Nov 29, 2017 | Rach
As some of you have seen on Facebook by now, we lied and are not in Southeast Asia yet. Instead we spontaneously flew home to LA from Barcelona and surprised our families for Thanksgiving! This wasn’t part of our original plan, but then again we didn’t really have anything set in stone and left our itinerary open for a reason.
Thanksgiving is my extended family’s (on my dad’s side) biggest holiday and one that I look forward to each and every year.
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Nov 25, 2017 | Rach
We arrived in Madrid after a six hour bus ride and checked into our AirBnB which was in a neighborhood called Justicia. Shortly after arriving, we met up with two of my good friends whom I met while they were studying abroad at Cal Poly. They are both named Ane and they are originally from San Sebastian, Spain but have been living in Madrid for a couple of months. I hadn’t seen them in four years so this was a long overdue visit.
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Nov 17, 2017 | Rach
The South of Spain is nice! So much to see, so culturally rich, and so much interesting history. We titled this post Southern Spain because we have been in five different cities within the last week. Brace yourself, this is gonna be a long one.
We arrived in Seville after an easy two hour flight from Pisa. Using the infamous Ryanair to book our seats, we weren’t originally given seats next to each other as this somehow cost more money; but coincidentally, a lady who was supposed to sit next to me asked Al to switch so she could sit next to her daughter so it ended up working out perfectly - out of ALL the seats on the plane…
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Nov 8, 2017 | Rach
Sadly, our time in Tuscany at our Workaway has come to an end. In total, we ended up staying with Chicca and her family for 2 1⁄2 weeks, but it felt like so much longer. Although it went by fast, we feel like we experienced the Italian way of life (in Tuscany at least) - specifically, a more slow paced, relaxed, generous lifestyle where working was more about passion than anything else.
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Nov 1, 2017 | Al
Hello from Tuscany! Rach and I have been in a Tuscan town called Castagneto Carducci for the past week through a program called Workaway , which is a platform that connects “hosts” all around the world with volunteers. Shout out to Rach here because she discovered Workaway and was the one who got in touch with Chicca. After reading tons of host profiles, Rach came across Chicca’s and it immediately grabbed her attention (who wouldn’t want to live with an Italian chef right).
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Oct 22, 2017 | Rach
After saying our goodbyes to Daniel and Mish in Milan, we boarded a second train to Bologna, Italy. When we were planning Italy we went back and forth on spending more time in Rome or splitting it with another city that we hadn’t been to, we ultimately decided to spend four nights in Bologna. My friend Katie had spent a year of her Masters program studying at John Hopkins University in Bologna and I had heard great things (and I mean I love bolognese sauce).
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Oct 15, 2017 | Rach
Al and I were sad to leave Lena and her family in Ravensburg as we had to re-learn how to take care of ourselves (thanks again for spoiling us Lena & parents), but we were looking forward to visiting Italy, the country we will probably spend the most time in. We prepared for another long travel day but didn’t anticipate train delays and missing connections. Lena drove us to the train station in her town but there ended up being a 40 minute delay (supposedly this wasn’t out of the ordinary for this train) so she graciously but quickly drove us to a neighboring town so we could catch a ferry to take a different train.
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Oct 10, 2017 | Al
Hey y’all it’s Alex again! Since I had never been to Switzerland we decided that I’ll handle the Swiss post. In short, Switzerland is as beautiful as the pictures, but more expensive than we had thought! Although, it was definitely worth it and there are always ways to save to money. Also, the Swiss Franc is just about a 1:1 exchange with the US dollar so that made it easy when looking at the price of everything.
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Oct 4, 2017 | Rach
We were sad to see our time in Croatia end, but we were looking forward to the next leg of our trip as we were meeting up with our friends Michelle and Daniel. Our Airbnb host drove us to the bus stop bright and early so we could catch a bus to the Split airport which ended up being 25 minutes out of the city center. We got the last seats on the bus and ended up getting to the airport too early to even check in for our flight.
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Sep 26, 2017 | Rach
Croatia - where to begin… This was one of the places we were most looking forward to visiting and while it was beautiful and we had a great time, Al and I both agreed that it was pretty touristy, even in the “off season” and sort of underwhelming. Compared to some of the other places we visited, history, walking tours, museums, etc. weren’t the main focus of our time. We gathered much of our cultural knowledge by talking to some Croatian locals.
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Sep 17, 2017 | Rach
Slovenia is a hidden gem! Very untouched and less touristy then the other countries we have been to. We took the train from Budapest to the capital city of Ljublijana (pronounced LUBE-LEE-YAWNAH) but in doing so we had our first major “oh shit” moment. We got to the train station early, per usual, in Budapest and were waiting at the track for our train. We hopped on a train that arrived a couple minutes early since in the past, our international trains had arrived early.
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Sep 13, 2017 | Rach
Budapest or Buda”pesht” as they pronounce it here was a pleasant surprise. We had heard mixed things prior to coming here and it wasn’t on our original itinerary but I think we are both glad we came. This might be partially because it was sunny and warm for the first time on our trip and we wore sandals and shorts the whole time. We stayed in a “Vintage Studio” AirBnB a 25 minute walk from the city center.
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Sep 9, 2017 | Rach
Prague started on a rough note as you can imagine. We basically spent the first day and a half in our apartment since I was grieving (which I will continue to be for a while) and Al picked up a head cold. Our Airbnb was a godsend and exactly what we needed given the circumstances, especially since I was feeling a little down and homesick and Al had a fever. We stayed up by Prague Castle in a studio apartment and had our own kitchen and washer.
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Sep 6, 2017 | Al
Hey everyone, this is Alex! I know you’ll all miss Rach’s voice but we decided that I should write the post for Berlin. Fair warning, I feel like I will ramble a bit more so this post is longer than our previous posts. We’ve had some trouble uploading pictures through Wix so we decided to share photos through Google Photos albums now (applying backwards to Copenhagen and Amsterdam as well). We already use Google Photos to back up pictures so this is easier for us and it also has some more features than Wix.
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Sep 1, 2017 | Rach
We Love Amsterdam! It is definitely a more chaotic city, but it has a lot of charm. It reminded me of a combination of Rome and Venice. Navigating the streets is a bit crazy because at every intersection there are bikes, mopeds, trams, buses and when you get in their way they’ll let you know.
We lucked out with our accommodation here. We booked on hostelworld.com but it ended up being more of an Airbnb as it was the only room as part of the “Pension”.
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Aug 28, 2017 | Rach
Before we left I said I forgot what it was like to stay in a Hostel since it had been four years…but I quickly remembered the first night when I didn’t sleep at all. We were in a four bed shared room with an older Asian couple, easily the oldest people in the whole hostel. The man was little, less than five feet, but boy could he snore! He was sawing wood all night and even threw in the occasional fart.
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Aug 26, 2017 | Rach
We made it to Copenhagen!
Our flight went by fast - direct flight from LAX on Norwegian Air (although all the flight attendants were Thai interestingly enough). We got the emergency exit row which was nice so we could spread out a bit - Al especially was happy about that with his long legs. The food was meh but Al got his own personalized gluten free meal which had a note on it that said “For Mr.
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