people i don't know very well yet, and the food is just as terrible as ever. but it's been snowing a little (i've been detoxed of cold boston memories and am just delighted every time the fluffy stuff starts falling), and when it's not too cloudy you can see snow on the mountains across lake zurich, and i'm just so happy to not be doing the sf-mv commute anymore. so, so far so good.

interlude 2

i have been completely remiss in euro-blogging, and have many weekends to catch up on. but i wanted to let everyone who doesn't know yet know that i'm back in california now, but will be heading back to zurich for another five months from february to june! so the adventure will continue...