And after browsing through these pictures, imagine how the owner of the shop looked like.

Exactly!
Wow.

Opeth & Norway.
Now I need to find a conference in Norway so that I get my plane tickets reimbursed.

by Sam Brown

It took about 5 hours to get from Ann Arbor to Windsor, and another 5 hours to get from Windsor to Toronto. Windsor is seperated from Detroit by the Detroit River, which is at the same time the border between the US and Canada. Usually, getting from Ann Arbor to Windsor should not take more than 2 hours, and the main reasons for the delay were: (1) the very unreliable US train system AmTrek. After 2 hours of waiting, I took the GreyHound bus to Detroit instead. (2) My cabbie, who was stopped at the border “because, yes Sir, your German documents are all in best order, but your driver is known for bringing illegal immigrants into the country, and we cannot let you continue your journey.”
The weather in Toronto was amazing. It wasn’t particularly warm, but sunny the whole weekend, leading to a complicated pattern of reflections of reflections (of reflections) of sunlight within the network of towers of steel, glass and mirrors. I walked around for three days, sometimes accompanied by my wonderful host (whom I met on couchsurfing. If you still haven’t signed up, you might want to).

Worth living Toronto:

• Diagonal street crossings! Yes, at some important intersections in Toronto downtown there are not only traffic lights on either side of the street, but also on the opposite diagonal side of the intersection. All cars stand, and you walk straight across the intersection and feel like a king.
• All the tall black buildings made of steel, glass and mirrors.
• Three wonderful friends living in Toronto, and their flat high up in the clouds! From up there you have a marvelous view over the city.
• Listening to icelandic (I really want to learn icelandic now). It might be the most beautiful language.
• The fact that there are people out there who successfully have longlasting and fullfilling relationships that are very different from what we usually understand as relationship.

Chicago

The autumn in Ann Arbor has been unreasonably unseasonable (e.g. warm), and my luck continued in Chicago, at least the first day. I took a photograph of a digital temperature display around 3am on Friday night, showing 56°F, which translates into about 14°C. It was much colder after that, though, and very rainy and misty.
My hosts were amazing, as so many people I have met in the couchsurfing community (if you haven’t sign up …). Warm, interested, helpful, open-minded, relaxed, responsible, calm, caring and curious artists. In their apartment, the world is a better place – if you want wonderful hosts in Chicago, let me know.
Chicago is a big city, and one of the most “planned” cities in the States. The grid is impeccable, and although making navigation very easy, confuses my European mind. You can stand in a pretty small street, which happens to be the street in which your house is, and it feels close, somehow, but actually your house is 15 miles away. After having lived in Ann Arbor for a while, I keep underestimating distances in bigger cities (I spend 2 hours on Saturday walking from the closest metro station to a Museum – it looked so close on the map).
Downtown Chicago is known for its skyscrapers. In contrast the rest of the city is fairly flat. People here tend to live in small houses much more than Germans do, and most of these small houses only have one upper floor (only very rarely do you see a second one). The same applies to Ann Arbor and Toronto: a bimodal distribution, whereas in Germany it would be more like a bellcurve, the median being about 4 or 5 floors and not 2.

Worth living Chicago:

• Our busdriver on the Megabus. She kept announcing random things over the speaker, and most probably works as comedian in the evenings.
• Two small boxes next to newspaper containers close to Logan Square people put there, one for videos and the other one for books. Put something in, take something out – and please bring it back once you are finished. A little street library!
• Zack’s bread. I have regularly spent over $8 on different loafs in different locations with a good reputation in search for good bread, and had given up about three weeks ago. American bread is horrible, even if it’s organic and expensive and fancy. Zack makes his own bread, and it’s most probably the best one on this very continent.
• A Starbucks employee treated me like a human, not like a customer – with true interest and no superficiality.
• The “Occult Bookstore” at the intersection of Division/Milwaukee, with … interesting books like “2012 – return of Quetzalcoatl”. A sign in the shop, next to the announcement about next week’s seminars about teaching Magick after the great Aleister Crowley, stated:
  “If you didn’t see what you’re looking for, ASK US! We can get it for you.”
  How about … empirical evidence?

— Thanks to Lucie, and greetings to New Zealand!

My eyes are closed, I realize I just woke up.
I haven’t slept properly for 4 days and feel exhausted, tired, but I am awake now. I have found a position to sit which is extremely comforting. Everything is silent, I am at peace, calm, happy.
The sun warms my hands, my arms, my face, and I open my eyes to watch the world outside of the train slowly moving by. I am sitting at a big window and I seem to be the only traveler, noone and nothing is to hear except for the very soft movements of the train.
Looking around I realize that I am driving through (or over?) a picture: someone drew huge geometric figures on the surface, polygons of different shapes, and colored them in yellow and green and brown tones – farmland. And he even took himself enough time to take out a brush and put a touch of white on everything that is moving by – fields and trees, houses and fences – giving the whole world a peaceful, a silent, a serene and clear expression.