the month in me: Aprilish 2026
(Wow. I can’t believe it’s over.)
life
This was my most intense travel month, with lots of shorter visits to different cities and countries.
Uppsala
My family visited Uppsala when I was three years old. I fell on a curb and cut my chin. This year’s visit was injury-free, but as I scootered around town I did occasionally imagine I was fated to crash and once again avail myself of Sweden’s universal health care system.
Uppsala might be the most “college town” I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just because I was in the center city at an improv festival, but it seemed like everything was dominated by the university, by student housing, by shops that cater to students and their visiting parents, by former students making their way. I grew up in a college town, on a college campus. I loved it.
In my journal I wrote that I enjoyed “just walking around looking at things and tasting some of them.” I looked at the university’s museum and library, the botanical garden, and the house of the artist Bror Hjorth. There’s no record of what I tasted.
My favorite part of my visit to Uppsala was hanging around with Stags Woodward. Stags and I met in Jen Hardy’s workshop at SNIF. We took two more workshops together at SWIMP. While there, we figured out we’d both hung out with the same Swedish improviser in Edinburgh, although we didn’t meet there. And we knew we’d see each other once again in Liverpool. He’s an affable person and a sensitive improviser, and very funny onstage and off. I’m so glad I got to know Stags (and his improv partner Jon Trevor).
Stockholm
In Stockholm, because I’d been there twice before, I felt a little less like a tourist and more like… just a visitor, I guess. I did enjoy the City Museum and the views from Skinnarviksberget and Hermans, and the cherry blossoms in Kungsträdgården.
More than any specific sight, I loved biking around the city. I took a bike tour in 2018, but I couldn’t figure out how to rent a bike to ride around on my own. Now Lime and other short-term bike hires are operating in Stockholm, and it’s easy. The bike route network is extensive, connected, and easy to follow – I was never uncertain about where to go or how to get there, whether I was in the extensive royal parkland of Djurgården or the urban grid of Ostermalm. Just heavenly.
I also enjoyed chatting with the same two New Yorkers over hotel breakfast each morning. I’m a very solo traveler, but it was fun catching up with what they’d done (or failed to do) the day before, sharing tips about the city, and getting advice on my future stops.
Zurich
Zurich was never on my radar as a city, and yet it was one of the motivators for this whole three-month journey. My friends Janne and Ethan moved there a couple of years ago. I wanted to visit them and see the city through their eyes – Janne in particular is a sharp thinker about the shapes of cities. But I didn’t want it enough to fly across the Atlantic. It was on my last trip to Glasgow that I thought, If I lived here for a while, it would be so easy to make short trips to Zurich, or Berlin, or Stockholm! And so it was, relatively.
Everywhere I’ve traveled in Europe, people have warned me, “Oh, it’s so expensive there!” and then I get there and things just cost what they cost everywhere else… until Zurich. It’s the first place where I’ve genuinely thought, OK, maybe I’ll skip a meal or two. One reason restaurants are expensive is that wages for the staff are high – which is great! It seems like it’s not hard to live there, just to visit.
I was conflicted about Zurich. It’s expensive, but for good reason. It’s great to walk in, and hard to bike in. It’s run by big capital, but it’s also run by leftists. Its governance seems impossible, but it’s beautiful to look at. It really is beautiful to look at.
Düsseldorf
I spent almost all my time in Düsseldorf at a tech/design conference (see below), so I didn’t really see it. It seems fascinating, though. It has the third largest Japanese population in Europe, behind London and Paris (two much larger cities), and holds the European headquarters of many Japanese companies. The wall art in my hotel bathroom reflected this – mementos of an imaginary Japanese-German girl trip.
Leaving Düsseldorf felt like a turning point. Two and a half months of “hello” and “hello again” turned into “goodbye” and “goodbye for now.” Instead of finding my way through new and strange cities (and languages), I’d be returning to favorite spots I’d seen before. I was heading west. I was heading home.
Glasgow
I’ve now stayed in five different Glasgow neighborhoods. This was my most central stay, a five-minute walk from the Glasgow Film Theatre, and I took full advantage, seeing seven movies in seven days. That was my life in grad school, drinking in all the cinema I could in between classes and homework. It felt good to revisit that version of me.
In my last Glasgow week I also revisited others: the jazz jam I’d been to in April, board gamers at Curler’s Rest, a musician friend (twice).
When travel web sites and magazines make lists of the UK’s friendliest cities (or the world’s), Glasgow is often at or near the top. It is of course ridiculous to try to rank cities on something as vague and subjective as friendliness, which means so many things to different people. It is also, I am convinced, true. It’s the reason I keep coming back. It’s the reason it’s the city I spent more time in this spring than any other. It can be a rough sort of friendship. But I love it.
Liverpool
I think before I visited Liverpool, I sort of thought of it as a small town where nothing ever happened except the Beatles. They were so huge for my musical adolescence, it never really seemed like a city that existed in its own right. But it’s a big city, full of industry, history, culture, and (I’ve heard) football.
I feel like it could become another favorite city, but I’d have to spend more time getting to know it. In 2024 I was just there for a couple of nights to see Gemma Hayes. This time I stayed longer, but I spent almost all my time at the Liverpool Improv Festival. Which was wonderful! But, like, there’s a whole city there! Maybe I’ll see it someday.
Holyhead
I set myself up with an overnight stay in Holyhead after Liverpool. This was partly so I wouldn’t have to take a tiny flight to Dublin, but also I had a feeling it would be really nice to spend a night in a small seaside town after all the buzz of the Liverpool festival and before Dublin. I was right – it was great to have some time to reflect, and also to just exist without reflecting.
Dublin
I went to Dublin because that’s how you get home from Liverpool, but also to see Gemma Hayes play a concert to celebrate her first 25 years in music. I’ve been listening to her for most of that time – her voice is etched in my brain like Paul McCartney’s or Paul Buchanan’s. For a long time I thought I’d never see her live, but now I’ve seen her twice. I feel very lucky.
I also saw a castle and some museums and stuff. And ate some very good ice cream, twice.
arts
I went to two improv festivals this month. In mid-April, I went to SWIMP, the Sweden International Improv Festival. The festival was in English, but two of my favorite shows were by groups from Sweden: Uppsala’s own Teater Prego doing Improvised Ingmar Bergman, and Lilla Improteatern (“the Little Improv Theater”), who I also saw in Edinburgh.
I also took two great workshops: an all-day class from Jeff Michalski about some subtle ways to create a longform set, and one from Anniki Englund that addressed the fear that we’ll be lost without a big idea or a lot of words to drive the scene. Somewhere in here I started thinking, for the first time in a few years, that maybe I too could teach somebody something about improv.
After Uppsala I saw Lilla Improteatern again in Stockholm, this time in Swedish! I practiced Swedish with Duolingo every day for six years, so I have roughly a toddler’s listening comprehension. (A young toddler.) I’m very interested in nonverbal aspects of improv (a big topic in both of my SWIMP workshops), so I thought it would be fun to watch a show by talented performers in a language I barely understand. I was right – I didn’t get a lot of “jokes,” but there was plenty to laugh at in physicality, tone, and the connections between performers.
And in early May, I went to the Liverpool Improv Festival, which was a flat-out wonderful experience. I was cast in the festival ensemble, meaning a dozen of us met each other (mostly for the first time), rehearsed, and performed a show, all in the space of three days. Getting to know and work with the director and cast was an experience I’ll treasure. You can read more about it in my Instagram post, and even watch the show on YouTube.
code
I wrote a post about the sliding block puzzle I’ve been working on, and another post about something I learned while working on it, and about learning and AI.
I spent two days volunteering at Beyond Tellerrand, a conference for coders and creatives. The talks I saw were all good:
- Oliver Reichenstein on “madness and imagination” and IA Writer
- Annie Atkins on her process creating paper props for period films (e.g., The Grand Budapest Hotel)
- André Michelle on his career and creating OpenDAW
- Lauren Celenza on “Living through an AI takeover without losing your soul”
Better than the talks, though, was the sense of community. Marc Thiele has created an event where people talk with each other, not just at each other. Relationships are made and strengthened from year to year. People are excited to be there, to be back, to learn and connect. I haven’t been to many tech conferences in recent years, in part because most of them aren’t like this. More of them should be like this.
onward
This feels like a good place for a summary of my three-month journey through Europe and the UK. What did it mean? What did I learn? How did it change me?
But I haven’t processed all of that yet, and this post is overdue. So for now I’ll just say: I’m home now, back in Minneapolis. It’s good to see my friends, and my bikes, and to know where things are and how things work. And I’m already thinking about my next big trip.