Surfin’ USA

Long overdue

I just returned from a great weekend visit to Jerusalem, a truly fascinating city. I will have some more details (and pictures) later, but first I feel I should catch up with my trip to Finland and Germany earlier this summer.

As you might remember, I traveled to Finland to attend a conference. On my last day in Helsinki I had some time to explore the city, of which you can find some pictures below. Helsinki reminded me quite a bit of Gothenburg (or Stockholm and Oslo, for that matter), and I liked it a lot.

After a week in Finland, I traveled on to Germany, to visit my family. The big surprise (although I was suspecting it to some extent) was that Teiko came to visit for a week as well, just in time for my birthday — what a great idea! On my birthday all of us (except for my sister’s boyfriend, who unfortunately couldn’t make it) visited the zoo in Arnhem, Netherlands, which was lots of fun (see below).

Update: I added four pictures from Teiko’s camera, taken on a day trip we took to the “Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord”, a nearby former steel mill area.

…and gone again

Since Wednesday I am now in Haifa, Israel. I will be here for almost three weeks, working with some people at the Technion University on a joint project. If time and money allows, I will take one or the other ‘touristy’ trip around here, so stay tuned.