After my conference in Pittsburgh I went on a week-long road trip with my friend Andrew, who worked at CMU-Q two years ago and now lives in New Jersey. From there we went to New York, NY; Providence, RI; Boston, MA (for several days); Salem, MA; Biddeford Pool, ME; and Kennebunkport, ME, before returning to New Jersey and thence to Pittsburgh.

We combined our pictures and I've just posted them.

As with Spain, I'll put my favorite picture of each city here in case you don't want to scroll through all 175: ( Click here for six pictures of our trip! )

I'm back in Doha, just in time for sandstorm season. Woo.

Pictures of my trip to Spain with my friend Ryan are now posted. Someday Ryan will post his pictures there too, but it may be a while since he's in the midst of moving and starting a job right now.

Since not everyone may want to peruse all 260 photos, I've posted one highlight picture for each city below. ( Click here to see my top 7 pictures! )

Or, if you totally can't be bothered, here's the extremely redacted version:

I'm on a Greyhound in central PA, heading from Pittsburgh, where I just spent a week at a conference and then some friends' wedding, to New Jersey, where I'm beginning a week-long road trip with my friend Andrew. Thus I am in fact reenacting the route of the song quoted above. Woot!

It's always fun to drop in on Pittsburgh once a year. It seems to be doing pretty well for itself. A couple nights ago I had dinner at a nice Ethiopian restaurant in a neighborhood I would once have been a little nervous to walk around at night. Way to go, East Liberty.

The annual symposium for people from both campuses was good (my favorite so far) and the wedding was beautiful. It was attended by a variety of people who've lived in Doha over the last three years, so it was quite a reunion for me. It's also the first wedding I've ever attended where, after the groom/mother dance, the DJ said "alright, let's fill the dance floor" and the crowd actually complied. Trust Dave and Karen to have such fun friends! It's also the first wedding I've attended at which we danced to Promiscuous Girl. LOL.

Weeks like this make me so grateful for the friends I've made in Qatar. Earlier this week one of my best friends was surprised to realize he knows all the other people I consider my closest friends, because they're all Doha people. (Well, that's not exactly what was said since I was too shy to say I consider him in that group, but it's what was meant.) The truth is that in the five years after I left college I made only one real friend. But in the five years since I moved to Qatar, my life has been overflowing with amazing people who I feel honored to know and privileged to spend time with. In many ways these have been the happiest five years of my life, and it's largely because of them.

Well anyway, tomorrow I'm off to New York, and then the next day to Boston, and then around New Hampshire and Vermont a bit. This surprises people because I'm pretty well-traveled, but I've never been to either New York or New England before. I'm excited to see what all the fuss is about!

I promise to get my Spain pictures posted any day now, but I've been busy at the annual symposium in Pittsburgh.

Which is to say: I'm in Pittsburgh right now! Hi, Pittsburgh people! Is there anything fun going on in town this week that I should know about?

Couldn't post this while I was there, so a brief recap of my last 36 hours in Spain, spent in Madrid.

We arrived in the late afternoon and met Ryan's friend Javi for dinner. Javi was a lot of fun, perhaps because he's a ROCK STAR, or at least has just recorded an album with his band Mamut. It's an indy pop band although his heart is really in heavy metal, which cracked me up because he's like the opposite of the plot of Detroit Metal City. After dinner Javi drove us around the city so we could see the non-touristy parts, which were surprisingly like Any City Anywhere, and then showed us the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple that somehow got relocated to Spain.

Tuesday was my last day in Spain, and I was fixated on viewing as much art as possible. We got to the Prado as it opened and spent 5.5 hours there, and then after lunch spent another hour and a half at the Thyssen-Bornemisza.

We saw many amazing things but I will recap my three favorites:

• Hieronymous Bosch's incredible Garden of Earthly Delights and Seven Deadly Sins. I'd heard Bosch's name before but honestly knew nothing about his art. He's like a 16th century Dalí... it was amazing.
  
• A ridiculously extravagant merman salt cellar and jar featuring Narcissus diving into the liquid, from the Treasury of the Dauphin. Can you imagine having those on your dining room table?
  
• At the Tyssen museum my favorite thing was Dalí's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening. <3 Dali.

I'd hoped to make it to the Reina Sofia to see Guernica, but it's closed on Tuesdays. Ah well, that's the price of spending only one day in a city.

In the evening we headed up to the gay neighborhood, Chueca for dinner. In pursuit of an heladería on the way home we accidentally ended up in the red light district. Madrid's prostitutes are, um, assertive; as we left the ice cream shop with our cones we saw a prostitute physically grab a man and try to drag him with her. Whoa. Ryan complained that his ice cream tasted of fear and shame.

So that was it: Spain in 10 days! Take that, Frommer's!

I haven't written a thing during our two days in Barcelona, since we've been too busy drooling at the amazing architecture. This city is absurdly beautiful, and the neighborhood we're in is particularly notable for its Modernist (the Catalan flavor of Art Nouveau) buildings.

Our first day in town visited La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece, which Ryan aptly described as what a church designed by Tim Burton would look like. We then visited the Park Güell, with more quirky Gaudí works. Day two we did a walking tour of Modernist buildings and then visited the Picasso museum, where I particularly enjoyed the temporary exhibition on Kees van Dongen (the image gallery there has some of his coolest paintings; the last three were my favorites).

This morning we visited the most confectionary of Gaudí's buildings, the Myst-esque Casa Batlló. It was spectacular.

In a bit we're off to the train station to try to catch a train to Madrid. So excited to see the Prado!

The plan Thursday morning was to wake up at 5:45, head to the center of Granada and catch the 6:30 bus to the airport for our flight to Barcelona.

My first thought on waking was "Huh, it's pretty light outside for not being 5:45 yet." It turns out that's because it was 6:30, and we'd slept through my alarm. We managed to dress, pack, strip our beds, leave a note in Spanish explaining where we left our key, and head out the door by 6:45, all without waking our dormmates. Go us! We speed-walked down the hill to the main road, hailed a cab, and made it to the airport at the same time as the bus. Yay!

That main road is called Gran Via de Colon, by the way. I don't think I've mentioned how very much they like Columbus around here. We visited his rather epic grave in Seville, and the graves of Ferdinand and Isabella in Granada. I never understood why they're called the Catholic Monarchs (los Reyes Catolicos) since being Catholic doesn't seem remarkable in the Spanish context, but that's obviously because I didn't understand how long the reconquista took. They were the monarchs who conquered the emirate of Granada and expelled all Jews from Spain. Oh, and started the Inquisition, of course. Catholic, huh?

I am writing this from a cafe in Albayzin, the aforementioned cool bohemian part of Granada, where Ryan and I have been sitting in a cafe attempting to eat lunch for OVER TWO HOURS. I just got and ate my dish (fried potatoes) but Ryan is still waiting for his fish. The owner just came out to apologize and explain that the fish is "bastante gordo" (quite fat) and thus taking a while to cook, which might be a better excuse if we hadn't seen the waitress go off to BUY the fish 5 minutes before. Ugh.

We spend an extraordinary percentage of every day trying to acquire food. The guidebooks say service is laid back in Spain and you won't get your check immediately, which is fine; lots of countries are like that. But we are consistently having difficulty even getting waiters to bring us menus. They bring other people menus, but not us, even when we ask politely in Spanish. What's this about? Yesterday we had to skip lunch entirely because we had to leave for the train in 45 minutes and that's not enough time to get even a sandwich or crepe.

We made it to Alhambra this morning, which was pretty cool but we both feel not quite as awesome as the Alcazar in Seville. It didn't help that the audioguide was narrated by a fake Washington Irving. Still, Granada is just a fun, hip town. It's funny because I came here specifically for the castle and went to Seville for general ambiance, but that was backwards.

Ah, the salmon is here. Whew!

I've toured a ridiculous number of castles in my life, but I was still blown away by the Alcazar in Seville. You should check out some pictures online.

Favorite part: the doors of the king's chapel are carved with "Only Allah can conquer" in Arabic. I knew Christianity and Islam coexisted in Andalucia, but not that they borrowed so freely from each other.

Now we're in Granada. We've only been here two hours and I love it. LOVE it. And I don't think that's just the one-Euro wine talking. :-) Even if we don't make it into Alhambra tomorrow (apparently they sell only 6200 tickets a day and that's not enough?) it was worth it to come here just to walk the meandering streets, take in the laid-back hippy culture, and enjoy the food and shisha. Granada is precisely what you'd hope a Middle Eastern city would be! Except in Spain. :-)

Also, bonus points to anyone who can explain to me what being "relegated" means (context: football/soccer), why it recently happened to Betis, and why precisely that means Seville is full of rowdy protesters wearing green.

Seville is beautiful! A lot like Florence in some ways. We spent the morning walking around the cathedral area, especially the network of alleys in the old juderia. Gorgeous. Another highlight was the Archivo de los Indios, a National-Archives-like building housing documents related to the New World, from 1492 onwards. The current exhibit is on Spain's role in US history, which was both educational (I knew nothing of Spains involvement in the revolutionary war) and fun (translating the signs for Ryan). A highlight for me was seeing a very early map of NorCal, including Capes Trinidad.

Unforch, Everything else was closed today (Monday! Grr) so we finished up with a trip to a park with extravagant buildings built for a 1929 expo.
The rest of the day has been devoted to eating things. Said things have been both plentiful and delicious.

My travel buddy Ryan and I spent the afternoon in Córdoba, former capital of Al Andalus and once the largest city in Western Europe. Its main claim to fame is the Mezquita, which is the opposite of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul: an enormous, beautiful medieval mosque that was later turned into a church.

Al Andalus, Moorish Spain, is often held up as a high point on religious tolerance between the three Abrahamic faiths. Churches, mosques and synagogues coexisted, and Maimonedes and Averroes both called this city home. But Al Andalus also had its share of low points in interreligious dialogue, too. I'll be interested to learn more during our remaining two days in Andalucia, before we head up to Cataluña, where I am longingly anticipating sub-100-degree weather. (At 6:20 this evening we passed a thermometer reading 42. That's 107 Fahrenheit. At 6:20 pm.)

My high school/college Spanish is gradually returning, but not without some hiccups. Today at an ice cream store I asked for a scoop of mente chocolate, which actually means "chocolate mind." I'm pretty sure I already have one of those...

The friend with whom I'm traveling to Spain asked my advice on what to pack, so as a follow-up to my travel planning tips, I am now sharing my default packing list when going to a new country for 7-10 days. I like to think I travel pretty light, but I know some of you are way more hard-core than me -- your feedback is welcome. :-)

( Marjorie's Default Pack List )

So what's on your packing list? What can't you leave home without?

Since I got back from Japan, I have not stopped talking about how awesome it is: the beauty of the temples, the elaborateness of the toilets, the wonderful smell of tatami, the fun of eating with chopsticks. Even their socks are cooler than our socks (I bought five pairs!).

Last week I told my mother-in-law that my friends are sick of hearing me wax lyrical about Japan. She said, "I'm sure that's not true." Justin said, "No, actually, it is."

Luckily Danny Choo is around to remind me of the darker side of Japanese culture, with these crazy pictures of a Canon factory. To improve efficiency nobody has chairs, and apparently if you don't walk 5 meters every 3.6 seconds in the hallways, alarms go off! Hmm, maybe Japan isn't Shangri-La after all.

I love planning trips to new countries, and I am ridiculously lucky that I get to do it so often. As I'm starting to plan another one (to Spain in two weeks) I thought I'd share my vacation-planning process, since I've found a bunch of useful web resources that other might find handy.

Lots of you guys do a ton of independent travel, too. I'd love for you to comment with other resources you find handy!

Planning an Itinerary

I never pick a country to visit without Googling its name and the phrase "when to go," since there's no point in planning a dream vacation and then showing up to realize it's monsoon season. In some cases I also check State Department travel warnings and Google news, too, to make sure it's safeish. :-)

For putting together a rough itinerary, I think nothing beats looking at the "Getting Started" chapters in Lonely Planet guides. These are all available for FREE on the Lonely Planet website, under the "Buy by Chapter" section for each guide (here's Spain's). That chapter gives an overview of the coolest parts of the country and suggests a handful of itineraries. I've never actually copied one of their itineraries wholesale, but it's usually where I start to get a sense of where I'd most like to visit (and which of the chapter I want to buy).

I use lots of online resources to refine my itinerary: the applicable Lonely Planet chapter(s), Wikitravel.org (hit-and-miss: its Japan pages were as good as the Lonely Planet; its Spain pages are paltry), and local tourist websites (e.g., asturiasguide.com), which while cheesy are frequently very helpful. In the case of adventuresome destinations I check out the itineraries of tour companies that do the sorts of trips that I like (e.g., Exodus, GAP). I also Google stuff like "one week in Spain" to find other people's suggested itineraries. And if I'm trying to decide between scenic locales, I often search Google or Flickr for pictures of the places, to see if they appeal.

Don't forget to find out about local festivals and events. My Japan itinerary was entirely built around the discovery that Nara, Kyoto and Tokyo were having major festivals in the same week. And of course, detailed itineraries always have to be worked out in parallel with domestic travel plans, since the order in which you visit the cities on your list depends on when the trains/buses are convenient.

Travel

For international travel I'm a Travelocity girl -- I always shop around, but usually that ends up being the way to go. For domestic air travel, I've found the cheapest tickets are often found by getting a list of the airlines that fly into the relevant airport (either from the airport website or from Wikipedia) and going through their websites.

Seat61.com is indispensable if you're taking trains (and you should!). Figuring out the train system in a new country can be daunting, but seat61 tells you everything you need to know: what companies operate which lines, where to find timetables, how to buy tickets, how far in advance to book, whether you need seat reservations, what to expect at the station, everything. My favorite is that it has pictures of the different classes of train travel so you can decide which class to buy, which is fabulous in countries like India where you have eight choices!

Sleeping

As far as I'm concerned, Hostelworld is the definitive source for information on where to stay as well as the easiest way to make reservations. The hostels are rated by a huge number of people who have actually stayed there (unlike on tripadvisor, where hotel owners can post fake rave reviews), so you get very reliable info on what the hostel's like. I don't even use the Lonely Planet's suggestions anymore; why rely on one travel writer's experience in 2007 when you can see how 20 people who stayed there last week felt about it?

Some of my friends don't book in advance, though, because some of the cheapest hostels don't have a web presence; instead, they just show up and look around for a place to stay. That works really well some places (e.g. Thailand, parts of India) but for others (e.g., western Europe) I like the peace of mind of knowing I have somewhere to stay.

I'll add more sites to this list as I think of them. Fellow travelers, what websites do you find most useful?

I've posted my Japan pictures! Click below to view.

The captions are sort of a narration of the trip, so I set it up to default to "Journal" view so you can see the captions more easily. If that irritates you you can change to different views at the upper right.

I'm writing this in the Tokyo train station, waiting for my Shinkansen back to Osaka. I think the airport has wifi so I can post there.

I'm glad I came to Tokyo, just for the experience of wandering around and seeing what it's like, because it's very different from Kyoto. I'm also glad I only stayed one day, though; that was enough to wander through the areas I wanted to see (Akihabara, Shinjuku, Shibuya, with a side trip out to Nakano to visit Mandarake, a ridiculously large manga/anime store). There are things I'd see if I had more time (museums!) but I wouldn't give up a day in Kyoto for it.

I can't say I'm looking forward to getting back to Doha per se, but I am eager to see Justin, and get my pictures posted, and see my friends. If only Doha had mountains and trees and rivers and hiking paths and onsen! How happy I'd be!

So I hereby proclaim my solo vacation a rousing success. Funnily enough, the constellation of festivals that made me decide this was the right time to come (the Noh festival in Nara, the hollyhock festival in Kyoto and the Asakusa festival in Tokyo) were the most underwhelming parts of the week, but I guess that just goes to show how wonderful everything else was.

So Mata ne, Japan -- not Sayonara, since with any luck I'll be back someday.

Today's dinner report comes to you from a sketchy Indian restaurant in Akihabara, Tokyo's "Electric City" famous for electronics and geeks. So much shiny stuff! So much anime! I'm having troupe figuring out which stores to go in since the anime/manga places and the porn places look much the same. The last store I went in was selling blow-up dolls, which the signs were eager to point out were equipped with both breasts and a "danger hole.". WTF?

My favorite part of Tokyo so far has just been people-watching. In Kyoto people looked mostly like people in any city, albeit with a much higher proportion of school uniforms and kimonos. Here, they look like Tokyoites: women in outrageous goth loli, boys with absurdly carefully styled hair. It's fun just to watch.

I got very lost today, for the first time on this trip. I reserved my hostel online using my iPod, and kept the webpage with directions open. But when I got to the right neighborhood and pulled the webpage up, it tried to refresh and failed because I didn't have a net connection. No address! No map! I knew approximately where it was, but kept circling the area to no avail. Luckily Tokyo has police kiosks all over the place so eventually a policeman helped me find it. But it was irritating to lose a full hour of my 24 hours in Tokyo! On the bright side my neighborhood, Asakusa, is the center of the huge festival going on right now, so at least I got to see lots of the festivities as I circled the area!

I can't close without a shout out to my friends who are graduating today. Go, Leland! Go, Ryan!

It rained today, so I went hiking. There are two beautiful wooded valleys north of Kyoto, called Kibune and Kurama, and one can hike over Mt. Kurama from one to the other. It only takes an hour or so, which is good since I got a much later start than intended due to late-night karaoke with some new friends from my hostel.

I tragically forgot my camera battery (left it charging) so I resolved to write down impressions every time I wished I could take a picture:

A little boy leading his patient father from stepping stone to stepping stone across the river, sending two cranes into flight.

The clever signs in Japanese train stations, which tell you the name of the current station AND, with arrows, the names of the next station in each direction, so you can easily tell when your station is next.

The many intense shades of green of the forested hills north of Kyoto, vivid against the white sky.

Wisps of cloud between me and the highest peak.

Hearing nothing but the patter of rain on the leaves, and the competing sounds of half a dozen waterfalls.

Coming across a large Shinto shrine seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Stopping to ring the bell to honor the mountain, and startling a tiny wren in the undergrowth.

The view down the valley on descent: nothing but mountains and trees and clouds and the gracefully concave roof of one temple.

My first funicular ride, from Kurama temple down to town. So cool! Like an outdoor elevator with seats.

The bus up to the onsen, which in addition to having self-opening doors like other taxis here, also had a live video feed on the dashboard of the rear view of the vehicle.

Finally, the view up at the mountain from the onsen itself, which I couldn't have photographed anyway. An onsen is a hot springs that has been turned into a public bath. It was amazing. Every afternoon hike in the mountains should conclude with outdoor nude hottubbing -- the world would be a better place, I promise.

I am now in a fancy falafel restaurant near Kyoto University, watching the people around me eat pita sandwiches with chopsticks. Wow. I don't care, I'm eating mine with my hands. I'm pretty sure I'm more authentically Middle Eastern than anything in this restaurant, anyway. :-)

Tomorrow I'm off to Tokyo. I still haven't seen the golden temple, though. I'll have to decide tonight how unmissable it is; I could always go see ot first thing in the morning, before catching the train.

Four days after arriving in Japan, I have seen the unthinkable... LITTER. I know, I was as shocked and appalled as you are right now. Litter! On the STREET! What is this country coming to?

Today was very nifty: long chat with Italian roommate, hollyhock festival, geisha performance, then shrines and walking all afternoon. I did the philosopher's walk, a path up in the hills between temples. Since I've learned that my appreciation of a temple is inversely proportional to the number of people in it, that was a good choice.

The geisha play was wonderful, much more accessible than the Noh play. There were four acts, each one tied to a season: spring was a play about two performers who fall in love and the machinations it takes for their employers to consent to their wedding; summer was a duet, I didn't catch the plot; fall centered on two young men getting drunk; winter was an elderly couple and maybe they died at the end? And then all the geishas did one last dance in spring. Quite lovely.

It was a treat to see real live geishas; each geisha house has public performances once a year, which is the only time us lowly mortals can see Kyoto's remaining geishas perform. So iy was good timing I could go. I was in the cheapest seats: "it's Japanese style, ok?" they said when I bought the tickets. When I saw the little one-square-meter cushion I was to kneel on for the next 90 minutes I thought, this is cushy! Then they told me that cushion was seating for four! It was very cozy, me and three Japanese women.

I finally decided to stay in Kyoto an extra day and head to Tokyo for just a day and a half. That seems like a good balance. So much to see!