June 30, 2025
Mara Solen
On June 13, I got back from a 9 week trip to Europe where I slept in 10 different cities across 6 different countries. The trip was almost entirely for work, and I went to 2 conferences (CHI and EuroVis), visited 4 research labs, and made lots of new connections. I also did some fun activities like hikes and I visited with a bunch of people I already knew. It was super fun but also exhausting, and I've been reflecting on my trip and how I think about each of the places I stayed in. Each one had a different energy to me, because of the differences in things like architecture, language, and food, and even more importantly in the people I saw and the activities I did.
I am still obsessed with lines, and one of my past line-based obsessions, signatures, has come back a bit. I think it's so interesting how a small cursive line with infinite degrees of freedom can be so distinctive, and so attached to an identity. So, I made a visualization of the route I took on my trip, and for every three nights (rounded up) I slept in each city, I chose a picture that I felt represents my time there. The pictures I often felt most drawn to were the ones that emphasized the differences between the places in the times that I was there. They made me reminisce on a lot of different emotions that I felt, like excitement, fun, comfort, exhaustion, extroversion, introversion, and baby fever.