So Long, Spontaneity

Laocoön and His Sons

“Oh, traveling is so easy! Trust me, you’ll find yourself sitting in your room on a Thursday afternoon and think, ‘Oh! I want to go to Berlin this weekend,’ and then the next thing you know it will be Friday afternoon and you’ll be in Berlin! Even better is that these sorts of trips won’t cost you anything!” Such is the advice I received back in December as I prepared to leave for Europe. I was told by nearly everyone that traveling was “so easy” and spontaneous trips happen all the time. This information, at least in my experience, is FALSE. Any trip I tried to take on a whim never happened, and the successful ones I’ve taken have all been the result of “planning ahead.” What I found since I’ve been here, is that people tend to get in groups and plan all their trips by the end of February. They know what weekends they will be here, what weekends they will be away, right up until a few weeks until the end of the program. Especially since I am in London, I was told that hopping on the Eurostar to Paris at a moment’s notice is particularly easy. This is only partly true: The actual act of rolling out of bed to walk down the street to the train station is easy, but I was only able to do this because I had arranged my ticket three weeks prior. Plus, the Eurostar is only cheap when tickets are booked months in advance, and under binding contracts. I have never traveled around Europe on my own before, and one can only imagine that if one weekend to Paris took such effort, my two and a half spring break was going to be an even greater challenge. My friend Jen and I decided that we were going to take on Eastern Europe for the bulk of vacation, with my trip finishing up in Barcelona, where I am staying with a friend. We knew our route was going to be Prague, Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin over the course of twelve days. At first I wanted to be able to just go with the flow and only book a few necessary hostels. But then as our research began, we realized that there were so many more factors involved in traveling than we expected. Instead of easy breezy, “one click away” trip planning, I’ve been simultaneously consumed by the intricacies of Hostelworld, Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia, Trip Advisor, and trying to translate the incomprehensible website of the Vienna train guide. I felt bogged down with the pressure of finding out the fastest and most affordable way to get from point a to b, where to stay in point b, and so on. “Do we take the bus, the train, or fly?” “It takes how many hours to get there?” “What is the conversion rate of HUF to dollar, euro, or pound?” The endless reviews, pictures, and maps had left me in such a daze from overstimulation and visual overload. What resulted was a feeling conveyed by the expression of the central figure in the ancient Greek marble sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons. I felt pulled in every direction, struggling to break free, yearning for the sense of freedom that I hope would come from the actual traveling to and around these places. While I know that I am simply bitching about my frustration with trip planning, this little story does have a happy ending. We booked everything, and now I feel so confident that I know more about the neighborhoods of Budapest than I do the East Village. The sense of relief in indescribable, and now I can get truly excited for the adventures that await us in the coming weeks. To return to the quote at the beginning of this post, here’s what I would tell anyone planning his or her own long trip throughout Europe: It’s hard, time consuming, and exhausting. However, once you press “book” for the last time, the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment is so great that all those other feelings will eventually slide away back to the cyber world from where they came.