Europe--an Inter-railing adventure!

[fergo]

Hi all!

I know I don't post here as often as I should, but I'm very excited about something and just have to share.

Me and my girlfriend have been talking about going travelling this summer, and while I don't want to get my hopes up too much, it's starting to look like it might actually happen!

Like everyone else in this situation, my head is swimming with grand plans: places to go, things to see, an entire continent to explore in a few short weeks. It's going to take a long time--and a lot of heartache--to whittle down all of the bizarre ideas into an itinerary that seems at least theoretically possible. A few things are certain, though: Amsterdam and Paris seem like musts, northern Italy seems like a great idea as well, and--and I know this is a bit of a leap--I want to end up in Istanbul.

Why Istanbul? I don't know.

Well, obviously, it's a brilliant, romantic city, bursting with character, studded with historical buildings, overflowing with the debris of centuries of history as the beating heart of world empires.

The funny thing is with Europe is that there are loads of cities like that. It's pretty fantastic in that way.

Still, Istanbul would be great as well, if we can line everything up so that we can get all of the way there and all of the way back.

Anything else? Vienna, Budapest, some of Germany. Old castles, breathtaking scenery, good beer for me. Vegan food, tasteful architecture, and loads of art for my girlfriend. Adventure, good people and lots of fun for both of us.

If people are interested, I'll update this threads as we come up with new ideas--and if anyone has been to any of these places before, maybe you can give your thoughts. Until then--well, if anyone's done this before, share your experiences! Where was good? Where should be avoided? I know the Playground has its fare share of travelers, and I have to admit I have very little experience in the area (except for spending more than my fair share of time on trains, I suppose).

[Bulldog Psion]

Hope you have a great time and I, for one, am eager to hear all about your adventures! :smallsmile:

I was in Istanbul for one day once. Wouldn't mind going back with some more time to actually look around the place, but that's way, way in the future. :smallwink:

[RoyVG]

I haven't been to a lot of places myself, but my parents and grandparents have been to Prague a couple of years ago and they say it's a beautiful city. I've been to Berlin myself for 3 days last year in April and it was actually pretty cool.

[Meph]

Hallo Fergo!
I'm originally from Milan, I spent five years in Turin and am now living in Hamburg since a couple of years; I have the hobby of travel myself too. So, even if the Internet is surely full of wonderful touristic tips, here's what my personal experience has to say.
Paris and Amsterdam are surely two Must among the European cities, but to be honest I wasn't particulary hit by them. About Paris, consider it to require several days to be visited properly, it's sort of huge. About Amsterdam, if you're motivation is the beauty of the city rather than its underground spirit, than I personally recommend you to go for Bruges instead. Even more beautiful and with much less setbacks.
About Northern Italy, my hints are Turin and Verona. Milan and Venice are surely as wonderful as they say... but not very easy to be visited if you do not personally have friend to guide you there (and I claim it with a bitter heart since those are two of my most beloved cities). Note that moving from Paris to Italy you pass next to Lyon - it totally deserves a night or two.
Going to Instanbul this way, my next stop advice is Split in Croatia. Cheap and stunning beautiful both for the historical centre and for the beaches, able to provide you a look at what all the other cities of the Adriatic Sea can offer. Further in this direction I cannot help you anymore, not having been southern than Split in the Balkans myself.
On the other track, you mention the castles panorama way. Vienna, Prague and Dresden are all lovely in that meaning, but I've nothing bad to say about Budapest and Munich as well. The Alps contain some pearls too, if you will be moving by car rather than train and wish a breathe of nature instead of other urban life.
Open to every debate here and to receive private messages if you need,

[fergo]

Hope you have a great time and I, for one, am eager to hear all about your adventures! :smallsmile:

I was in Istanbul for one day once. Wouldn't mind going back with some more time to actually look around the place, but that's way, way in the future. :smallwink:

Thanks!

We've been looking at the practicalities of it and Istanbul is by no means a certainty--we'd really need to have a month pass for it to be practical (because it takes so damn long to get anywhere in Eastern Europe). I still sincerely hope I can make it there--it would be brilliant!

I know you were only there for a day, but did you manage to see anything there? What was the atmosphere like? Were the people friendly? Were there really legions of wild cats?




I haven't been to a lot of places myself, but my parents and grandparents have been to Prague a couple of years ago and they say it's a beautiful city. I've been to Berlin myself for 3 days last year in April and it was actually pretty cool.

I would love to be able to visit Berlin, but looking at the map, we may not be able to :smallfrown:. I hear it's a really exciting city to spend time in though.

We might try and get to Munich instead--mostly for the beer, to be honest, but also to get a taste of Germany. And from there to Vienna... maybe... time allowing.




Hallo Fergo!
I'm originally from Milan, I spent five years in Turin and am now living in Hamburg since a couple of years; I have the hobby of travel myself too. So, even if the Internet is surely full of wonderful touristic tips, here's what my personal experience has to say.
Paris and Amsterdam are surely two Must among the European cities, but to be honest I wasn't particulary hit by them. About Paris, consider it to require several days to be visited properly, it's sort of huge. About Amsterdam, if you're motivation is the beauty of the city rather than its underground spirit, than I personally recommend you to go for Bruges instead. Even more beautiful and with much less setbacks.

We understand the downsides to these cities, believe me. Our plans at the moment include three days in Amsterdam and two in Paris, so hopefully we have enough time to give the surface a decent scratch if nothing else. We've considered alternatives, but from an art perspective, nothing else really compares.


About Northern Italy, my hints are Turin and Verona. Milan and Venice are surely as wonderful as they say... but not very easy to be visited if you do not personally have friend to guide you there (and I claim it with a bitter heart since those are two of my most beloved cities).

Hmm... we were thinking of Florence--clichéd, I know, and full of tourists, but beautiful nonetheless. But hopefully we'd have time to visit a medium-sized city as well. Plus, Turin is on the way in, and Verona looks bloody gorgeous. Any suggestions about what to do while there?


Note that moving from Paris to Italy you pass next to Lyon - it totally deserves a night or two.

Lyon is on our list as a firm possibility. I know it's famed for its food, but what else would you suggest a tourist spend his time on while there?


Going to Instanbul this way, my next stop advice is Split in Croatia. Cheap and stunning beautiful both for the historical centre and for the beaches, able to provide you a look at what all the other cities of the Adriatic Sea can offer. Further in this direction I cannot help you anymore, not having been southern than Split in the Balkans myself.

Ah, now things get difficult. As much as I hate to think about it, we may not get much further than Vienna or Munich--a whole month of travelling isn't cheap, and it'd be very ambitious to get to Istanbul with less! But when we're looking at the possibility, we'll bear that in mind. Our current plan goes something like Vienna - Budapest - Bucharest - Sofia, and then down into Turkey--but that involves a lot of very long train journeys, so we'll have to see.



On the other track, you mention the castles panorama way. Vienna, Prague and Dresden are all lovely in that meaning, but I've nothing bad to say about Budapest and Munich as well. The Alps contain some pearls too, if you will be moving by car rather than train and wish a breathe of nature instead of other urban life.
Open to every debate here and to receive private messages if you need,

I would love to be able to fully explore that area by car! Plus, some nature would certainly not go amiss, and Germany or Austria seem like good places to try and fit that in.

I'll certainly PM you once we get a provisional itinerary sorted and are looking for more specific advice. And thanks for everything so far! It's really made me excited about the possibilities of northern Italy :smallbiggrin:.

[nedz]

I did Sophia — Plovdiv — Istanbul by train a couple of years ago. You've missed the highlight of arriving in Istanbul by train: Waking up in the Balkan countryside, snaking along the coast of Marmera, winding through the modern suburbs, slipping through the Theodician Walls, circling around the Topkapi palace before arriving in the center of the City — they've just built a new line in a tunnel. Still, the trains a lot faster and you won't get woken up and chucked out of bed at 3 am to clear customs. Plovdiv is better than Sophia BTW.

[SarahV]

When I did the month-on-trains-around Europe bit, it was quite a ways back (in the 90s) and some things have changed... we didn't feel safe going so far east due to things like the Kosovo War.

Our itinerary (which I had almost zero input on, FWIW) was something like: Copenhagen > Berlin > Prague > Vienna > Munich > Venice > Naples > Rome > Florence > Barcelona > Paris > London.

In retrospect it was a pretty good way to see which cities I'd like to go back and spend some real time in. It was not a great way to really see those places, because we ended up spending half our time on trains and finding our lodging in each city. We crammed in a few important things (museums, castles, etc.) in each place. But I fell in love with Berlin and I've been back several times... I've also been back to a few others (Paris, Barcelona, Rome, London) and really enjoyed my subsequent visits. I'd love to go back to Prague, also, we had a lovely time there - I just haven't been able to afford it yet.

If I were doing it again I'd spend a LOT less time in Italy. I know a lot of people love it, but even on a return visit to Rome I wasn't so fond of it. If I had to pick one city in Italy I'd go for Venice, just for the flavor and a gondola ride, plus it's not so far out of your way :smallsmile: (To this day I'm flabbergasted that two of my friends did not want to shell out TEN DOLLARS to take a gondola ride through the Venetian canals, because they thought it was too expensive. Seriously, in the grand scheme of your life, that is a ten dollars worth spending...)

If I have one piece of advice it would be: don't go see any sights unless it is something you are truly, genuinely interested in seeing. Don't feel like you "have to" or are "supposed to" go see something-or-other that is in all the guidebooks. If it sounds like "rooms full of boring old paintings" or "a wide open space with a lot of pigeons" to you, trust your instincts and skip it. (The same place might sound like "rooms full of exquisite works of timeless art" to you, and that's great! Just saying - different people like different things and you should let yourself be you and not be influenced by other people too much.)

It is completely worthwhile to just explore some local cafes for an afternoon, meet some locals in a bar, see a concert, take a "ghosts of <city> tour," wander around and get lost looking at cool houses, whatever you like. You don't have to see every museum and every statue. You don't have to see the Mona Lisa just because it's famous. Don't wear yourself out so every day is jam-packed running from one thing to the next. Do what you really want to do, and take the time to enjoy the people and culture wherever you end up.

Art is a beautiful thing, but when you look back you won't say "Hey, remember that time we went to seven museums in a week and waited in line for an hour and saw that painting that we'd seen pictures of 400 times before and it was so much smaller than I pictured it?" But you might look back and say: "Remember the time we were in Paris and we found that little creperie that was open at 2AM and we ate steaming fresh Nutella crepes with our fingers while we stood on the bridge over the Seine and looked at the Eiffel Tower all lit up at night?"

[veti]

Paris and Amsterdam are surely two Must among the European cities, but to be honest I wasn't particulary hit by them. About Paris, consider it to require several days to be visited properly, it's sort of huge.

This is well worth bearing in mind about lots of places. They're huge. Visiting somewhere like Paris or London or Rome or Berlin for "a day or three" is just an exercise in frustration. You need a week, minimum, to even begin to appreciate those places. (Edit: and not at all coincidentally, they're also mind-bogglingly expensive.)

Smaller cities are the way to go, I think. In France and the UK, there's no realistic way to avoid Paris and London completely, but there's no need to stop there either - I suggest passing straight through on your way to Avignon, Nice, Brighton or Bath, all of them lovely cities positively reeking with history. In Belgium, I can recommend Antwerp. Further south my knowledge gets hazier - I'm personally fond of Munich and Budapest, but they're both pretty large.

Smaller cities (and smaller countries) are much easier to take in. (Although even there, beware of thinking you can see "everything", or even all the things various guides will try to say you "must see".)

[Meph]

I totally agree with SarahV: avoid what it is "supposed to be visited" if it doens't actually appeal you too. Just wondering by foot in the streets of the centre is the core of visiting a city for what it is and feeling it on your skin, I think. That's why I suggest you to pay particular attenction at the addresses of the hostels \ hotels you book at, the same attenction you'll pay to their prices.
Personally I would not recommend Florence then - same setbacks of Venice (too small, too crowded, too much tourists-exploiting) while lacking its actual fashinating beauty. But that's only my taste (and my awful personal past touristic experiences with the town): milions of tourists cannot be all wrong.

Plus, this reminded me a couple of books I read a few years ago, about this English guy (name Patrick Leigh Fermor) walking across Europe in the 1930s. Not a very compelling plot maybe, but still kind of entertaining. They show in the hard way, by making me feel an ignorant for example, how can a pretty lame landscape become wonderful if you know the history behind it. The title were "A time to gifts" and "Between the woods and the water".

[007_ctrl_room]

Enjoy the trip!! I just did Europe for the first time (vacation-wise; flew in and out for deployments) with my wife last summer, and it was incredible. We were more so along the mediterranean, but the highlights were definitely Italy's Amalfi Coast, Oia (Greek island town on Santorini), and Pompeii (my favorite). I would recommend just seeing what you want to see; like you mentioned you could probably spend dozens of trips or even months/years travelling Europe and there would still be cool stuff to see, so don't over-travel, relax a little bit, and ENJOY it!

[GolemsVoice]

If you have the possibility, absolutely see Berlin. I love this city, and it's like history come alive there. Fantastic, I envy you ;-)

As for German cities, being a native, I can probably give you some advice. Come to Karlsruhe and I'll give you a tour ;-)

[nedz]

Personally I would not recommend Florence then - same setbacks of Venice (too small, too crowded, too much tourists-exploiting) while lacking its actual fashinating beauty. But that's only my taste (and my awful personal past touristic experiences with the town): milions of tourists cannot be all wrong.

Wait, what ?

I did a week in Florence 18 months ago — amazing place.

Florence is all about the art galleries though and we did have a car to explore other places: Ravenna, Piza, Lucca as well as San Gimignano (the village in Tuscany with the crazy towers). If you are not into art then Florence is probably not for you.