"You understand how to have fun with others and to enjoy your solitude." --From a fortune cookie
I have been daydreaming Europe for a long, long time. For starters, a beautiful map of Europe from National Geographic Magazine was put up in my bedroom two years ago. I have become so familiar with the map that when my friend Raymond started to draw it in order to deliver the word "France" in a word guess game, I recognized it immediately, which surprised even myself.
Added to the craving was the fact that I almost had my first trip to Europe six years ago. But looking back, had I made that trip six years ago, I wouldn't have had so much fun as this time for many reasons, one of which is that I hadn't learned to enjoy traveling alone yet back then.
In fact as my friend David, an avid traveler, had told me, you are not really alone. Because unless you are really rich, you would stay in hostels, where you can easily find like-minded people to talk and to hang out with.
I mixed business and pleasure in this trip, putting my business, i.e., attending an academic conference, in the middle to control the pace and to take a break. Backpacking is a physically demanding activity so you should do it when you are young.
Since this is my first trip to Europe, I ask myself which cities I wouldn't miss for the world. My answer was clear: Paris and Roma. (Sorry, London! I would have needed another visa to visit you. Next time!) So I planned my trip accordingly, allocating four days for each of them, then distributing the rest of the itinerary for other great cities. The planning of the trip was an extremely complicated optimization problem with double objectives: maximizing the number of cities I could visit and minimizing the total cost, subject to the hard constraint of the length of my vacation. I literally spent two month just on planning and will discuss it in detail later.
Without further ado, I will start telling you, my dear readers, interesting stories from my amazing trip to Europe in summer 2007.
I have been daydreaming Europe for a long, long time. For starters, a beautiful map of Europe from National Geographic Magazine was put up in my bedroom two years ago. I have become so familiar with the map that when my friend Raymond started to draw it in order to deliver the word "France" in a word guess game, I recognized it immediately, which surprised even myself.
Added to the craving was the fact that I almost had my first trip to Europe six years ago. But looking back, had I made that trip six years ago, I wouldn't have had so much fun as this time for many reasons, one of which is that I hadn't learned to enjoy traveling alone yet back then.
In fact as my friend David, an avid traveler, had told me, you are not really alone. Because unless you are really rich, you would stay in hostels, where you can easily find like-minded people to talk and to hang out with.
I mixed business and pleasure in this trip, putting my business, i.e., attending an academic conference, in the middle to control the pace and to take a break. Backpacking is a physically demanding activity so you should do it when you are young.
Since this is my first trip to Europe, I ask myself which cities I wouldn't miss for the world. My answer was clear: Paris and Roma. (Sorry, London! I would have needed another visa to visit you. Next time!) So I planned my trip accordingly, allocating four days for each of them, then distributing the rest of the itinerary for other great cities. The planning of the trip was an extremely complicated optimization problem with double objectives: maximizing the number of cities I could visit and minimizing the total cost, subject to the hard constraint of the length of my vacation. I literally spent two month just on planning and will discuss it in detail later.
Without further ado, I will start telling you, my dear readers, interesting stories from my amazing trip to Europe in summer 2007.
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