Category Archive: Europe >>

traveling and living in Prague

What’s It Like to Live in Prague in Your 20s?

I lived in Prague in my 20s and still live there.

Easy access to anywhere in Europe. Prague is quite central. If you are based in Prague, you can go just about anywhere. While I was here, I managed to accomplish a mega journey, a big item on my bucket list. I visited all 50 countries in Europe.

The Finest Picturesque Ski Resorts in the World...

The Finest Picturesque Ski Resorts in the World…

ski resort imageThis article is submitted by Lily Smithson. 

Lovers of mountainside Nature know there are few holiday escapes quite as appealing as those offering pristine white views from the world’s most scenic ski resorts. There are many things that make particular resorts stand out when it comes to their contemplative beauty: the presence of imposing mountains, verdant Nature, quaint architecture and of course, the silence required to take so much beauty in.

When to walk alone

Checklisting Europe | When To Walk Alone

You wish to get out and go somewhere, but you won’t because you don’t have anyone with whom to travel.

You can comfortably pull off whatever needed at home all by yourself, but for some reason, you hesitate when it comes to soloing out into the world.

The need to travel with someone else is something I still wrap my head to understand.

Moldova Travel Guide

Checklisting Europe | The Many Wonderful Goals That Suck

A New Year in Moldova

Where is Moldova?

It’s in the top 100 places to visit before you die. Moldova snubbed France last year for the number one tourist destination in Europe. It is the Alps of Europe’s the Far East. The capital of Moldova, Chisinau, is fast becoming the tech hub of Eastern Europe. Moldova is becoming a lot of things.

Accidental goal that works

Checklisting Europe | An Accidental Goal That Works

goal works

So you want to visit a new country each month for 12 months and later on to see every country of Europe or any continent.

First you lay out an annual calendar and marked all public holidays on it.

Master plan for adventure

Checklisting Europe | A Master Plan for Adventure – Loving Spreadsheet and Becoming Czech

master plan

(Read the first part “The Germanized Slavs“)

I found a new love. I loved spread sheets. I loved everything that had columns and rows so I could put bits and pieces of data into cells. By using spreadsheets I was able to dig into the giant blob of the travel industry, organize my research and record my activities. I listed every day and broke it into blocks of time like first half, second half or morning, day and evening. I identified every possible action points including simplest task such as “taking the bus to the airport”, “getting from the train station to the guest house” or “check-in online”. I filled the next columns with details of the places, contact information, reference numbers, etc.

Germanized slavs

Checklisting Europe | A Master Plan for Adventure – The Germanized Slavs

 

Wait! What about surprises? What about just let things happen? (Read “How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza“)

You can forget that dealing with Czechs.

The Czechs are strange kinds of Slavs. They don’t resemble other Slavs I have encountered, who are more slovenly in their habits and actions. In contrast, the Czechs are fastidious in nature, possessing a weird sense of orderliness, not only uncharacteristic for Slavic people, but also for people from post-communist countries.

Missed bus turn into adventure

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

Missed bus turn into adventure
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.

Checklisting europe - settling down

Checklisting Europe | Settling Down

Seriously? A sound recommendation on how best to run away from home is to find another home and settle down?

When I was a child and then teenager, I fixated on idle boat ride on shallow water and bumpy ship journey across open sea. As I got older, overnight train, long-distance bus and road-trip got added to the mix. In this millennium, online shoutout and social hash tags boat voyage and land transport are shortened to #rtw, glorying round-the-world trip spanning major continents and world cities.

So I didn’t get to driff off indefinitely and tag my vagabonding as #rtw, but I stumbled into another kind of traveling, less roaming and less world-bound. I moved to one region, stayed put and became region-bound. I became Eurocentric.

For starter, this kind of traveling is much easier than the traditional #rtw where you will likely need to sell  everything or put everything away, quit everything and do nothing but rounding up the world.

morning exercise in bulgaria

Underestimating People: Lesson from a 6-year-old

My friend and I went on a short vacation at her childhood home in Bulgaria . After wandering the earth for half a year, I wasn’t that interested in traveling anymore, jumping from one place to another. I suggested that we had a simple no-frill holiday. Instead of going places, we would focus on doing activities like exercising beside the obvious swimming.