This year’s travels will be a combination of my two world trips in 2014 and 2015 (see summaries above).  I will be heading  eastward from San Francisco to Germany for the annual Dresden Music Festival in May (my fourth year in a row!). The photo above is the completely rebuilt center of the city in Dresden, known as the “Florence of the Elbe”.  After that, it’s back to Berlin to attend a  one month, intermediate level language course at the Goethe Institute.

The second leg of the trip will be another long-distance train ride. I will meet my husband Gee Kin in Beijing to take the Trans-Mongolian train to Ulan Bator, where we launch a one-week visit to Mongolia. After a stop in Irkutsk along Lake Baikal, we plan to continue last year’s trail of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the eastward direction to the final coastal destination at Vladivostok.

The last segment of the trip will take place in Japan. From Tokyo, we will head west to visit Kusatsu Hot Springs, Nagano, Matsumoto Castle, and a walking trail known as the Nakasendo Highway, an ancient route built more than 400 years ago that connected Edo to Kyoto.

This might be considered a consolidation trip, to revisit and capture some of the highlights that were missed or overlooked from the past two years. I will have more time to reflect and explore German and Russian cultures, and to compare them with the Mongolian and Japanese. I hope you will enjoy traveling along with me to cities like Dresden, Berlin, Beijing, Ulan Bator, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Nagano, and Tokyo, as much as I will enjoy sharing them with you! BONSAI!!!