Traveling 101: What not to do

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

On the importance of shopping around

It quite literally pays off. Cliche, yes, but true. I looked at flights to go home for the summer about two weeks ago, and I about puked from sticker shock. Since then I've been busy taking way too many siestas and doing way too much of nothing, so I haven't had time to look at flights. Today I finally did, and good thing I shopped around.

When I first looked, this is along the lines of what I saw. I wasn't happy about it and actually got a little worried. 

So I looked at trusty Student Universe, the site where I bought my one-way ticket to come to Spain last September. Didn't turn out to be so great this time around.

So then I thought maybe it'd be cheap to fly to Chicago and then either buy a separate flight to Omaha or take a bus. Wrong. Still $701 to go to Chicago through Student Universe.

I looked at Iberia, Spain's airline. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, IBERIA? Almost 2,500 euros to fly to Omaha?

Then Expedia, from Madrid to Chicago. 633 euros. Then Expedia from Madrid to Omaha. 1,300 euros. So no. Then CheapOAir - $634 to Chicago. Nope again.

And then as a last-ditch effort, I Googled "student flights" and found STA Travel, which I had heard of when I studied abroad in Spain and Costa Rica, but I hadn't been impressed by their rates before. Then, THIS:

The exact same flight that is 2,422 euros directly from Iberia is $487 through STA Travel, which is a reputable company, even as too-good-to-be-true as it seems. The site has awesome deals for students and "youths" (me) under 26.

So, I'm coming home June 17, and I ended up paying $487. I'm thrilled.

Un saludo,
Teresa

A beautiful mess

For my trip through Paris, Amsterdam and Belgium, I had everything meticulously planned. I studied public
transportation timetables for hours, charting the most economical times and locales.
I pored over hundreds of hotel reviews for four different cities. Everything went off
without a hitch. Our lodging was great, and transportation plans were spot on.

Meanwhile, I neglected the week-long trip I would be taking with my little sister and my
roommate through Barcelona and the south of France. I made a few lodging plans and
browsed bus schedules to sketch out a rough itinerary. I figured we could solidify things
when the time came.

Then the time came, and things were as unsolidified as ever. We didn’t know how or
when we’d get from Madrid to Barcelona; Barcelona to Nice, France; and from Nice to
Marseille to catch our return flight to Madrid.

I'm a planner by nature. I'm always the one to take the initiative and plan projects and
trips. I obsess over details and am a slave to Internet reviews. But, as this trip proved,
sometimes it's good to loosen my compulsive grip on control and let things work
themselves out.

French Riviera

For lack of a more articulate description, we did a lot of stupid things during the trip.
Like assuming we could buy Madrid-Barcelona bus tickets for a prime departure time
mere minutes before said departure.

Like arriving in Barcelona at 1:30 in the morning and hauling our luggage through the
city’s notoriously thief-laden streets (we didn’t get robbed, so there’s a nod for faith in
humanity).

Like sitting down at the computer at 7 p.m. on New Year’s Day and assuming it was
possible to buy tickets for an international overnight bus for the same evening.

Like, after realizing that wasn’t possible, scrambling to find any company with buses
headed to southern France, then buying the tickets and deciding to wait until the
morning of departure to print said tickets and look for lodging.

Like buying tickets for a train we could see would be departing any second, and
watching it pull away as the machine spit out our passes.

Like getting off a train in a random French port village without double-checking
because a random man told us that was the place we were looking for.

The whole trip was one beautiful, frenzied misadventure. But what's travel without a bit
of panic?

The only mess we encountered that wasn’t provoked by our own irresponsibility was
a train delay between Nice and Marseille, where we needed to catch an evening flight.
The train ahead of us had an electrical problem and blocked the tracks. We sat stalled
in the train for an hour or more, listening cluelessly to the intercom progress reports in
French, which none of us spoke. At one point an Italian passenger and I were talking, he
in Italian and I in Spanish, about what was happening. Ultimately, the issue got fixed,
we made our flight, and we caught the bus home from Madrid to Don Benito.

Even considering the time and money wasted because of our imprudence, I don't regret
neglecting the planning (although I would like to have some of that lost time back to
visit more of the ridiculously amazing French Riviera). We have a handful of disaster
tales to keep us giggling for years to come.

Here’s to embracing every fiasco as an opportunity to learn or laugh.

Un saludo,
Teresa

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Gaudi house on the right, Barcelona

Park Guell, Barcelona

Marseille, France, port

Beach in Nice, France

Harbor in Monte Carlo, Monaco

A whiny open letter to Ryanair

Dear Ryanair,

No, I don’t want you to hawk calling cards throughout the entire flight.

No, I don’t want Giorgio Armani or Calvin Klein perfume.

No, I don’t want an allegedly sexy charity calendar of the Ryanair crew (I peaked at the cover as the cart rolled by, and I wasn’t impressed). 

This is not an image from the calendar, unfortunately (or fortunately) for you. Source

No, I don’t want overpriced cognac, even if I do get one free with the purchase of another.

And no, fellow Ryanair passengers, I don’t want you to clap when we arrive. Our safe landing should be treated as an expectation, not a victory.

Source

I just want to sit in my tiny seat and try to enjoy what’s sure to be an unenjoyable journey.

But no, Ryanair, I will not stop using you, given your ridiculously cheap prices and stripped-down service.

So I guess I’m just a whiny blogger with a problem I refuse to fix.

See you soon,

Teresa