If you've been following my travels through social media or my family, you know I've been to a fair few places--8 countries and various cities. In order to do justice to my travels properly, I will post more on each country individually, but to give you a taste for where I went, here is a list:
1) Ireland--Dublin, Cork, Galway, Killarney
2) Spain--Madrid (for one night), Salamanca, El Manzano, Villabona/San Sebastian, Donostia (most of the surrounding Basque region)
3) Germany--Berlin and Munich
4) Czech Republic--Prague
5) Austria--Vienna and Salzburg
6) Switzerland--Zurich, Lucerne, and Geneva
7) France--Paris
8)Belgium--Brussels
I spent roughly a week in Ireland with my Mom, traveling from place to place. I then spent the Christmas holidays in Spain with a family friend. Finally, I spent 18 days on a very fast-paced and jam-packed tour of Central Europe.
My accommodations varied from hotels with my Mom to actual homes in Spain to various hostels in Europe. I tried all sorts of cultural dishes, heard several languages, and lived out of a suitcase for five and a half weeks. A lot of my friends from both the UK and home were a bit astonished at this, and I was haggardly exhausted by the end, but it is an experience I wouldn't have missed for the world. Now that I'm back in Oxford, slaving away over a paper on T.S. Eliot (probably my least favorite poet ever), I am nostalgic for the days of freedom and tiresome travels.
The biggest takeaway from my travels was realizing that you connect with people who don't speak the same primary language as you. I met all sorts of people in the hostels, people that I will most likely never see again. And while it's a strange notion to comprehend, the slight impact they made on my day changed the scope of those travels.
So here's a teaser for my later entries:
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| Zurich, Switzerland |
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