Want to travel to Europe?

My resumé consists of two degrees in Spanish and History, an excessive amount of teaching experience,  experience with children, and yet I feel the most qualified planning trips.  I wouldn't necessarily call myself an expert, but I've sure logged a lot of hours on the computer planning the "perfect" vacations.  I would call myself an experience(ist).  I understand that it's not a word, but I love the idea of a good experience.  I guess it's a mixture of my historical, frugal, and adventure natures that land me in control of planning excursions.  Here's a tip for all of you that wish that you could do what I'm doing or go where I'm going: you can!  Traveling is relatively cheap and every country speaks English, you just have to know the loopholes and where to find the deals.

Getting to Europe is the hard part, traveling throughout Europe is the easy part.  To get to Europe you have to deal-search.  One good and bad thing about flights is that they change daily.  One day you might find a flight from Chicago to Madrid for $550 roundtrip and by the next day it has already jumped to $650.  That's a way of life.  Once you start looking you have to be ready to pull the trigger.  Some great websites for finding cheap flights are Orbits, Kayak, Skyscanner, Pakistani Air, and for you young travelers studentuniverse.com (if you are a student or under the age of 26 you have to verify you status with studentuniverse.com before you book--simple emailed photocopy of license/student card).

Now once you're in Europe everything may seem hard, but it's deceivingly easy.  The three methods of transportation are: train, plane, bus, car, boat.  Ok, there's about 5 methods, but I only use three of the five.  Even with the abundance of trains and busses in Europe, flying might be the cheapest option.  A few of the main websites come to mind, but each has a catch.  Ryanair is great, but flies into remote airports up to an hour and a half outside of the city center (Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, and Venice to name a few), and they'll charge you 6 euros a piece for online booking, but it can have flights as low as .01 euros per person.  Vueling is a bit more pricey, but flies in and out of major airports, however, charges 12 euros for online booking.  If that's not robbery enough, they charge you to check your bags.  Easyjet can be inexpensive to many places in Western Europe, and Wizzair is great for destinations to Eastern Europe.


Traveling by train is a great way to see the countryside and to save money if you do it right.  I've heard of the ever eye-brow raising rail passes, but I've yet to use one.  Train travel is good and inexpensive at times IF you use regional transportation.  Yes, traveling from Madrid to Paris seems like a delightful time, but a direct train will cost you up to $500 and $100 for those of you with rail passes.  The trick that will save you hundreds is to NEVER book a train that crosses a border.  Countries have fought long and hard to create the "best" public transportation for their countries and do not wish to share that title with the rest of Europe.  To get from Madrid to Paris you should take a train to either Irun (border of France and Spain) or Figures (border of France and Spain on the other side) and then a bus across the border into France, and finally a train from that border town to Paris.  Train is $40 in Spain, bus is $1-5, and train from French town to Paris is $33, bringing the grand total to under $100.

Traveling by bus will almost always be the cheapest option, plus will allow you to get to those tiny, hard to reach towns in Europe.  I just got done taking a 9 hour bus trip at night from Bilbao to Valencia at night and it cost me $37 each way.  It may seem a bit high, but the beauty of it was that we left Friday night to go to Valencia and left on our return journey on Tuesday night, ultimately giving us 4 whole days in Valencia and paying for only three nights in a hotel.  The objective of budget traveling is seeing as much as you can for as little as possible.  Sometimes you have to sacrifice a night or two sleeping in a bus in order to save some money.  Stay tuned for my next addition: planning a multi-country adventure?

Spanish
Gilipollas-asshole, dumb, stupid (referring to a person):  It doesn't necessarily have a fixed meaning, but is very commonly used.  It is derogatory and also used with a note of disgust in ones voice.

Basque
ondo-good:  Commonly used after people ask "Zer Moduz".

British English
It has come to my attention recently that British people pronounce words exceedingly different than we do.  For example, the word "fillet" is pronounced (fill-it) not (fill-ay) as we might pronounce it.  This has come up a couple of time in our discussions and never ceases to amaze me.