High among the many compelling reasons to work for DIA, one must rank the management's willingness to let one take four weeks' vacation on the trot. Nevertheless, one does this sort of thing at one's peril, and the witticisms that have enlivened this space in my absence seem proof enough that the blog goes on. But faint heart never won fair Hefeweizen, and I have to admit that somewhere between Maidan (in a lull of the crisis du jour and under the docile occupation of a half-dozen parties' professional protester-campers) and the Hofbrauhaus, work, DIA, nonprofit tech, all disappeared gloriously into the memory hole. Feeds and newsletters and all that stuff in total stillness, with just the cool cascade of strange sights, new people, and miles of cobblestones to walk. It's not that I don't love everyone, it's just ... I don't know how to finish that sentence. Besides, travel is a form of metaphysical -- and ever-so-physical -- blogging (bear with me here, I'm trying to get a writeoff for attending Carnival). You get your experiences in bite-sized, disordered chunks -- a late train here, a Titian gallery there, an impulse buy from a street vendor, a stranger at a hostel who becomes a friend for a night or a lifetime -- whose only coherent arrangement is chronological, yet which manage to loop back around to each other with unexpected symmetries and connections and with luck heavy use of the "awesome" tag. And then it's up to you to wander through them: make the connections or miss them, leave your comment on someone else's journey or skip it, and always plentiful digital photography. My camera's memory card reveals every essential ingredient of the blogosphere. There's contending vanities. Heavy drinking. Cute animals. Inevitable meta-blogging. And flamewars. ("Death to foreigners")