On my last full day in Berlin, I signed up for a far happier tour than of the previous day: Sanssouci Palace and Potsdam. Our first stop after about an hour on the train from Berlin was Potsdam. Potsdam was a planned city where the Prussian kings and German Kaiser lived until the early 20th century.

On one of my days in Berlin, I had signed up to visit a concentration camp: Sachsenhausen. While far from a "fun" tour, I felt that, as the Nazi history is so prominent in Germany's history, it would be a very interesting visit. Sachsenhausen was the first concentration camp built, just outside of Berlin, to house political prisoners. It later served as a camp for both Jewish and gay prisoners. As Sachsenhausen is in Germany, it was considered a work camp, rather than a death camp, although many deaths still occurred within the walls. The visit was quite incredible, bringing us as close to what it must have been like in those years despite the fact that we will never quite understand how it felt without having gone through it.

One of the experiences I was most looking forward to in Australia was diving in the Great Barrier Reef. As I wouldn't be spending too many days in Cairns, and would be both flying in and out of the city, I was unable to actually dive with an oxygen tank, but chose to snorkel instead. I signed up for the Cruise and Fly Reef Tour through Expedia, and it was an incredible experience.

To kickstart my Australia trip, I wasted no time hanging around. My first flight was from NYC to Vancouver, Canada. I left NYC on 1/1 at 7PM and arrived in Vancouver 6 hours later, or 9:40PM local time. It's funny thinking that was the short leg of the trip. Whenever I fly from NYC to Seattle, or my family comes to visit, I always think it's such a long flight and how crappy it feels. But, since I was flying halfway around the world to Australia, this first leg felt like no big deal.

As I'd mentioned in my previous post, I recently traveled to Australia and New Zealand for 3 weeks. It was an incredible and very packed vacation. We did so much in those 3 weeks that it would be impossible to try and fit it all into just one post. I will break down all the adventures into multiple posts and upload those over the following weeks. A quick run down of all the activities:

As NYU gives us the whole month of January off to pursue recruiting, I spent the past week in San Francisco through a school tech trek. We visited twelve companies in four days, so lots to take in. Here's my take on the recent trip:

Like I'd mentioned in my previous post, in order to get Zoey to New York from Seattle, we had to drive cross-country. It was an incredible experience. We'd complained in the past about how long the 4-5 hour drive from Seattle to Spokane WA was, twice a year for four years while I did my undergrad at Gonzaga. Preparing to move to New York, we knew we had at least 40 hours to go! Let that sink in for a minute.