Going East Travel Blog
Date: 2025-07-22
July 22 - Leaving Utah
This morning, I woke up at 6:50, had breakfast, dropped off my apartment keys and hopped on the train north. It always feels strange leaving a place you have lived in for years. I will most likely never live in live in Utah again so this feels especially odd. Luckily, I was able to spend the last couple of days with friends and family before I go travel and eventually settle somewhere else for work.
It looks like all the missionaries are leaving Utah as well lol
Once the flight lands, I'll be staying in Manhattan. So that's the most info you'll get for now :)
Posting my current location and whereabouts to the open internet is not the safest thing to do while traveling. So these posts will be delayed at times.
New York City, United States
New York is now my favorite city to walk and take public transportation in.
After my plane landed at the Newark airport, I took the subway and other trains to Manhattan. Riding the subway is definitely an experience. The trains themselves are loud, fast and some trains/stations can get really hot. And they are often packed so people will sit closely together and you need to find a place to squeeze in. The trains come every couple minutes so you are never waiting for very long.
Subway station entrances are often the little staircases you see in movies. After going down one, I was not prepared for how much the station would twist and wind until you get to the platform. And sometimes, you have to follow the signs down the stairs from one platform to another for a different train line. It's a really enjoyable challenge to navigate.
There are also very large subway stations.
After reviewing my pictures, I realized that I only really took them when there was a small amount of foot traffic. This is because walking with a lot of New Yorkers is actually takes a decent amount of effort. I'll try to explain it:
New Yorkers tend to speed walk with a set path. By setting that path, they project where they want to go and to expect you to do the same. Because I'm more used to crowds that go with the flow, I would often change my path initially and I could tell this slightly annoyed the people around me.
Disclaimer: These notes are from my observations and I have not actually talked with someone from New York about them yet. So it could be inaccurate. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I only really talked to a guy I met from Austria who was also on vacation)
This kind of construction scaffolding seems to be in a lot of places and it's a fun difference in scenery. The buildings themselves are very large and unique designs are common.
One of the first things I did was go to the Chinese Consulate to apply for a tourist visa. The consulate looked like a DMV and the officials were very efficient. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed so I can't put a photo here. [I later got a 10 year China tourist visa so that's exciting!]
After I left, I figured I would walk along the west Manhattan coast down to a ferry. On the way, I passed a lot of piers. Some of them are what you expect a pier to be. Others are have helicopter pads, My favorite was this kind of park built on cement pillars.
A while ago, I heard the advice to take the ferry to Staten Island as a free way to see the Statue of Liberty. I may have taken the commuter ferry because the ticket ended up being $4.50.
I was able to get a pretty good look at the Statue of Liberty but I won't include my zoomed in picture because you can see better ones online.
While I was on Staten Island, I saw NYPD respond to a call. I have seen this police car design so many times in movies that I thought it was fake. But it turns out that this is what real NYPD cars look like.
NYC has a pretty neat ferry system. The main station has 5 docking points and the boats themselves quickly come, unload, load and go. One ferry rider brought her nice road bike to use Manhattan's dedicated bikeways.
Another touristy thing to do in NYC is to tour the United Nations. I'd highly recommend going if you are going to NYC, as it is not something a lot of americans do. The United Nations is not perfect but it does a lot of good for the world.
For those that I played Super Powers 2 with, this is where the guy in the intro declared war! lol
And yes, I went to Times Square. It's at the center of Manhattan so I found myself walking through it many times.
The plays were a little expensive so I only saw the Book of Mormon at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. It was a great comedy and I'd recommend it as long as you don't mind a bit of good spirited blasphemy.
I went on a Financial Crisis tour that took us through Wall Street and Broad Street. It was really cool to see the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and other buildings that played important roles in American history.
After the tour an Austrian and I chatting and we ended up getting dinner from street food vendors. We talked about life in Austria compared to the US with things like industry, cultural norms and politics. Apparently, Austria also had a pretty large anti Covid vaccine movement.
On my way to JFK, I walked through Coney Island and over the Brooklyn Bridge. I cam across this cool looking guy at one point.
This list of events is not exhaustive but I'm ending it here because of limited time. I want to spend more of my time exploring and enjoying each place I go to :)
Oslo, Norway
My plane landed at the airport and I got a nice view of the rainy countryside.
There is this feeling of excitement that slowly builds up until I walk off the plane. Then I'm just happy to be there. Enjoying the difference in the people around me, the languages spoken and even the building's subtle details. In the US, nearly all exit signs, turntables, outlets and other things are predictably boring. But when going to another country, your exceptions for all of these things are challenged by doing something as simple as walking through the airport.
After getting off the plane, I headed over to immigration. I was a little surprised that I waited in a line to talk to a person. When I had visited Vancouver, Canada, I scanned my passport, answered some questions and a machine let me through.
When I walked up to the immigration official, she wanted a passport, lodging information and return trip information. I handed my passport over and showed my reservations for Oslo, Norway and Gothenburg, Sweden. And told her that I was planning around backpacking through Europe and Asia.
When she said that I needed a return, my heart sank a little. I would not have a return ticket for a while. And when researching Norway culture, I found that they generally do now like making exceptions to rules. Thankfully, savings/credit is another way I can prove that I can pay for my exit and won't be a monetary burden for the EU. So I franticly logged in to my bank on the spot and she let me through. I really thought that for a second, my trip would start with me being stuck at the Oslo airport 😅
It took a relatively large amount of effort to find my way from the airport to the hotel I was staying at. Partly because it was my first time in Europe but also because it was raining and I did not have cellular data. So I forgot to take a lot of pictures.
But I did take a picture when I came across the Royal Palace.
And a Crow. Norway has the coolest looking kind of bird.
Another big shock was the major contrast in cities. I had come from New York which is loud, hot, and dirty. Oslo is a polar opposite despite being Norway's largest city.
People talked at a volume I would expect in an American library. The train and cars are nearly all electric so the few vehicles that did pass by were nearly silent.
This is what a semi-busy street in Oslo looks like.
Unfortunately, all of the hostels were booked so I reserved a cheap hotel. The hotel had some neat history as a pensioner's house. But I did not have much time to learn more since I was headed to Sweden the next day.
Oslo has a surprisingly large train station for it's size.
The countryside is so beautiful! And there also seems to be a decent amount of industry.
This was taken somewhere near the Norway/Sweden border.
Gothenburg, Sweden
I absolutely loved visiting Gothenburg. It is a decently large and diverse city that felt peaceful.
Most of the city had multi story residential buildings with shops on the first level. And this layout went on for a while with occasional parks and a street with restaurants. I don't think I saw a single house until I got on the train leaving and was looking at the countryside.
For those that don't know, this is what a hostel looks like. Generally 6-12 people share a room so traveling is cheap. This hostel was around $45 USD each night because it's the time of year when lots of people travel in Europe. Some hostels can be booked for $15 or lower.
This particular was neat and hostel took recycling and composting very seriously.
Most hostels have a kitchen where you can cook food so you can make your trip a little cheaper. Because I was staying in Gothenburg for about a week, I cooked most of my meals.
Because Sweden is more diverse, there is not a lot of traditional Swedish food. The hostel's front desk person recommend going to a place called Ölstugan Tullen for Swedish food. There I had some very good fried flounder and tried a Swedish beer. I'm still not the biggest fan of beer but it was the least bad tasting beer I've ever had lol.
Interestingly enough, there are a lot of Italian restaurants all over Gothenburg. According to the walking tour guide, Swedes have really liked Italian food in recent years.
I ended up going to an italian restaurant with two Swiss guys I met at the hostel. The food was amazing but the food was different from the Italian food I had in the US. The rice was small and more circular? And some kind of butter was used extensively.
Another interesting note is that plumbing seems to be routed outside of the walls here.
Also, garbage containers in Sweden are emptied with a some kind of crane truck. I first saw this from the kitchen window and had to stop what I was doing to watch.
I really liked Gothenburg. It feels like the kind of city you would want to move to for a fresh start. And Swedish seems like it would be a fun language to learn.
Overall, I'm glad I stayed here a little bit longer. The longer stay allowed me to make some friends and to become more comfortable in Europe.
Stockholm, Sweden
It turns out that Stockholm is made up of a bunch of islands. And the name Stockholm translates to English as Log Island.
I took this picture after waling from Gamla stan, the old town, to Södermalm, the cultural/hip part of Stockholm.
I took the second picture from the tower on the left. The first picture was taken along the walkway on the very right of the second picture.
While I was with a walking tour group, we witnessed Swedish military personnel repel from a helicopter onto the Parliament Building. The guide said that the military was more active in exercises because of the current political party/majority in power.
During the tour I befriended a Spanish/Venezuelan who was also on vacation. We explored the island of Djurgården and took some pictures for each other.
We also took the tunnelbana (subway) on the blue line where there is some artwork.
As you can probably tell, I am a fan of colorful wall art.
I went out of my way to visit the memorial of Olof Palme, Sweden's Prime Minister who was assassinated 1986. This murder went unsolved for decades until the Swedish government named Palme's killer in 2020. The BBC reported on this event and explained that many Swedes were dissatisfied the the official explanation.
I was introduced to this historical event in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo book trilogy by Stieg Larssen. Larssen was a journalist and fictional author who wrote about the failings of the Swedish government and extremist groups. And wrote inspiring fictional characters that overcame these challenges. So it felt a little magical to be traveling around the city where Larssen and his fictional characters existed.
I am not used to living in a place with so much rain. And it turns out that my laptop was damaged by water when it was in my backpack while I was out in the rain. A repair shop called TeknikFix was super awesome and helped me get the laptop working again by discovering the water damage and unplugging the cmos battery so my laptop would boot again. I wanted to pay for their time but they did not accept any payment. So I left a 5 star Google review I'm tell my two readers how awesome they are lol.
Before leaving on the train to Denmark, I had just enough time to visit the Avicii museum. I'm not someone who really sings but I made an exception for their fun little solo VR singing booth.
Copenhagen, Denmark
When I walked out of Copenhagen Centraal, I got a view of thousands of bicycles. There were multiple spots like this filled with bikes all around the tain station and amusement park next door.
Without realizing it, I booked a hostel in the partying part of town. I arrived on a friday night and the place was filled and you could hear music from afar. When I checked-in I'm so glad I noticed the free earplugs. There is no way I would have slept with how loud it was without the earplugs.
Copenhagen Suborbitals was the thing I was most excited to see in Denmark. This group was formed in 2008 with the purpose of being the first amateur rocketry group to put a human into space.
Their workshop exists in an old ship building yard and looks like the real world equivalent of Kerbal Space Program. Everything they use is off the shelf. And this includes things like the electronics and metal used for their liquid fuel engine. They ignite the rocket with a wooden stick with a firework attached to it. Other things were creatively re-purposed like a paintball air tanks and race car chairs.
They even have a gimbaling liquid fuel rocket. It's a functional prototype so our group was able to move the motor with a control panel attached to this jig.
They operate entirely on donations so getting things like a CNC lathe and mill proved to be difficult but attainable. To achieve this, they rebuilt an old lathe and mill to have electronics controol the movement. Making them CNC!
They used to be alone on this old shipyard but in the last couple of years, many business have opened up. Next door is a food court, bordering gym and paintball. The food court makes use of a lot of shipping containers for shops and an entrance archway.
Hamburg, Germany
Most of the Trains to Hamburg were booked so I had to wake up early to catch a few trains to end up here.
I had not had breakfast at this point and decided to eat at the station. And I found mexican food! ...served with white rice? What I ordered was like chili with rice. Not really what I would call Mexican food but it tasted great!
The streets of Hamburg are generally dirty, filled with spray paint and empty glass bottles giving the city a rough look. Asking around, I found that people left their bottles in the street for the homeless to collect and take to recycling machine for money.
This is a particularly artistic part of the wall art. The woman's face is repeated all over the city and I'm not sure if there is a meaning behind it.
I booked a walking tour through hamburg learned that this is where the Beetles band became famous. The tour also took us through Germany's biggest red light district. I was unaware about all of these things so it was a very fun tour.
While I was waiting for the tour, went find some food and ordered a good looking fish sandwich. It would only when I got the sandwich that I realized it was a raw fish sandwich.
So I had this inner conflict. Should I waste this sandwich? Should I risk getting sick?
I ended up eating it and spent the rest of the day slightly worried. But that did not get in the way of enjoying Hamburg. After the tour, I walked through this old tunnel that goes under a shipping channel.
Here is the tunnel from above. They built it in 1911 so people could commute to work on the docks. Too many people needed to cross that ferries could not fulfill demand and the sailboats were too tall for a bridge.
Thankfully, I did not get sick from the raw fish sandwich. But someone who was also staying at hostel gave me something else to be worried about lol.
I met a Czech political science student who is convinced that Europe will be at war with Russia in the next couple years. His main argument is the press releases by German military leadership and Russia military buildup towards europe outside of Ukraine.
At this point, I have a cold and booked a hotel to recover. And to be alone. It's a little draining being around people 24/7.