Checklisting Europe | How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza – Experience the World

15 Nov 0

Checklisting Europe | How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza

If you live in Prague, you travel to Budapest. If you’re on an extended Central European trip, you make Budapest and Prague parts of the journey. These two cities are twins, iconic representatives of the former Communist Central Europe.

In 2009, two friends, Sviatlana, Juliya, and I planned a weekend trip to Budapest. We hoped to make it on the second week of March, but we couldn’t find any bus ticket and had to delay to the last week of March. Yuliya and Sviatlana would spend only the weekend in Budapest and then return to Prague while I would continue south to Novi Sad, Serbia and spend another week there, which happened to be on the first week of April.
Earlier of this year, in February I was in Turkey. In January, I spent a few hours in Brussels waiting for a connecting flight. At the same time, another friend was asking if we could go somewhere in May for summer holiday.
At that instant, a light bulb flashed in my head. “Oh! I’ve been visiting a new country each month now, why don’t I do this for the rest of the year?”
Thus, seeing a new country each month for 12 months became a goal for 2009.
My year 2009 turned out like this:

Month	Country	Month	Country
Jan	Belgium	Jul	Norway
Feb	Turkey	Aug	Portugal
Mar	Hungary	Sep	Switzerland, Austria , Liechtenstein, Ukraine
Apr	Serbia	Oct	Missing in action
May	Italy, Malta, San Marino	Nov	Ireland
Jun	Missing in action	Dec	Italy, Slovenia

At the end of the year, another light bulb flashed: “I’ve seen many countries in Europe now. Why don’t I just see the rest of it?”

And this was the starting point of the next three-year European saga, strung together by seemingly unrelated events, as said by Julian Huxley, “Life is just one damn relatedness after another.”

I never deliberately planned to see every country in Europe. It was something that sort of happened.

I used to think that to have idea, we have to look for it. We have to think long and hard to find it. We have to then amplify your logic radar to turn this idea into some tangible form.

But I’ve found that most of the time, ideas just come to us naturally when we least expect it, when we let go of the need to be logical and practical and when we open to surprises, the good surprises that is and allow a little bit of space to watch events unfold.