I went to taiwan quite a while ago now. Everyone always says how friendly the locals are in the places they visit (except paris, obviously) but on several different occasions in different parts of the island the response to us trying and failing to ask questions or buy stuff was one of the staff or customers leaning out of a window and shouting a bit, and then someone else coming in off the street to translate for us.

The food was great, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, but one thing I particularly liked were these fast food stands where you grabbed a small basket and picked some ingredients, which tended to be fairly common to all the stands, but then you’d hand the basket over and some process would be applied to the things you picked and each time the effect was different. Sometimes it was a soup, sometimes a stir fry, sometimes it would be astonishingly spicy. I’m guessing now with readily available translation software on everyone’s smartphones some of the surprise would be taken away.

We saw far less than I’d have liked, and I should go back again before tensions with china ratchet up too high.

Small thing, but I don’t know how I’m going to top the surreality of waking up one morning on a trip to Austria with my high school orchestra to hear the TV playing a German-language kids show doing a puppet version of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. “Das vogel ist tot” indeed. Mostly I was surprised that I was able to recognize it given my total lack of German language skills beyond counting to 5 and saying “I’m sorry, I’m a foreigner and don’t speak German” because sometimes the American stereotypes are absolutely true.

Overall I actually had a lot of fun on that trip, and got to be absolutely insufferable about having been to Europe when I got back. See again, American stereotypes.

I rode a train for the first time in Estonia and the experience was magical. It had service to all these tiny rural towns too! I wish we had that kind of thing!

I don’t know about fun. I don’t have people to travel with, so I just visit (european) cities and take a completely unreasonable amount of photos of mostly trains, trams, metros, stations etc.

On 2 occasions I piled into too small of a car with some school/uni friends for a 12 hour road trip to a campground on the mediterannian sea. Once in Apulia, once on the Costa Brava near Barcelona. Planning was minimal & we were all a bit desperate and drank too much. Still the greatest I ever remember feeling on vacation.

We made a day-trip to Barcelona of course. After we got our time-slotted tickets for the Sagrada Familia we had some time to kill, so wandered into a tapas place a block away. We were a large enough group to order the Paella and it was amazing.

Just been a week in Berlin where I had an absolutely torrid summer affair with this cool girl in Neukölln that culminated in going together to the F4g Dolls party where our already elevated levels of lesbian depravity could blossom a thousandfold. Gosh that was what I call travel ^___^ Last week will be displayed with a golden frame in my memories hall of fame for the rest of my life. I’m still swooning madly over her and will probably U-haul within the week (not really tho there’s stuff going on (but I yeaarnnn)))

Husky sledding is a lot of fun! The energy those dogs have and want to release is insane. You always need to be on the brake,if you want to pause, so that they don’t run off by themselves.