I just got home from a vacation in and around the beautiful city of Montreal and a family reunion in upper New York State. While I was out there I met a girl who mentioned that one of the easiest/best ways to travel in Europe for an extended amount of time is by purchasing an Interail Pass which allows you to hop on the train in just about any European country. Now I’ve heard rumblings about this pass from some of my friends who have traveled abroad, but no one has really been able to tell me the details or really figure out what it’s called.
It turns out that there are two different passes that are available for purchase. The first one I’ve mentioned is the Interail which I mentioned about and is only available to those lucky enough to live in Europe already.
The second is the Eurail Pass which is available for tourists and can be purchased starting around 500 bones (a continuous 3 month pass comes out to $1395 CAN). The pass looks like a great deal considering how much ground I’m going to need to cover while I’m out there, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in some of the Eastern European countries that I’m keen to see (Slovenia, Albania, Croatia etc.). The pass itself can be bought a number of ways, all of which are confusing. For example you can buy a 22 day pass, or you can buy a pass for 15 days within 22 days. The idea (I guess) is to allow people who aim to stay in one place for 3 or 4 days at a time while traveling to get a better bang for their buck. Because I have no idea how long I expect to be traveling from place to place, choosing which one to get is pretty daunting. Fortunately that can wait until later while I procrastinate even more important things (like visas).
Another thing I plan to do before my trip is to attempt to learn a couple of languages that might help me out across the globe. At the very least it should help me to avoid the “deer in the headlights” panic when I find myself face to face with my first language barrier. I’m already somewhat fluent in English and I can understand French quite well which should give me a little bit of a leg up in understanding some Latin-based languages. In the grand scheme of things I plan to run across Oriental and Slavic Languages, so I’m going to try and pick up both Russian and Chinese in the next 10 months. Yes, this does sound as crazy to me as it does to you. I’m aiming to pick up several copies of books I’ve read (oddly Harry Potter jumps to mind) in the different languages so I can speed up the process of absorbing a new language, and I plan to do the same thing with movies. To top that off I want to grab a copy of the Rosetta Stone language program and spend (at the very least) the required 3 hours a week per language to learn them in time for my trip. My schedule just got busy.
The big list of things that I want/need to do to pull this trip just keeps growing, but I’m super stoked to start the planning this early and I can’t wait to really get into it.
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