Once I managed to get my tickets and walk through the entrance, what an incredible museum the Pergamon is. Outside the Met, the British Museum and the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, it's probably the most impressive collection of antiquities and the ancient world I've ever seen. It's breathtaking. What's most unique about it is the huge restored excavations, such as the Ishtar Gate from Babylon (you know, from the Bible), the Pergamon Alter, the Market Gate of Miletus, the Aleppo room and the Mshatta Facade. Fully reconstructed out of excavations from the late 1800s and early 1900s, it's awe inspring to stand around and walk through all of these major parts of the ancient world. To make it even better, the audio guide (which is surprisingly included with the admission cost) is fantastic. The guided audio tour takes you through all of the most important areas of the museum and is very well done.

After the Pergamon I walked around the Museumsinsel are some more and then ended up on Unter den Linden and made my way by foot and the 100 bus down to Gendarmenmarkt, which is a very pretty square. The day had gotten warm so I had lunch there in an outside cafe before heading out to the hotel and back to Berlin's main train station.

Overall impressions of Berlin: super modern, super clean, amazing public transportation (who said you can't do major infrastructure works in big cities -- take that San Francisco), and amazingly well spoken English. I really enjoyed the city and it turned out to be quite different than I had originally had mentally envisioned Berlin to me.

I'm now in Frankfurt and my flight for split in is a few hours. I'm going to take a quick stroll and breakfast in Romer square before I head over to the airport.

I went from Checkpoint Charlie to the Berlin Wall Museum and read through all the escapes, deaths and other sad stories that the Wall become a symbol of. The museum is a bit dated, but the amount of material they present is staggering. I walked down from there to Wilhelmstrasse / Niederkirchnerstraße to see additional remains of the Berlin Wall, plus to see the museum at the Topography of Terror. While walking there I stumbed in to the Stasi museum along one of the side streets. More modern in its history that much of the rest of the day it was very well presented and depicted the haunting the Stasi performed on the GDRs own citizens.

I made my way to the Topography of Terror. The museum is stunning and riveting, walking you through 50 years of the Nazi's and then of the separation of Germany. The museum is just incredible. It takes a long time to get through but it's well worth the time. Right next to the exhibit is the last (?) remaining Nazi building, the old Luftwaffe headquarters that is now occupied by the German finance ministry. It's an imposing old building.

Looking for a change of pace, I went over to Kurfürstendamm and walked around for a while until I landed in KaDeWe and parked myself in the foodhalls for a while. From there I went across town to Alexanderplatz (which I think is in the Jason Borne movies) and took a tram to Hackescher Markt. Very cool part of town with little shops, squares, cafes and bars. The area right next to the train station is very well developed with people milling about.

Tomorrow I head back to Frankfurt via ICE at about 330, so I think I'm going to see the Museuminsel and hopefully Gendarmenmarkt time permitting. If the weather is good, I may even attempt to rent a bicycle (it rained on and off most of today). Impressions of Berlin thus far: incredibly clean city, amazingly well spoken English, but it all feels very new and very modern. Not terribly 'quaint' but I guess that's what's to be expected post-war. Also very bicycle friendly and the S-U Bahn system is unbelievably good.

I went from the Reichstag via the S-Bahn to Potsdamer Platz. It seems that the S-Bahn rolling stock is shared between various lines. The cars have maps for multiple, non-intersecting routes, which must mean that they're shared between various lines. It's also impressive how clean the whole city and transportation system is. Much like Paris, the central parts of the city are spotless. Anyway, back to Potsdamer Platz: once you come above the station to the actual Platz there's a great Berlin Wall memorial and segments of the wall preserved along with info panels across the area explaining where you are in relation to where the wall was. It's amazing to walk around the areas and realize all the varied parts of history that have crossed the streets here in the last 60 years from Nazi Germany to the Cold War to today.

Tomorrow's plan is to explore more of Berlin and mostly see as as many of the historical items of interest as possible.

I'm currently writing from an ICE train in Germany, heading from Frankfurt to Berlin. The train is pulling in to make a stop at Kassel-Wilhemshohe. I had a rather uneventful flight from San Francisco on United to Frankfurt and then took an S-Bahn train from the airport to Frankfurt hbf. The station isn't bad but it seemed quite empty as did all the streets around the area.

I was in the market for a SIM card for my Blackberry so I stepped outside the station while waiting for my Berlin train and found a hotel. I walked in and asked them where I could find one and they said I'd have issues today as it's the 1st of May and a Sunday which means that nearly all stores would be closed. I figure that explains why everything outside the station in Frankfurt were closed.

At their suggestion I went to the internet cafe in the basement for the station and was able to get a Vodafone SIM card. I can get voice and text on it, plus I can get internet access via my browser, but it refused to connect to the Blackberry network so I can't get any of my email, calendar, contacts, nor do any third party apps work (like Facebook or Gmail or Twitter). This whole carrier dependent BIS thing is lame. If I had an iPhone I could just pop in a working data SIM and it would work. I'll try the SIM later on my iPad and see what happens.

Thus far I haven't been particularly impressed with the infrastructure in Germany (and it's a thing I was expecting to be impressed by). On this train ride, my cell keeps loosing signal, it was 10 minutes late, and there's no wifi. I did have a fantastic pretzel at the Frankfurt hbf, so I guess that's a huge plus. Let's see what Berlin holds next.

On Sunday I ran in to NYC for the morning, right before the storm hit. It took us 45m to get and 2 hours to get back. I shot some photos of the city as it started to get hit.

View from 1540 Broadway, 17th floor:

View walking up Broadway:

I managed to get out last night via White Plains instead of the original Newark to Atlanta, spent the night in Atlanta and am now waiting back at the Atlanta airport to head out. The flight out of White Plains (Westchester County) was pretty harrowing. The 40+mph gusts on the ground made for huge snow drifts, causing it look like we were about to take off of an ice shelf in Antartica. Here are a few pictures as we boarded the plane:

Thankfully everybody is safe and thanks to my dad for driving me up to the airport, I'm ready to go down to Belize and Guatemala and enjoy the sun!

We got in to Beijing last night for two customer meetings we have today, then we're off to Korea this evening for a workshop with another customer of ours on Thursday. Beijing is an exceptionally short trip as we kind of tacked it on in front of our meetings in Korea. Since we got in last night we did a quick run through of Tian'anmen Square and then had a fantastic dinner of northern food (including some great knife cut noodles and some amazing jao zi).

I miss China a bunch. The sights, sounds, people and everything about it makes me think back to the times I lived in Shanghai. What I don't miss is the pollution. I've only been to Beijing once before and I don't recall it being this hazy and, well, gross.

On my flight from from Bombay to Dubai, I was on the same flight at John Abraham, who apparently is some huge Indian movie star. I had no idea who this guy was except there was a crowd of men and women flanking him everywhere he went. I was in the boarding line with him and the only way I figured out who he was was by reading his name off of his boarding pass and then Googling it.

I left Bangalore on Friday and spent the weekend in Bombay with my sister and my grandma in Santacruz. On Friday night we went to this place called Escobar(great name, eh?) to hang out with and meet my sister's friend. Quite fun.

Spending time in the Bangalore office reminded me a lot of the first few trips I took to the Microsoft Shanghai office in 2005. The team is full of energy, excited and eager to work on cool technology. I love getting to spend time with motivated and excited engineers. The office there is full of talent and I hope to be able to mke it there a few times this year. It's almost alluring enough to make me want to move there for a while. I also had a chance to give a tech talk on Packager for iPhone to the teams there, which was also great.

Bangalore is a pretty impressive city. For one it feels a bit more progressive than other Indian cities I've been in. I was last in India January 2009, in Mumbai. The streets are quite clean, and there's signage everywhere that says "don't drink and drive" (in English). In fact, at this one round-a-bout, there's a (for lack of a better word) sculpture of a guy who hit a tree on his scooter that says something like "don't let this be you."  There are apparently four subway lines coming to the city, with one supposed to be opening this year. Given how bad the traffic is here, that should be a godsend. It takes us ~30m to travel the ~5km to the office. Yikes.

We're here working with the team to design a bunch of the major components of the product that will be made here (again, I should blog on the latest job news) and to kick off our next few sprints. It's fun to work with energetic thinkers and spend time brainstorming on the whats and hows of our work.

I'm here till Friday, when I leave for Mumbai to spend the weekend with my sister. From there, it's back to the states on Sunday.

Hue was nice, with large leafy streets, but brutally hot an humid. We had a total of four (yep) hours in the city during which we in effect chartered a AC'ed taxi and saw the Citadel, the Tu Duc Tomb, and the Thien Mu padoga. It was a whirlwind tour through the city and we even had enough time to book our return flights from Hanoi to Saigon.

Back at the bus by 5pm, it had started to rain a little bit so that among other reasons (which were totally opaque to us), the bus took off late for the 15 hour ride to Hanoi. The buses were the sleeper type, which meant there were nearly lie flat individual bunks to sleep on. While that may sound somewhat comfortable, it's not at all. They were barely padded and the start and stop traffic all through the night meant I probably put in 6 hours of sleep.

While on the bus, we managed to find a Halong Bay tour operator which said we had to get to their office by 9am sharp to make the bus to Halong Bay. As soon as we arrived in Hanoi we found the first cab we found and hightailed it across town to catch the next three hour bus to the bay. Total time on a bus in transit from Hoi An to Halong Bay was roughly 30 hours!

Thankfully we made it on time, and set out for the two day, one night cruise along the bay and the lime outcroppings in the UNESCO-protected Halong Bay. It was a beautiful day to be on the water, and the geology of the surroundings is something otherworldly. One of the other passengers on the junk was a Dutch oil geologist who we went part of the evening chatting with on how the formations came to be, which added bit of color to the picture.

On the bay, we rented kayaks and paddled about two hours (or so) total, first out from our junk to a beach where we climbed some 450 steps to a pagoda at the top of an island. From there we paddled for a while until we finally came to an opening in one of the mountain facs that was maybe 10 feet high and 30 feet across. We paddled through it which lead to an incredible open lagoon. By the time we paddled out, our junk at arrived at the opening and the crew lashed the kayaks up as we went in to the water for a swim.

The water in the bay is bath tub temperature. Given the surroundings are in the 90s it's not terribly surprising. While that sounds idyllic, we had heard from our tour guide that the waters in the area have some box jellyfish present, and unfortunately they managed to sting both Brendan and Dan. The jellyfish isn't poisonous, but it's as described by them "it felt like an scalpel cutting your leg". Apparently there was a jellyfish sitting near the ladder that was used to climb out, and both of the guys had the misfortune to get their a leg each wrapped in the tendrils.

They sat writhing in pain for a few hours that eventually subsided, we slept in our cabins on the junk and made our way back to land by mid day. Our return put us back in Hanoi around 4pm, after which we explored the old town and made bookings for an evening water puppet show.

Old Town Hanoi is quite lovely. It's bristling with motorcycles and bicycles and more than once I was nearly clipped by one, but it and the city seem like they'd be a great place to spend some time. By the time we got back to the hotel, the aforementioned Aussie girls had left us a note to hang out later since we were at the same hotel. We went to the water puppet show, which was fantastic. There was an 8 piece traditional Vietnamese orchestra playing music to the water puppetry.

After the show we met up with our friends and ended up stumbling upon an all you can eat ice cream buffet that happens the first Friday of every month. Needless to say, that ended up being our dinner. After walking along the lake back and taking photo booth pictures in the night market, we returned to the hotel and everybody has turned in for the night.

Tomorrow begins the return leg of our journey. We fly from Hanoi to Saigon at 11am, then Saigon to Tokyo at 11pm. There's a ~10 hour layover in Tokyo on Sunday, during which I think we're planning on going to Tokyo proper via the JR Express. We're also planning during the day to meet up with Justin in Saigon for the afternoon and do any last minute shopping.