Everyone,

Leaving my apartment with an excessive amount of stuff, some went into storage, most came with me.

This is my farewell, for a bit. For those of you who don't know, after a long, thought provoking session after my graduation, I have decided to explore. Yes, today I embark on an expedition across the ocean to a few places, including Tanzania, Cyprus, Germany, and Switzerland. My itinerary can be found on the left column of my web page. Details about what I am doing in each of these places can be found, along with links to related information.

Mini-storage filled up to the brim with all of my crap.

I will hopefully have a chance to send an email and/or pictures throughout my journey, when I get access to the internet. As for now, before I take off, I wanted to send a shout out to everyone. Adios, for now, and stay tuned. Summit day on Kilimanjaro is Friday, June 24th, so say a prayer for me on that day!! I will definitely take a lot of pictures!!!

Take care, I will post stuff soon,

Blaine

Well, yes, I am still alive! It has been a long time since my first "Bon Voyage" email: before leaving, I was hectic trying to move most of my personal objects into mini-storage for the summer, at the same time trying to pack for an impossible trip that included a freezing expedition up the tallest mountain in Africa (winter clothes, and climbing equipment), a Safari (summer clothes), and a beautiful wedding (nice clothes). Well, I did it!!! (little over packed, I blame it on inexperience)

I was greeted by a laughable scene in Arusha, Tanzania. Within a crowd of about a hundred tour guides holding up their clients names written on signs, one of them stuck out like a sore thumb:

Yes, Chris made me feel embarrassed, even though we knew none of these people. I also think he was getting dirty looks from the other tour guides.

I'll just give you some highlights of the trip: the first 4 days was in Serengeti (by myself), where we saw an amazing assortment of wildlife. The first day we saw Cheetahs, Simba (Lions), and Leopards. By the end of the week, we saw each of them eating (and I mean EATING) their feast, including a leopard eating an impala (which I am told is quite hard to find). (got great pictures!)

Many of you wouldn't believe this, but someone who just graduated as a Ph.D. in Computer Science actually brought a FILM camera to the Bush, so most of my wildlife pictures are not yet developed. To make this situation worse, the last day (thank god), when we were headed to the Ngorogoro crater, which is suppose to be one of the most dense area of wildlife in the world, the camera's film winding mechanism broke, so the camera was not usable. Luckily, we already saw some ridiculous stuff in Serengeti, and only a few things, like the Black Rhinos, I only captured on my low-res digital camera. I was really hoping to capture a video of an animal kill, but was satisfied with watching (and videoing) some Cheetahs hunting. They move really slick, and I got the movements pretty good (video probably won't be uploaded until I get to Germany).

In any case, I got back to Arusha, and we were ready to Climb. Last Sunday morning, Chris, Graham (Someone we met through Chris's friends), and I were ready to trek:

The big issue of this hike up Kilimanjaro was the path we were going to take. We could either take the Western Breech, which is more difficult, or up the regular, more traveled route, on the other side of the mountain, which could be done from a few different routes. Well, the western breech is very difficult to describe and it is very difficult to take a picture of:

Quite frankly, none of us knew how we would get up this side of the mountain, but our guides, who spoke no English, were insistent on taking us up the western breech, probably because Chris mentioned it early on, when he had no idea what we were getting into. Another thing we were worried about was whether to take the altitude drugs to help us cope with the lack of oxygen. We were getting mixed reports from some doctors, who were on their vacation on the mountain, and since we did not research this well, nor could we talk about this with our guides, we all decided not to take any drugs. Starting at 1am last Friday morning, we started our trek up the western breech. The closer we got to the top, the closer towards vertical the climb became. At times slipping on icy rocks, I thought that one of us could have slipped right off the mountain into oblivion. We finally made it up to the top by 8am:

Yes, we made it! We also saw the incredible shadow that Kilimanjaro has on the clouds when the sun first rises. (Mt. Meru is also popping out of the clouds on the right of this picture)

All of us, including Harriel (left) and Juma (right), who were our guides, at the top:

So, after we peeked, we had a LONG way down, and didn't stop, except for lunch, and an occasional rest/pass out, until 4pm the same day. This made our day our to over 16 hours, since the night before we were not able to get much sleep, blaming it on Porters from other camps partying it up, with there radios, and yelling back and forth. It was kind of ridiculous, but we were happy to get to the camp in the rain forest at the end of our 6th day without showers. Here is a picture of beginning of the 7th and last day of climbing down:
We were hiking even further down for a few hours, to be rescued by Deo, the guy who picked us up and took us back to Arusha.

Well, we were pretty drained, but had a party to go to on Saturday night. We played Ultimate Frisbee on Sunday (not like we didn't get enough exercise that week), and had an awesome time with the crowd of people Chris hangs out with in Arusha, mainly consisting of Pilots and UN people (there was one pilot that worked for the UN). Monday was an awesome day, even though I did need to leave in the afternoon. In the morning, I went to the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), where I talked to some people I met at the party on Saturday about what they do. This office was in charge of counting the wildlife, and they have records dating back to the 70's (or possibly 60's). In any case, I told them about my work, and it was interesting to discuss their interests in Visualizations, etc.

Next, I was off to the UN, where I was able to sit in on of the trials at the Rwanda Tribunal. This was REALLY INTERESTING!!!! It was amazing to watch the difficulties with the language barrier: between the Defense Attorney (English), Prosecution and witness (both French and Swahili, I had earphones on so I barely heard it), and the Judge (from Sri Lanka, who was speaking English, but not very good at it). I had a really interesting discussion with someone else in the Nirobe Airport later in the day. This guy was an religious missionary from the Midwest visiting the Congo who knew fluent Swahili and English, and has knowledge of many of the languages exist in Africa. It turns out that the question the English Defense Attorney was asking would be extremely difficult to translate into Swahili, and, in turn, was making the witness look bad. In any case, it was fascinating, and I was sad to leave Tanzania so early!!! I think it was growing on me.

So, I started my journey, which I am still on, towards Cyprus. Luckily, I got into Nirobe, and kissed up to the people behind the ticket counter, they were able to bump me up to business class!!! This was huge, since I was able to take a shower this morning in Zurich's airport, before heading to Budapest, which is where I am now, enjoying a nice internet connection in a coffee shop. My plane leaves at 11:25pm tonight, and won't get into Cyprus until 3:30am. I am really looking forward to the next part of this trip, including Ozgur's and Sinem's wedding. Don't worry, CGUI, I will represent. Well, I will keep you informed, I am not sure how difficult the internet will be in Cyprus, but I am sure it can't be worse than Tanzania.

I hope everyone is well, I am sorry for the long email (although if you got this far, you must have enjoyed it!) Please keep me informed with anything important that is going on at home, such as baby kickings, baby deliveries, engagements, other travels, health, or anything else important that is happening. So, until next time, keep it real.

Love to all,

Blaine

Alright, it has been way too long without an update. First thing is first, I was able to develop the film pictures in Cyprus, so I have some nice pictures to show, a couple of them I will show here, all of the rest of Tanzania are up on my picture web site:

A lion sleeping in a tree	A baboon scouting out another	Little lions playing (more of them on the web page)
Cheetah looking at us and about to hunt	Leopard climbing into a tree	Leopard watching zebras go by in the rain
School bus of kids visiting the bush	Sunset looking away from Kilimanjaro	Western breech on Kilimanjaro, what we climbed (don't ask me how! no tools, though, just hiking)

Getting into Cyprus at 3am in the morning is not the best thing to do, especially since I didn't know where I was going to sleep that day. Also, to make matters worse, my plan was to rent a car and drive from the south to north of Cyprus, which I found out is not a simple task. Not getting much sleep, I realized this was the first time I was ever going to drive on the "wrong" (or right) side of the road, along with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. Although I was watching it happen in Tanzania, I did not really pay attention to it much. But after two all nighters on my plane trips I needed to be attentive. More than attentive, actually. The rental car guy steered me into the wrong place. The "crossings" between the north and the south are not easy to find, since they were only created 2 years ago. I finally found the crossing, and arrived in Girne (or in Greek "Kyrenia") on the north, with my tiny Nissan car (upper right) and the beautiful center of town in Kyrenia (left). I ended up finding the hotel where the wedding was to take place, and started to do some serious recovering from the long Kilimanjaro hike and airplane and car trip. This was done by sitting my butt right next to the hotel pool.

A day went by, and it was wedding day. The hotel was really nice and the weather could not have been more beautiful. I met a lot of Sinem's friends who were originally from Northern Cyprus, and most of them went to school in the U.K. or the states. They are very cool, and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the week, checking out beaches, clubs, and hookah bars. I also did some cultural things, like visit the ancient castle in Kyrenia, but mostly relaxed and recovered. For the last day in Cyprus, I went to Agia Napa, which is on the south east part of the island and represents the "Ibiza" for U.K. people. Honestly, I couldn't understand most of the people, even though I think they were speaking English by then. In any case, the town partied until 7-8am, and the beaches were really nice as well. Fun place!

The rest of the pictures of Cyprus can be found here.

Back to the real world! Well, it kind of felt like it, whatever "real" means. I guess now-a-days it really means that you can get a fast internet connection, or wireless LAN in most hotels or cafes. This was certainly not the case in Tanzania, even the best connections were slower than a phone line. Cyprus was a bit better, but it wasn't easy. In any case, enough of the computer talk, I was in Germany! There is one thing about Bavaria (the region Munich is in) that people are good at, and that is drinking beer! So, Chris and I went out for an early lunch, and everyone, I mean EVERYONE at this authentic place downtown was drinking beer for lunch. Chris has informed me that it is actually legal (for government workers) to drink beer on the job, or to drink and drive, just as long as your alcohol blood levels are legit. In any case, another thing that was a bit strange was that the service was awful. I mean not only awful, but almost disturbing. We walked into this restaurant, no one said a word to us, and all of the waiters were walking around with large trays of food that almost took my head off.

So, my weekend was all planned out, with some time for some improvisation. The day I got in, I decided to go to the concentration camp in Dachau, where I realized that each of the three places I had gone to so far on this trip have experienced genocide within the last 70 years, with Germany and WWII, by far, the furthest back. Rwanda's genocide between the Tutsis and the Hutus, the Greeks just admitted to mass graves, which have been known for a long time, when they killed many Turkish Cypriots back in the 50's and 60's, and now Germany, Jews, along with many other types of people. This camp in Dachau was one that started early, where priests and criminals were first put to work before it got out of hand. In any case, it was pretty sick, but I did spend some time checking the museum out. We ended up taking it easy until Friday night, then ate a real authentic Bavarian meal and hit the Munich club scene. During our meal, our waitress, who looks like Michelle Pfeiffer, was taking our order, and I asked her if we could have a salad. Her reply, which I thought was hysterical, was "you are in Bavaria, we don't eat salad, only meat", hence, refusing my salad order. I guess, she could have also said "food eats salad". But anyway, we went out to the clubs that night, when I figured out the "hip" thing is the "new music" they listen and dance to called "drum-base". Honestly, I think the music is ok, some of it is good, but it's difficult for me to understand that it is something new. It's basically just club music, but without any tune, just drums and bass. Anyway, it was a fun night out in Munich.

Saturday we went Fishing on the Isar river. It turned out to be a beautiful day, and the fish were biting! We ended up cooking a fish for dinner, and then I learned how to play this game Go, which originated in China, and is a really cool game that is exponentially more complicated than chess.

Sunday we went to the Hofbrauhaus and ate white sausages, which I never knew how to do correctly. The trick is to take off the skin of the sausage, so they don't taste nasty, but very sweet (with sweet mustard). This place was really cool, festive, and full of drunken tourists (even at noon!). Another thing that I saw that was weird was how people ate pretzels: pretzels are like bagels in the states, if they wanted to put butter or meat on the pretzel, they would slice it horizontally and eat it like a sandwich, which would be a little awkward. But everyone did this, and it seemed like the norm even though more than half of the "sandwich" would not have dough to surround the meat. In any case, later that day, Franz showed up, we went to eat "Doner" (middle eastern Gyros, they told me Germans actually invented, which I didn't believe), and went to a concert. The band was Thievery Corporation, whose members are actually from DC, played in a venue that was an empty indoor swimming pool. Very cool place, and good music, but the swimming pool room turned into a steam room, about 150 degrees. We went into the other room, which was a perfect place to listen to this type of music, and the crowd was very cool.

The next day, we went to TUM, Franz and I gave talks on our work, slid down the large slide that is in the middle of the building a couple times (picture on the right), had lunch, and headed to the Autobahn towards Jena. It is too early to leave Munich, but I have an agenda, and need to stick to it. I guess that I will just need to visit again soon.

The rest of the pictures of Munich can be found here.

The autobahn was fun, Franz let me drive his car, which had a governor at 220 Kilometers (132 mph), but it was difficult to go that fast because I had so much crap in my bags. The drive went pretty fast, the weather changed drastically from Munich to Weimer: it rained heavily most of the days I was in Munich (I think they had massive flooding even after I left), and Weimer was beautiful, warm and sunny. We stopped at the old border between West and East Germany, but now it is just a gas station, gift store, and food court. Our conversation quickly turned to the cold war, the wall, and communism. Franz was 8 years old when the wall came down, and he remembers when his family set up a secretive trip to Hungary to meet his family from West Germany. During that trip, he drank is first Coca-cola, and (I think) he met his cousins for the first time. (I thought that was incredible! sorry, Franz, for telling the whole internet world! :) )

In any case, that evening Franz's parents took us out to the most authentic dinner I had on my trip (left). It was in a town, outside of Jena, that had 23 habitants, and it was basically in the middle of the forest. We ate wild game, amazing soups, and we drank quite good beer, of course. The weather was perfect. After dinner, Bjorn, Franz's long time friend, let me drive his motorcycle around, which was nice since I haven't ridden for 6-7 months. The next day, I gave a talk at the University in Weimar, then in the afternoon, we went to the Italian restaurant where Bjorn and Franz work (right), which is right in front of the house that Goethe lived in (he wrote the classic Faust), which made this square in Weimar a bit of a tourist trap, which was good for business.

Then we proceeded to the oldest Fraternity in the world (left), which I had no idea, was started back in 1817. Students who fought during the wars in 1813-15 that ended Napoleonic governments all over Europe continued to wear their uniforms, and eventually met in 1817 to create these Fraternities. So, you could say, Napoleon was indirectly responsible for the creation of the Fraternities. The house we went to had a restaurant on the first floor, although we already ate, we ended up talking to this guy who knew a lot about the history (Franz translated for me), and grabbed a beer. He then was going to take us upstairs to see the first German Flag, which also originated in this fraternity and was created from the colors of the students' battle uniforms (yellow, red, and black). Although, that evening the Fraternity was in a meeting, so while we tried to get into the chapter room (right), everyone in the room gave us dirty looks, and were visibly disturbed we were interrupting (I instantly had a flashback to my college days and how similar this encounter would have been if it happened to us). In any case, we ended up going out pretty hard that night, to a coffee shop, then to some bars, including some salsa dancing. We also picked up some random people, including a guy from the area who lived in Ireland for a while and our "tour guide" from the Fraternity, who Bjorn actually knew, since Bjorn knew just about everyone in either Jena or Weimar in the restaurant/bar industry. In any case, we found some liveliness in Jena, and it was a lot of fun.

Today, we woke up a bit late, went back to the Fraternity house and got to see the first actual German Flag up in the chapter room (amazing!!), and had my first and best Wiener schnitzel for lunch in the restaurant below (it was really incredible!!). So, that is it for Jena and Weimar, until next time. I hopped a train (after contemplating whether to rent a 500-series BMW to fly on the autobahn, but none of the rental car companies had any), so I am off to Frankfort!

The rest of the pictures of Jena and Weimar can be found here.

Arriving into Frankfort, I was greeted by the Picard sisters, Renate and Conny. Both of them, along with their family, have known me and my family since before I was born, and I was excited to see them. I saw Renate and Carolin 6 months ago in DC and NYC, but I didn't remember the last time I saw Conny until she started telling this famous story: when I was 3-4 years old, and my dad, brother, and Conny were in DC on a subway going to some museum downtown. I think my brother was playing around with me, telling me that I should get off at the next station. Well, it wasn't the correct station, and when I got off at the same instance the subway doors closed, my dad started freaking out, since a 4 year old has no business roaming around subway stations alone. This incident is engrained in my memory: I met these really nice police men and they gave me Big Red gum to chew on until my dad showed up. I don't remember it being such a big deal, but Conny tells me that my dad told me specifically not to tell my mom when we got home. As soon as we got home, I blurted out the truth, and my dad was in big trouble. In any case, it was a memorable experience, and it was really great to see Conny again.

So we all went to dinner at a very cool outdoor place (left, Renate, me, Conny, Ella, and Johanness), we drank sparkling cider and ate a massive meal. It was a really nice evening, and we topped it off with a night cap after dinner. Ella, who was very close with my grandparents, was telling stories about our families. To this day, I am always so amazed how the Picards' grandparents are similar to mine, even though they grew up and lived on different sides of the world, in so radically different countries, both politically and socially.

The next day we headed out to Mainz, where Carolin goes to Law School. It's a very cool college town, and it is very well known for the first printing press developed by Johann Gutenberg way back in the 1400's. So, we went to the museum and I was put to work immediately to hand press some pages of the bible (left). That evening, one of Carolin's friends was having a birthday BBQ down by the Rhein River (right), which was very cool. I met a lot of her friends, and we hung out to the wee hours of the night on the River's Edge.

The next day, we headed back to Renate's place and had a wonderful breakfast. I can't believe it was already time to leave Frankfort, but that's how it goes. I was off to the train station, say good bye to Renate and Carolin, and now headed towards Switzerland!

The rest of the pictures of Frankfurt and Mainz can be found here.

Coming into Switzerland, from the train I could see the beautiful country side was lush with wine vineyards, farms, and rolling hills. The main focus of this trip to Berne was to check out the music festival GurtenFestival, which is located on top of a hill adjacent to and overlooking Berne. This festival is a 4 day affair, with shows all day, clubs all night, and even places to camp out so you wouldn't need to take the funicular (shown in the picture on the left) up and down the hill each day.

Philippe, who I know through Columbia and playing hockey in NYC, is from Berne and was there to pick me up from the train station. We ate at his parents house, then headed directly up to the hill to check out the festival on his Vespa (I was a bit scared). This outdoor festival was rather small compared to others I have been to, such as the New Orleans Jazz Festival or Woodstock '94 (can you believe that?), but it was clean and setup very well. Also, it was completely self-contained, and it had everything from a hair dresser tent to Shiatsu, to really good Swiss food and other kinds of delicacies. The weather was really nice on Saturday as well, and we heard some good music, such as the Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, and even a local Swiss musician Patent Ochsner who is really popular in Switzerland, played really good acoustic music, but would have liked to have understood the lyrics :) (they were in Swiss German).

Sunday, I walked around Berne, the capital of Switzerland, to check it out. The coolest part about this town is the Aare River (right) winding through it, which drains the melted snow right off the Alps. The river's current is really fast, so a lot of people get in it upstream, and float down it while checking out the scenery. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do that, we did grab some drinks at an outside bar/lounge that was literally built on top of the river (left), while we were also able to see the government buildings as well. Beautiful. That evening we drove to some nearby lake, and had an incredible dinner with an amazing picturesque mountains. My time was slowly coming to an end in Berne, and since Philippe, Christine, and Emma (their precious daughter) need to go to Mykonos for some tough vacation, Philippe is not going to be able to use his two tickets to the U2 concert in Zurich tomorrow night, so Karl and I need to use them!!! I am really excited about that!!! So, off to Zurich we go, the final stop on this trip!

The rest of the pictures of Berne can be found here.

We get into Zurich, and its raining pretty hard. This doesn't look good, since we are going to an outdoor concert. However, the rain subsides, and the concert turns out perfect. I haven't really heard any of their new stuff on "Vertigo", and I have never gone to a U2 concert, but I definitely enjoyed it quite a bit.

It was sad to realize the last day of the trip. I have come so far, and now it was time for it to soon end. The last day I checked out quite a few museums, including an art museum and a history museum. Zurich is such a beautiful city (left). The last evening, I went to this really cool outdoor theater right down on the water (right). The movie that was showing was in French, with German subtitles, so it was difficult to understand, but I managed. It turned out to be a good movie.

So, that about does it!!! This morning I woke up, went to the airport (which is so close ~6k from the center of Zurich), and got on a plane to come back to New York City! It has been such a wonderful trip, and I hope you have enjoyed this summary and my pictures!

Much Love, Blaine

The rest of the pictures of Zurich can be found here.

NOTE: All of the pictures from my trip can be found here.