After finishing my first year teaching and before coming home to Nebraska, my roommate and I took a nice 16-day swing around Central Europe. Once upon a time, I was a planner - meticulous and organized and anal. But together we have become the ultimate non-planners, a pair of late arrivers of the worst kind. But dang do we have a good time.
I'm going to use our failures to craft a somewhat sincere tips list for any readers who might try to recreate anything we did. Here's the trajectory of our trip: Madrid > Milan (only to the airport. An Italian friend picked us up there). > Jesolo, Italy > Ljubljana, Slovenia > Lake Bled, Slovenia > Verona, Italy > Parma area, Italy > La Spezia, Italy > Cinqueterre, Italy > La Spezia > Pisa/Florence (accidentally) > Venice > Prague, Czech Republic > Budapest, Hungary > Madrid, Spain.
1. If you sleep in the airport, be on time for your flight.
The minute I finished my last day of work, I headed to my apartment, finished packing, caught a bus to Madrid and slept in the airport, awaiting our early morning flight to Milan. Somehow we ended up losing track of time and having to power-walk/lightly jog to the gate after the rest of the passengers had already boarded. In the end, after sleeping in the airport five times, my best tip would be to just loosen your grip on your wallet a bit and fork out some euros for a bloody hotel. But if that doesn't happen: Don't try sleeping on the floor in the Madrid airport. There's a rancid woman who lives in the Ryanair check-in area, and the floorspace outside of that area is freezing. Your best bet is to snag a table at the cafeteria and fashion a makeshift bed out of the chairs.
2. If you're going to be in a country for any significant length of time, buy a SIM card with internet.
We spent about a week in Italy and found ourselves chained to restaurants with wi-fi and internet cafes. We wasted way too many hours and euros on internet, trying to communicate with the Italian friend and panic-searching for lodging. We could've bought a SIM card from the get-go (for about 15 to 20 euros) and saved ourselves the stress and money. As long as your smartphone is unlocked for international use, you can pop in a SIM card from any European country. You'll get a local number and everything. So European.
3. Speaking of lodging...Find lodging before you arrive to a country where you don't speak the language.
We arrived to La Spezia with no place to stay and without internet to look for a place. The information office was entirely unhelpful, so we paid 5 euros for wi-fi to do a haphazard lodging search. Italy is expensive, in case you didn't know, and we couldn't find anything cheap and available. So we reached out to an Italian Couchsurfing contact, who helped us find a place for 30 euros a night (each) near the train station (the owner didn't speak English, so I have no idea how we would've dealt with the situation without the local guy). Unfortunately, the Couchsurfer came to our rescue after we had already wasted three hours at the train station, caged in the wi-fi zone next to the loudest train platform.
4. Read the terms of a low-cost airline flight very closely.
We're seasoned Ryanair flyers, so we've never had a problem with them (make sure you always print out your boarding pass ahead of time or you'll have to cough up 50 or 60 euros at the airport). But from Venice to Prague, we flew Wizzair, a Hungary-based low-cost provider I'd frankly never heard of. It was cheap. For a reason. At a Venice internet cafe while trying to check in for the flight, I discovered that you have to pay to take a standard-sized carry-on. Only very small carry-on bags were free. Beings that we only had carry-ons for 16 days of traveling, our carry-ons were far from small. So we tried to pay online to add carry-ons to our flights (how ridiculous is it to pay to add carry-ons?), and guess what? The site didn't work. So we scrambled to contact the airline, but it costs more than a euro a minute to call. We bought a calling card, which we later found out can't be used to call a toll number. Ultimately we went to a bar with internet (which we had already been to earlier that day) and wrote a Spanish friend and asked him to call the Spanish Wizzair line. He called at 10:02 p.m. The customer service line closed at 10. So we ended up throwing a bunch of stuff in one big carry-on and paying 45 euros at the airport to take it on the plane.
5. Make sure you triple check that you have boarded the correct train.
From La Spezia, we intended to go to Collechio (a small town near Parma) en route to Venice. But we unknowingly boarded the wrong train and ended up in Pisa at 10 p.m. (I wish we could've seen our faces when the ticket man on the train informed us that we were not going to Collechio.) We had to take a train from Pisa to the central station in Florence and then catch a bus to a secondary Florence station to get to Venice on the night train. Let's just say Pisa and Florence are not places you want to be wandering aimlessly at night.
I'm sure someone somewhere once said that from failure you gain strength or wisdom or something like that, right? I like to think I've gotten something out of these mistakes other than a handful of memories that are awesome only for how awful they really are. If not, oh well.
Here's to living and learning.
Un saludo,
Teresa
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