For those of you who don’t know, I studied abroad my junior year in college at the University of Sussex. The Uni is located in Brighton, an hour south of London. While I was there I ended up playing volleyball for the school team, which is where I meet the three people who will be accompanying me on this trip.
Sven, Claudio and Monna all joined the team at roughly the same time I did.
Sven (above) is from Germany and does something with robots. It is too complicated for me to explain but perhaps he can add a comment at the end of this post to clarify! :) He is currently living a bit north of London and finishing his PhD.
Claudio (on the right) is Italian. (p.s. sorry for your loss today, Claudio!) He is living in Rome and since I have not had a full update yet I can't really say what he is up to.
Monna (the one on the right) is Finnish and she is the reason for this whole trip. See we have all traveled to each others respective homelands. Sven and Monna visited me here is Seattle. Monna and I went to see Claudio in Italy. And I went to Sven’s hometown in Germany. However, as you can tell we have not been anywhere near Finland yet. Monna = not happy about this. Thus the trip was born.
Since crossing the pond is not only expensive but creates on awful lot of pollution, I decided to add a few other destinations to the itinerary while I was over there.
Here is my plan: I fly into Heathrow. Spend a couple days in Brighton catching up with old friends (and adjusting to the time change). Then Monna and I will fly to Stockholm for a couple days. I believe (correct me if I am wrong) that Claudio meets us in Stockholm and then the three of us take the night ferry over to the capital of Estonia, Tallinn. Sven meets up with us there, where we assume we will take advantage of the sights as well as the quick hour ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki. After a day or two in Helsinki, we are planning to venture into the crazy Finish wilderness and hang out with Monna’s parents for a week. From the parent’s house, we plan to train to St. Petersburg then to Moscow and finally to the capital of Latvia, Riga. It is at this point that we all must return to reality. We fly back to the UK from Riga and then two days later I fly home to lovely Seattle, where July 4th will have passed and the weather will be wonderful for the rest of the summer. Yes, I have already knocked on wood. Don't worry.
So there you have it folks! Obviously, there is more to come but for now that is all she wrote!
5 comments:
Meg,
You are such a good writer and I am looking forward to reading all about your trip. It was great to see you and Cole yesterday and I am so glad we are friends.
Have a wonderful trip!
Alex
My research is not too complicated....it's rather easy:
I try to get a LEGO robot swarm to work together like ants and then build enough of them to take over the world! A bit like "I Robot" but with rather unhumanoid looking LEGO crawlers :D
Just 9h more and I'll see you at the bus stop!
And we will also be going to "my" island. Basically my family has 3 summer cottages on this beautiful long and narrow island in a middle of a lake in Finland and we will be spending 2 night there. The plan is to spend a lot of time in the sauna and the lake and maybe do some water-skiing and rowing and fishing and obviously a lot of eating and drinking!! Can't wait!!
Hi Meg - Mom and I are sitting in a B&B in Portland that over looks Mt. St. Helen and Mt. Hood, they are both out and beautiful tonight. It's great to hear about your travels and I admitt I had a World Atlas out tonight so that I could get better acquainted with where your headed! Keep us posted we will be checking in to see what going on!!! We're on our way to the Oregon coast tomorrow. Not as exciting, but who knows we might get lucky! Pops
I will see you in 2h 20min!! sooooo excited!
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