50 European countries Project

Many have asked me WHY, and sometimes I ask myself the same question. Often I tell them the simplest version: it is fun or I like it.

Any type of traveling is a reward in itself and doesn’t need any explanation, but I guess this kind of excessive traveling needs a bit more explanations other than its being mere fun.

They are here
Simply because they are all here. I am not European. I don’t plan to live here permanently. Someday I will leave. Now that I am here, I want to make the best of it.

Europe
I want to have a story to tell before hitting the rocking-chair period when my teeth start falling off and lazy to walk anywhere and recalling memories. What is more than a collection of stories from this great continent where one of the greatest civilization, the Western, was born; where remnant of fairy tales still exists, hidden behind hundred-of year-old fortress and royal palaces. Europe is the only continent where you can walk out of modern time into mystic ancient eras. It is the only place where you can sit from one continent and look over the others, Asia and Africa. It is where richness is in abundant and poverty isn’t too far away. It is where you occasionally feel completely bored by how predictable and civilized it is when things run precisely on schedule and EU imposed standard on every move, but a 15-hour drive or a 2-hour flight will bring you to a different world where chaos rule, and you wish to return immediately to the other side.

Europe is made for people of all ages and styles. It caters to students on a school break, to young adults who get hooked with the new Western trend of ‘finding oneself’, to active outdoorsy who want to challenge themselves on extreme mountain ranges of Europe, to immigrants who see the only possible better future is to get into Europe, to Asians who have never seen something this pretty, to Americans who want to discover their roots, to leisure-seeking tourists who go on an easy 7-day-10-country tour or to high-end tourists on luxurious yachts sipping champagne on the Greek islands.

Goal
(See more from ‘Plan’ below)

I used to have great difficulty with setting and achieving goals. I accomplished a few things not because I set goals and planned for them but because these were things I either had to do or I thought that I should do. Even after when I had realized the importance of goals and had a clear vision of what I wanted, still I had trouble because I could not make my goals as concrete and quantifiable (ones of key values for an achievable goal). While I didn’t set out initially to see all of Europe (I would have finished it by now have I had a plan from the beginning.), I started to be more convinced that I could and should do this. To travel on a budget in a short period and enjoy it as in “yes you can have a cake and eat it too” require a lot of detailed and boring planning. 2009 was a turning point. With these over-detailed excel planning sheet I made, I was able to see practically one new country every month. After this, I completely bought into to the advice that for a goal to be achievable, it has to be realistic and measurable. It helps if more know about the goal because the more public the goal is the more pressure and motivated you are to make it happen. 12 months. Quantifiable? Yes. Realistic? Yes. Measurable? Yes.

Plan
(See more from ‘Goal’ above).
I come from a country where people are not good at planning let alone making long-term plans. We go with the flow and master the art of rubber time; Mediterranean, Latin Americans or the Balkans cannot compete in the same league. Two of our popular sayings are “God creates elephants, so god makes grass” (to justify no need for child rearing plan) and “Even shoes have numbers/sizes” (to justify that you are born with a fixed fate and you can’t change it. In Vietnamese, number/size and fate are the same word ‘so’). This cynical outlook is a consequence from a combination of traditional beliefs in fatalism, centuries plagued by natural disasters and wars where we were always the under-dogs. So now, when I look at my detailed, precise travel excel sheets, I’m still bewildered at what has gotten into me. This planning even acquires some kind of ‘respect’ from my Western friends who plan even lunch date, what to do on the weekend and what to do on sunny days. These days, I plan constantly, to fit either my traveling around my personal and professional life or the other way around. ’50 countries’ is no longer a fun thing or a project, it is a character-building experience to work on and fix what has been my biggest flaw.

Cindy