I’m actually back home in Perth now, but I left out a lot of my travels in Europe as my computer broke down about halfway through my stay in Germany. So I thought I’d go back and finish them all off, both for your enjoyment (I hope) and a record for me so I can remember my time abroad. So to kick things off again I’ll take you back to January...to my trip to Rome, Italy... With only a month and a bit to go before embarking on my whirlwind tour with my mother, I risked taking four days out [View Full Entry]

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I know it’s been a long time coming, but here’s my next instalment...about a month or so ago now I went on a day trip to Milan, Italy. Don’t worry I wrote it all down in the bus on the way back, so we don’t have to rely on my shocking memory! :D So this is what I wrote on November 24: Before I start my blog on my day trip to Milan, I would first like to add one more tip to my last blog for Paris that I forgot last time. Tip #11: Learn at least how to say [View Full Entry]

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I wasn’t sure which of the titles I liked better so I decided to use both. I say ‘Paris on a tightrope’ because I ended up spending a little more money than you would if you were to do it ‘on a shoestring’, but still tried to keep it cheap. And when I say ‘Paris Diet’ I don’t mean Paris Hilton - I think one chocolate croissant would be one too many for Paris Hilton. I mean the city in France. So here’s ten easy steps on how to experience ‘Paris on a Tightrope’ or how to lose weight in Paris [View Full Entry]

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Yep, that’s right, I went to Oktoberfest. Twice. How can you be in Munich at this time and not go, right? But sadly, to disappoint all of you hoping I would become a beer drinker whilst in Germany, I didn’t actually have ANY, either visit. Sorry! But the thing is....the beer at Oktoberfest a) only comes in a ‘Mass’, which is 1litre, and having never really properly drunk beer before I thought I’d either not be able to finish that much or just pass out about ¾ of the way through it and b) is really expensive, and thinking I couldn’t [View Full Entry]

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So I’ve finally gotten around to telling you all about the rest of my ‘round-trip’ of Germany! Sorry about how long it’s been...I lost a bit of motivation somewhere along the way! I left off in Berlin, having stayed longer than intended but still enjoying every second of it (except maybe when I was sick - not quite so enjoyable...)! Due to no reply to my request to surf a couch in Hamburg, from Berlin I took a LONG train ride to Düsseldorf. I think it was about 4 or 5 hours. And unfortunately I’d finished Harry Potter the night before! [View Full Entry]

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I know it’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found a moment or two, amidst getting settled into my housing in Freiburg and starting uni to get back to my blog...So without further ado... I was unsure what to expect of my second Youth Hostel experience as I made my way 2 hours south of Munich to Salzburg, Austria, having had such an unusual experience the first time. However, as Veronika (oldest of the Schäfer ‘kids’, although none of them are really kids anymore...) and I pulled up in front of the HUGE building that we assumed to be the hostel, [View Full Entry]

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So after waiting 3 hours in the train station I suddenly had a brainwave - Facebook! Now I know some of you are a little sceptical about such things as MySpace and Facebook...so was I up until Tuesday night! I remembered that, although Monica (the friend I was to stay with) wasn't my friend on Facebook yet, she had commented on another of my friend's 'wall' (sorry about the Facebook jargon for those who don't know what it all means), and knew that sometimes people add their contact details to their profiles. So I thought, well, may as well give it [View Full Entry]

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So the friends I was staying with just outside of Munich (the Schäfer family), discovered that my Australian driver's lisence is valid in Germany for 6 months before I would need to get an international lisence, which is a good time period as I am only here for just over that anyways. It came in really handy during my last week in Munich, as Mr and Mrs Schäfer went away for a holiday, my friend Anna-Lena was helping run a camp, and her brother is barely home as it is. So being able to drive meant that I wasn't completely stranded [View Full Entry]

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Even if that sentence wasn’t easy to guess the meaning of, you’d definitely know what it meant once you’d been here for 2 weeks! Munich (or at least Bavaria, the area in which Munich is situated) is sometimes known as the land of castles, many of them built by Ludwigs! King Ludwig I had a pretty impressive castle built at the foot of a mountain, but then his son (Ludwig II obviously) thought he’d outdo him and had another, bigger one built higher up, perched on the edge of a rocky outcrop! Not to mention the two other ones he had [View Full Entry]

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So I finally did it. I managed to get everything organised and actually managed to arrive in Switzerland, after much nail biting as to whether I would be actually be accepted into Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg (the reason I’m in Europe in the first place) and as to whether I would be insured or whether I’d have to pay for the excess 7kilos I had (fortunately I didn’t, at least not for the first leg of my trip!). So it wasn’t until I was actually on the plane that I could breathe a sigh of relief...but even then it was short [View Full Entry]

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