Brendan Doms

One of the places around Larnaca where construction was just left hanging after the recession.

Cyprus is very arid, but being in the middle of the Mediterranean it still gets some fluffy clouds and has a comfortable humidity.

A hawk eclipses the sun as it sets over a pyramid.

Back in Cairo it’s interesting to see how the trash piles up on the sides of the street, but the mosques dazzle pristinely.

I didn’t get this all wrapped up by the end of the year, but I think it’ll be pretty close in the whole scheme of things. This will probably be my last post with a significant amount of writing.

When asked about my travels, there are a lot of questions that come up more often than others. Mostly revolving around what I liked the most or the least. Now I’m going to answer those.

Overall favorite place?
Edinburgh. Everything about it just makes me want to go back there. Scotland is a beautiful country with fun people and a rich, proud history. If I ever just want to take time off from American life, it will hopefully be there.

Least favorite place?
Naples. It was dirty, and smelly, and I felt the least safe there.

Favorite lodging?
Hotel Aphrodite in Athens. It just had the best people working there and staying there. The closest runner-up would be Vagabonds in Belfast.

Least favorite lodging?
Supposedly a four star hotel, the HEM Hotel Amsterdam was the nastiest place I have ever stayed in my entire life. The room was covered in cobwebs and grime. I found several dead cockroaches and more than one live spider. Whoever handed out the stars for this place should be fired from whatever job they have and then forced to stay in these rooms. In second to last place is Fabric in Portici. Despite having arguably the best amenities, the attached club was closed (hello, high-season?), the staff were standoffish and the guests were lame. Generator in Berlin was also a disappointment. That city has much better options.

Favorite food?
German food ended up being my favorite, though I never would have guessed that before the trip. It’s all so rich and hearty. Mmmm…

Least favorite food?
England lived up to its reputation for bad food. Everything was bland, and the meat was particularly unappetizing with its “grey colour.”

Favorite beer?
German beer. I have a weakness for their wheat-based infusions. Though Belgian comes in a close second.

Least favorite beer?
Mythos in Greece. If you’ve had any really cheap, bad American beer, then you have a good idea of what it tastes like.

Favorite wine?
The Portici wine straight from Mt. Vesuvius clearly holds the top spot in my mind.

Least favorite wine?
I don’t remember any of the wines I had being particularly bad, actually. But then again, I never really ordered wine outside of a region (like Italy, France, or Spain) where it would be probably taste bad.

Favorite spirit?
Scotch. All of it. Though I seemed to like the ones from Islay slightly more than the others.

Least favorite spirit?
Zivania, the local drink of Cyprus. Not good.

Favorite tourist site?
Pompeii was a surreal, all day experience. This full-sized ancient city definitely takes the cake. But for modern history, the whole of Berlin is a wealth of tangible buildings and locations from the biggest conflict of the last century.

Where did not knowing the language matter the most?
Naples. It seemed like a much lower percentage of the people there knew English, and they were generally more annoyed by me not knowing Italian.

Best surprise?
Happening across the Colosseum in Rome by accident. That was an excellent moment.

Biggest disappointment?
Paris. Popular culture has made it seem like some pinnacle of romanticism, and it doesn’t live up to that ideal.

Other random things?
There is no good Mexican food in Europe.
The Greek Isles and Cyprus have the best beaches.
Public transportation all around Europe is generally better than in America.
Madrid seemed to be the best place for shopping, if you like that sort of thing.
London really does have a lot of “theatres” and a large variety of shows.

There are probably a lot more questions than that, but those are the ones I’ve been asked personally. Hopefully it sheds some light on what I took away from the trip, both the highs and the lows.

It’s been months since I last posted, and this will be one of the few posts I do before I call this blog finished (at least until my next big trip!). I hope to have it all wrapped up before the new year. Expect some pictures soon, as I finally have the chance to go back and look over them all, and have a decent enough internet connection to upload any and all of them.

So, I’ve been meaning to talk about what I brought and didn’t bring on a trip this long, and how I managed to survive it. That’s what this post is about.

For luggage I just used one large backpack I borrowed (thanks Jim!). It only had one main compartment, which was used for all of my clothes. I had some plastic bags for clothes that got wet or smoky. There was one smaller compartment in the backpack which I used for toiletries. I also had a day bag, which was just a small duffel bag (it happened to be the one from the collector’s edition of Grand Theft Auto IV, a fact which only one random stranger on the trip noticed out loud), and I actually had enough room to stuff it in the top of the backpack if I didn’t want to sling it over my shoulder. The duffel bag held all of the other random stuff I had: my camera, Kindle, maps, hostel and plane confirmations, and any food or drinks. In total, all of my stuff weight about 37 pounds when I started the trip. Since I bought some things, it was more like 45 on the return.

The zipper on my duffel bag actually broke in Athens, and I heavily considered buying a new one, but I found a pliers in a street market for only 1 Euro. I had just been to the ATM, which only spits out 50’s (a fact I mostly lamented), and when I offered one to the man who was selling it, he told me to just take the pliers for free, rather than him bother making change. I got the zipper fixed with some creative pulling, squeezing, and twisting.

So, with the stuff that I did have, what was useful, and what wasn’t? What did I need but hadn’t brought along? Here are some lists describing those things.

Packed It, Shouldn’t Have

• Bug spray - Europe has very few mosquitoes compared to Minnesota
• Scissors
• Money pouch - as the outline could be seen through clothes, I felt it made me more of a target than it did protect my money; the best way to avoid trouble was to blend in and a money pouch screams tourist
• Bar of soap - after one use it got everywhere in my bag and I switched to a liquid body wash for the rest of the trip
• Multiple dress shirts - one or two were good, but more than that is not necessary
• Nintendo DS - although I thought I would play this while waiting around, I ended up always reading instead

Packed It, Glad I Did

• Extra pair of cheap flip-flops for hostel showers
• Towel and swimsuit - these should be obvious
• Combination lock - some hostels had using your own lock as the only way to secure valuables
• Kindle - lots of downtime on planes and trains; I read 9 books on my trip!
• Sunglasses - my eyes are grateful
• Digital camera with 8 GB of storage - I took something like 1700 pictures and can still fit several thousand more on just one memory card
• Rain jacket - I used a windbreaker that could be rolled up into almost nothing at all

Didn’t Pack It, Wish I Had

• Extra camera battery - there wasn’t always a good time or place to charge
• Digital, waterproof watch - both as an alarm and a timepiece; I eventually bought one on the Greek island Paros
• Hat - mostly to protect myself from the sun in Egypt
• Language primers - the small kind with just the starter convenience phrases; this would have helped a lot during my first hours in a new country, and I couldn’t find anything like them on the Kindle
• International calling card - I had to buy a lot since in Europe they’re mostly country specific, and the pre-charged SIM card idea was prohibitively expensive
• Camera lens cleaner - sand was terrible to my camera

Didn’t Pack It, Didn’t Miss It

• City maps/guides - they can take up a lot of space and weight, and most train stations or airports have free or very cheap fold up maps that point out the main attractions
• Dress shoes - another pair of shoes would have heavily taken up a lot of room, and I was never at a club or restaurant where someone commented on me wearing my comfy New Balances

Well, that’s all I could think of. Packing for a trip like this is almost an adventure in itself.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I needed a solid week to adjust from the jet-lag, and then life caught up with me. I’ve got things back under control now, and this afternoon I did some analysis of all of my credit card and bank statements going back to the beginning of the planning of this trip. I know it’s not always the most comfortable subject, but I think that it is important to talk about money and how much these sort of trips cost, so that those interested in planning their own version have a baseline to compare to.

When the idea really started to percolate this past March, I figured that I could do the entire trip for under $10,000. I wanted to do it for less than $8,000. The reality has turned out to be much better than either of those estimates. For the whole trip, including exchange rates and fees, I spent a total of $6,716.74.

Now, how does that break down between credit cards, cash, and fees? Credit card expenses totaled $3,885.92 (58% of total) with $17.90 in fees (0.5% of that). I withdrew $2,732.44  in cash (41% of total), with $80.48 in fees (3% of that).

For exchange rates, I averaged:

1.67 USD to the Pound Sterling
1.47 USD to the Euro
0.20 USD to the Egyptian Pound

Note that although I was in Switzerland, I avoided paying for anything in Swiss Francs since I knew I would be there for such a short time, so I don’t have data for that currency.

In terms of where that money went, I can only extrapolate from the credit card statements, since I didn’t keep track of what I spent the cash on. Here’s what it looks like:

Entertainment/tourism/shopping: 5%
Lodging: 19%
Transportation: 71%
Food and drink: 5%

Transportatin is obviously the largest chunk, so let’s examine what that consists of:

Planes: 70%
Trains: 23%
Ferries: 3%
Buses: 4%

The craziest part of this is the round trip flight from Minneapolis to London and back, which cost $785.35, accounting for 40% of what I spent on planes. That’s a definite outlier. The other large purchase was my Eurail pass (I got the 4 countries across 5 days version), which cost $386.60, and makes up 62% of the money for trains.

So, what does this all mean? It may seem like an absurdly low number, and in fact, I’m surprised by it myself. Living in hostels and not going out to eat fancy dinners definitely kept my costs down. I also didn’t anticipate how splitting lodging, tourist attractions, food, and drinks up to three ways with my friends and not paying at all for my housing in Barcelona (thanks again AP!) would affect things. Buying a lot of the plane and train tickets in advance, when I knew prices would be low, also contributed to the relatively low cost of this trip

Finally, the Chase Freedom credit card is amazing for travel, as they don’t charge any fees for international use. The only credit card fees I incurred were from the establishments themselves. Bank of America, on the other hand, charged a solid $5 fee for taking money out internationally, on top of the fee for the local bank.

I was gone for a total of 50 days, and each day cost me an average of $134.33. Definitely worth it.

Piccadilly Circus in twilight. This is the last picture I took in Europe.

Trafalgar Square. How do you pronounce that?

On to London. Me in front of Parliament.