It is a chilly -5 degrees as I'm writing this and everything outside my window is covered in a thick blanket of snow, so looking at pictures from last summer is keeping my frozen soul alive.

Berlin is an interesting city. On one hand you have an ultra-modern city with glass-covered buildings being built, and on the other hand you have buildings that have been around for over a hundred years with bullet holes as evidence of the history of the city. It is cheap, it is young and although people were always heading somewhere they didn't seem to have that lazer sharp focus in their eyes. It rubbed off on us so we spent every day in the giant Tiergarten between the touristy things on our agends.

After few days in San Francisco we drove down to sunny Souther California. We ate, we slept too little and we spent an entire day at Disneyland. The first impression of SoCal was that it was confusion.I remember looking at a map before the trip and seeing a sprawl from the mountains running down the coast.  In Sweden you always hear about Los Angeles but I quickly learned that Los Angeles was a bit of a drive from our place in Anaheim and that sprawl I'd seen on the map actually consisted of many smaller cities each different from the other. I took a liking for the place so much that I decided to study there later in the fall of 2014!

If I were to describe San Francisco in a sentence it would be " The New York of the West Coast". It would be as if you took the city of New York, shrunk it, made it less crowded (with the exception for China Town), and added the West Coast way of doing things. A bit more laid back.

We rented bikes the second day and biked all the way to golden Gate bridge. It took a bit longer than expected mostly because we kept stopping every 5 minutes to take photos. I've made it a habit to tell people to rent a bike every time they travel to a large city because biking in a city is the best thing ever!

Wow. It sure has been quite since the last time I posted here. Almost a year and a half? Well, better late then never!

What can I say? New York is New York. Prior to departing on this trip I had travelled to the city twice. It was just as chaotic and amazing as I had remembered it to be even though it had been years since I last visited. Not only the city itself but the people I finally got to meet was unforgettable. It is a strange thing, really, to get to know people over the internet, talk for years and then finally meet in person. You know them so well but at the same time you don't. You know their likes and dislikes but you also get to know how they speak, what they sound like, their unique characteristics that doesn't often translate well over written messages. Either way, I'm glad to be able to call them my friends.