If you are considering traveling solo. You’ve come to the right place! I will give you a step by step guide on what you need to do.

1. Plan how long you would be able to travel for. 5 days or 3 months, makes a big difference in how you travel. Pick a time to travel.
2. Plan a budget. How much are you willing to spend? Keep in mind, you need to spend on the plane ticket, food, accommodation, transportation fee, entertainment, and shopping if you want.
3. Make a list of places you want to travel to. List them all. Then take a look at the map and see where it would be possible to travel
4. Decide if you want to go on a low budget or a regular budget trip.
5. For low budgets, I would recommend using the app Hostelworld. You can book any hostel in any city at any time. It’s very convenient. Sometimes I just arrived to the city and book it 5 minutes before and go right in. I never had trouble finding a place to stay.
6. For traveling across cities or countries, I used FLIXBUS. It’s a bus that goes to almost every city in Europe and you can even do an overnight trip so you can sleep during your trip and wake up the next day in a new country. This saves money for accommodation and time!
7. Traveling within cities to go to different places is quite convenient as there are public buses and trains. Also walking.
8. For food, you can eat at any restaurant you want. Or to budget, get prepackaged foods from the local supermarket.
9. Google maps is very handy when it comes to getting from places to places. It told me whether I should walk, take the bus, taxi, etc.
10. That is pretty much all you need to know. The rest you can just figure it out when you get there.
11. Make sure you travel light if you travel alone because it is a hassle to carry around a large backpack.

Make sure there is air conditioning when you are visiting during summer time.

The consequence of me trying to budget and get the cheapest places to stay during summer made the stay in Barcelona torturous. There was here was no air conditioning. I was in Barcelona during the heat wave of 2018, the temperature was boiling and I could not escape being in the apartment because it was even more hot than outside. I was tired all day long from the heat and didn’t have much energy to enjoy Barcelona. During the night, I thought it would get cooler, but I was wrong. It was just as hot. We put in as many forms of liquid bottles in the freezer as possible and took it out during the night to put it around us to make it a bit more tolerable. I had to hug a frozen wine bottle and switch it with a cooler one several times throughout the night. We considered buying a fan, but as we were budgeting we didn’t want to spend 40 Euros for just a few nights. So a big lesson was learned here, to make sure to spend just a bit more money for the sake of comfort and make sure there is air conditioning during a heat wave. Thankfully, Barcelona was the only city that was too hot during the night.

Italian bus fee fine

When my friend and I arrived to the bus station in Bologna, Italy, we had to take the city’s public bus to go to our Airbnb. The process of trying to find the correct bus station and then the correct bus to go on took a while but we finally got on. My friend is from Vienna so she’s used to how European public transportation works. We saw that there was a 1.90 Euro fee that we had to get on the bus . We discussed if we should buy it, but then we were like “Oh, it’s going to be too unlikely that the bus keepers will check, it’s too early and they rarely check.” We were also just tired and too lazy to get out our money. After going through about 15 stations, no one came to check but when we were one station away from getting off, the bus keepers come in. I tried to convince them that I didn’t know that I had to pay and I just got to Italy. I talked to them for about 20 minutes but nothing worked. I ended up having to pay 120 Euros. This was a good lesson for me to never cheat the system. Better to be safe than sorry! 😦

My experience in Paris alone

The first place I wanted to visit was Paris. I didn’t do much research at all. Of course I knew of the famous tourist places like the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and Le Louvre. I didn’t have any intention to visit these places because I knew I could always come back to visit. I wanted to explore Paris raw. Walk around and experience it fully without knowing anything about the roads, trains, people, etc. Though when I was around 13 I used to play the game Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and there was this map called Renaissance that took place in Paris. I knew that map by heart as I played it so often. I knew that the place was real so it was always somewhere I wanted to visit. This map had a huge part in why I wanted to visit Paris. The day I landed, after putting my stuff in the hostel, the first thing I did was make my way to that place.