Airbnb

Hosteling has been our primary accommodation when we travel abroad.  In Italy, we ended up staying in one star hotels, which are basically the same thing as hostels.  We haven’t tried couchsurfing, although it does sound fun, it also seems much more likely to pick a crazy person to stay with than pick a crappy hostel.

As I was browsing through the archives at Ginger Won't Snap, I read about how she rents part of her apartment through Airbnb.  This is basically like paying to couch surf, and individuals or commercial businesses can list their places and users can search listings to find somewhere to stay.

I’m always trying to balance quality and price when it comes to housing because for two people on a two week trip, it adds up quickly.

After a quick perusual of the Budapest and Vienna results, it might not be cheaper but the quality might be better.  If we do end up going to Budapest and Vienna, I think I know the general area we want to stay in while visiting Budapest, but the high cost of central Vienna lodging leave me wondering what might be best.

On the other side, this sounds like a fascinating way to host visitors and make some money too.  The only downside it that I doubt we’d by living in a very touristy spot, so the desirability would probably be lacking.

The only downside I see to this is that they take a few percent from the host and a fee from the renter.  For a week in Budapest or Vienna, the fee ranged from $15-17, which is a bit high especially when compared to some of the hostel websites.

We haven’t tried this, and maybe we won’t, but there are great travel sites popping up left and right!

Italy: Day 1

We have another glorious trip to tell you about, and we will be doing it day by day, just like with our Athens trip.

Getting ready to leave Saudi Arabia was much more laid back than our last two trips.  We basically know exactly what to pack for our travels at this point, so most of it got done the day before we left.

Our first day was mostly travel, with our flight leaving about 2300 from Jeddah.  The Jeddah airport was packed again with travelers coming and going from pilgrimages.  Thankfully, we got through with relatively little trouble and made it to our flight on time. We had another layover in Cairo where we bought into the VIP lounge for some much needed sleep before heading out for Milan where we arrived around one in the afternoon. Well, that isn't really true, we landed in Malpensa and took a one hour train ride to Milan. The Malpensa airport was a big mess of construction, so we didn't take any pictures, but the Milan train station was a beautiful marble hall with a vaulted glass ceiling.

 We went straight to the hotel, which involved getting rather turned around for awhile trying to figure out what street we were on. We had a little bit of trouble after we got to the hotel, because they had lost our reservation!  The room was available for three of the four nights, but we had to go stay at another hotel on the third night in Milan. It was called a one star hotel, but it seemed pretty much just like a hostel to us.  The biggest hassle with the lost reservation was having to move luggage and unpack so many times.

Dinner was great, but we ate pretty early so we had the entire restaurant to ourselves.  We both got pizza, but the menu was only in Italian so we had to guess at the toppings we were picking!

Exhausted from the traveling, we zonked out early in preparation for our first full day in Milan.

Follow our journey:

Travel Plans are Never Final

Different Ways to Travel

How We Get Ready To Travel

Italy Day 1

Italy Day 2

Shopping in Italy 

Keeping it Alive by Trying New Things

Italy Day 3: Part 1

Italy Day 3: Part 2

Pack and Move

Or check out our Italy tag!

Travel Planning

I love planning for our upcoming trips, I absolutely do, but only after we have plane tickets and a hostel reservation.  Those two parts of travel planning stress me out so badly.  We almost didn't go to Greece because of the stress of deciding and buying tickets.

It is far and away a problem of too many options.  There are dozens of flight aggregators, airlines, and potential destinations, and somehow from all that picking one flight to one location seems daunting and overwhelming.

Our situation is a bit different than the average traveler I think, because we're very flexible about where we want to go.  I'm more than willing to let ticket and hostel prices dictate where we go, because I know that this is only the beginning of our travels, and I'm not hung up on getting to see one specific city or country at this point.

What I really need is an aggregator that will tell me the cheapest airline prices for various cities without having to search each city individually.  Does anyone know if that exists?

Right now we're leaning towards either Rome/Florence or Milan/Florence, depending on which city is cheaper to fly into. I think Italy would be a beautiful place to visit, but it certainly looks like it's going to be more pricey than Athens.  I suppose that's one benefit of visiting economy ravaged countries such as Greece, the prices seemed cheaper than elsewhere in Europe.

Despite the self inflicted stress of travel planning, please don't think for a minute that we regret or dislike traveling.  I'm so grateful that we have the opportunity to do so much of it now, as opposed to the mind set of waiting until we're more established.

Hija de la Luna had a great article about this, and I completely agree that finding ways to travel in our twenties is a high priority before we allow ourselves to get tied down with jobs, family, and the ordinary challenges of life that prevent international travel.

(photo source)

What We've Learned About Hosteling

After two hostel stays in 2010, we are starting to get our feet wet in a the very big world of international traveling.  There are probably much better places for you to go if you're looking for good solid, traveled advice, but this is what we've come to learn.

1)  Figure out what you're going to do before you decide where to stay.  This seems counter intuitive and is still hard for us to grasp when planning, but if you know nothing about the city you're going to, as is normally the case for us, spending the time figuring out what to do will greatly improve your feel for the city.  We like to stay near the sites, museums, and especially the metro stops.  We use the Lonely Planet website as our primary source of info on sites and attractions.  For Athens, we planned our hostel first, but managed to end up in a great location despite this.

2) Read a lot of hostel reviews, but take them all with a grain of salt.  We won't consider a hostel that hasn't been reviewed or had some customer feedback, in most cases there are enough other options that the risk of some crap place isn't worth a few extra dollars of savings.

3) Figure out what matters most.  For us, it was cleanliness and location.  Since we're traveling together and don't have much of a night life, we really don't care much about the atmosphere or sociability.

4) Roll with the punches.  It was madness getting out of Jeddah.  Cairo was a bit smelly.  Athens had Guy 2 who snored like none other.  Be prepared to deal with small inconveniences like buying some air freshener or ear plugs, without letting it be a show stopper.

So this is just a short list of what we've figured out.  If anyone has other tips we didn't mention or talk about, feel free to add to our list!

*Catch up on our entire Athens adventure by checking Our Travel Page, or our Greece tag.*

Roommate Antics

When we stayed in Cairo, it was cheap enough that we could easily justify a private double room, but since Europe is as a whole, much more expensive than Cairo, we went with a shared room for our stay.  Neither of us really knew what to expect, and that has definitely lead to some interesting experiences.  The 13 day length our our stay also meant that we got to see more than a few roommates come and go, so here's a not so brief retelling of some of the funniest, or funnest parts of sharing a room with strangers.

Guy 1:  An Iranian guy who is living and working in Norway.  He was only around for one night, which was unfortunate because he seemed nice enough and sat and talked to us for a while about Iran and some of the religious and political goings ons.  He said interesting and hopeful things, which don't bear repeating here on the interwebs.  What's interesting is I really don't know whether to believe him or not.  Since the building blocks of our opinion about Iran come from mainstream American media, that doesn't leave a lot of faith that what we think we know is accurate.  I think it's an area that I would certainly benefit from learning more about.

Guy 2: Oh my goodness, what a series of inappropriate words could be used to describe him.  A cultural studies professor out of England, he enlightened us with quips like "they can just be housewives and mothers" when talking about women in Saudi Arabia and a broad sweeping review that "there was nothing to do in Athens besides the Acropolis."  Surprisingly despite his prediction that Athens was a barren, boring city, we managed to have a great time for almost two weeks.  Now I seriously question what kind of cultural teaching is being done in England if this is at all representative.  He also snored louder than a trucker, a freight train, or any other typically loud object used for comparisons.  So loud in fact that we bought ear plugs so we could sleep!

Guys 3 & 4: In and Out.  They were only here a couple of days, and generally kept to themselves.

Guy 5:  Rolled in on New Year's Eve, which I thought was strange, but I felt pretty bad for him the next morning after a night of Guy 2's epic evening performance.  He certainly looked worse for the wear.

Guy 6:  Professor from the US.  A super nice guy, traveling around while in between semesters, like us!  It was nice to reconnect with an American and chit chat about life in US compared to Saudi.  He was a really nice guy and was in Athens for the remainder of the time we were.  He came to Athens to get ready for teaching a new class about mythology; how cool is it that we have teachers willing to go that far to get ready to teach!

Guy 7: One night in and out.  A guy from England just here for one night which was too bad, he seemed pretty nice. (easy on the eyes too)

At this point Guy 2 had to move to a different room, please know that we were not missing him at all.

Guy 8: Canadian who worked for the Google for the last few years.  Arrived same time as Guy 9 who also happened to work at Google for a large amount of time.  These two spent a solid 10 minutes recapping the building layout of Mountain View identifying similar Google buildings they worked in.  Then they got on Google maps so they could proceed to look at the buildings.  Aka super geeks?  He also liked to use the phrase "mickey mouse" a lot, which I thought was kind of hilarious.

Guy 9: From England, pretty interesting except for the long forays into the location of Google buildings, foreigners and taxes, and politics in general.  Aka bore my socks off guy.

Guy 10: Australian guy.  Nice enough, but a little too dependent on everyone else to find places to eat/things to do.

So it was definitely an interesting experience sharing a room with so many different people!  When we travel again over Spring Break, we'll probably end up sharing a room again unless we go somewhere cheaper than Europe.


*Catch up on our entire Athens adventure by checking Our Travel Page, or our Greece tag.*


Catch up on the rest of our adventure:
Athens Day 1
Traveling Back to Saudi Arabia
Small Math Problems and 4 Modes of Transportation
Restoring Faith in Traveling
Playing the Ethics Card
Changing Perspectives on Cash v. Debit
Athens: Day 2