General thoughts on travelling through different countries for two weeks
I had been planning to do a single write-up about my experiences
travelling around Eastern Europe (Budapest, Transylvania, Bulgaria,
Istanbul) for two weeks but after looking through my notes I realized
that such an effort would end up being quite a tome. Instead I am
going to do a series of shorter entries covering different aspects of
the trip, comparing them across cities as needed, starting with a few
general thoughts on doing a multi-country trip.
This time I was visiting four (if we exclude the UK), each with a
different language and currency. That proved to be rather exhausting,
although we managed (just barely) to use up all our foreign currency
as we departed each country. In the future I think I will try to at
least keep the language consistent across my entire trip. That way I
can learn some of the basic vocabulary beforehand without getting
confused. Living out of a backpack for two weeks also means that there is a
limited selection of clothing to wear. That's not terrible as long as
laundry facilities are available periodically and the climate doesn't
vary too much between regions, which can happen even at similar
latitudes with sharp changes in if the elevation or distance from
large bodies of water. For instance, I had assumed that summer in
Eastern Europe would be hot and a sweater would be unnecessary but in
Romania I felt uncomfortably chilly because we were high in the
Carpathians. On the bright side, at least I didn't need to get any vaccinations for the trip.
