anna sofie andersen

zofka

I started travelling in 2004/2005 when I moved to Ljubljana, Slovenia at the age of 20. I had never before heard of Slovenia and the decision was made by a teenage girl with a teenage-broken heart. But my year living in Slovenia had my teenage-heart grown stronger and made me a spirited youth ready to take on the world. Without Slovenia I would not have been who I am today.

It was in this period that I started travelblogging and found it an amazing opportunity to not only keep those at home updated, but also to have a reminder in the years to come. I travelled the Balkans for a over a month after my stay in Ljubljana. I visited places which to this day still remain strong in my memory, places that came to represent what I would later recall as "my Balkan".

see first blog on the trip: Enjoying my last days

My next big travel was in 2006, where I spent time travelling La Peninsula, discovering places such as Granada, "Chauen", Fez, Lisboa, Salamance, Valencia and off course Madrid, the centre of it all. I lived the following half a year as an Erasmus student in Madrid, in Argüelles. It was my time "living la vida loca", enjoying the freedom to do as I pleased. It was a time of love, of friendship, of life, it was Spain.

see first blog on the trip: Madrid - the journey begins

After having watched a travel documentary about the Caucasus countries, I embarked on a journey there in the summer of 2008. My love for Eastern Europe and the old Communist bloc was reinforced as I made my way through the plains of Azerbaijan, the mountains of Georgia and the churches of Armenia. Rarely have I seen anything so diverse and beautiful as the three Caucasus countries. But the journey was also a journey to understand and better myself, and to come to terms with my own cultural intolerance and (mis)understanding. In particularly through my visit to Azerbaijan did I learn how limited my world-view had been and how narrow-minded I was as a Westerner. However, it should take me years before I could truly say that I had fully improved and become better at meeting those different to myself.

see first blog on the trip: First taste of the Baltic - Riga

Half a year later, I went to Lithuania for an internship, mingling in the diplomatic circles of Vilnius society. For the first time, I got the chance to become probably acquainted with the labour market and have a sense of how it felt to have a nine to five office job. But the job was not what kept me awake, Lithuania was. It seemed so close to home and yet so far away. As if it was worlds apart from my Copenhagen life. While being used to wasting all the free time I had had as a student, knowing I had only the weekends for myself made me extra careful to explore new places when ever I could.

see first blog on the trip: There is something about Vilnius

In the summer of 2011, I crossed the big Ocean for the first time and had an amazing time discovering Canada and the US. Here I began out with a month in Edmonton followed by a West to East travel across the continent from Vancouver to Toronto with Amtrak's Empire Builder (I now understand why Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory has such a fascination for trains).

see first blog on the trip: Basecamp Edmonton

Next time you'll see me bloging will be when I travel to Japan in the