Introduction
From January through July of 2009, I took part in two study-abroad programs as part of my curriculum in the graduate architecture school at Washington University in St. Louis. The spring semester, from late January to late May, was based in Helsinki, Finland, while the summer program, from the beginning of June to the end of July, took place in Barcelona. Both programs were enormously eye-opening experiences for me; I got to see seven countries in Europe that I had never visited before (Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, France, Spain, and the Netherlands) and learned a great deal both from the buildings and landscapes I encountered and from the wisdom of my teachers.
I took a total of over 26,000 photographs over those six months, none of which I have published online except on this website. My intent here is to share the highlights of the photographs in a sort of photo-diary format, similar to the gallery section of my Switzerland 2005 site. In addition, as with Switzerland, I plan to scan and transcribe in HTML all the entries I made in my handwritten nature journal over the course of these programs. That and all the photo pages are accessible at once from the navigation bar at left. The background is black in order for the photographs to show up as well as possible.
This is all very much a work in progress for now and likely will be for quite some time, but I figured it made much more sense to start sharing some of the photos now than to wait until I've completed the selection and captioning of all of them. If you want to jump straight into the photo pages, the first one concerns my arrival in Helsinki.