Europe 2009: Prologue

I must admit the decision to go to Europe was kinda unexpected.. I had wanted to treat myself to a trip to somewhere as a present for my graduation.. As I had missed out on going on a graduation trip while in NUS, so I was not going to allow myself to make the same "mistake" this time round.. :)

There are so many places that I would like to visit, and frankly I didn't have any idea of where to go next, since I have covered Taiwan, HK and Macau in the last few months.. Had wanted to go for Abig's graduation in Moscow and do some sight-seeing in Eastern Europe with her, but had to cancel it as the dates clashed with my final presentation.. So when Sarah (my housemate) mentioned that she wanted to go Europe, I decided to jump on the opportunity to go along.. Seriously, it is hard for me to find friends to go on a long trip, especially when most of my friends are either married and/or have kids.. not to mentioned that they are all working and taking long leave is just not possible.. I would be in the same situation too once I started working, so this was really a great opportunity for me to travel far and "long"..

With my Masters report and final presentation weighting on my mind in June, I didn't have much time to actually plan for the trip.. Sarah did most of the initial planning even though she was also busy studying for her JLPT (which I should be doing too, but gave up in the end due to time limitation :P ).. It was a pretty mad rush for both of us... Since we are going on a shoe-string budget, we decided to check out the in-thing for back-packers, Couch-Surfing.. Sarah became our contact person.. sending more than hundreds of emails out asking if we could bunk over in their couches.. Thanks, Sarah.. :) While I was to find out the cheapest way to get us from one city to another, either through rail or bus, and also how best to travel within each cities..

Initially, we had problems deciding where to go, since both of us had never been to Europe before.. We decided that we didn't wanna do just the touristy stuff - arriving just to take photos.. We wanna be able to savor each cities and take as much time as possible to get a feel of them.. We consulted many websites (Lonely Planets, Wikitravels, Frommers and many more) and asked advice from people who had been to Europe.. The more information we had, the more difficult for us to make a decision.. plus the fact that we wanna go to places where we can get hosted by Couch-surfers, if possible..

In the end, we decided on 4 cities each in Italy (Rome, Siena, Florence & Milan) and France (Nice, Lyon, Macon & Paris), plus day-trips to the Vatican City and Monaco..