Schnitzels, Pierogies, and Currywurst: 107 Days in Europe Living Out of a Suitcase

This summer, I covered at least 4,500 kilometers, travelling across nine countries over 107 days in Europe. I stayed at accommodations ranging from 4-star hotels to hostels. Before this all started, I still remember the helplessness I felt right after I landed in Vienna, counting down the days remaining before I would return. How was I going to survive the next three and a half months living out of my suitcase?

The next thing I knew, I had completed the Southeastern Europe summer abroad course, backpacked across Poland, taken a German immersion course in Hamburg, before sitting at my final destination in Heidelberg scratching my head at how quickly time went by.

For other eager world travellers, here are some things I learned while abroad:

Australians are everywhere. In every hostel I stayed at, I met a lot of our cheery Commonwealth friends. Almost all of them seemed to be taking a year off, leaving their kangaroo-filled island for some relaxing summer fun, European style.

Tip: learn some Aussie slang before you leave so that you don’t get lost in any initial conversations. However, if they have been travelling for a while, many of them have become used to explaining what they mean.

Learning how to cook is essential. Travelling on a budget means that it can be pretty difficult to find cheap, healthy food, and the ridiculously cheap bakeries in Germany meant that I was always tempted to eat the tasty chocolate croissants. Cooking is a much better option, and I learned how to do it abroad, despite being initially intimidated by the apron-wearing and pasta-wielding Italians.

Tip: stay at a hostel if you can - almost all of them have kitchens you can use while learning from others! I learned how to make pierogies the Polish style in a Warsaw hostel.

How to fake being a foreigner. When I began backpacking, I realized how quickly tourists would get swarmed with people trying to sell them golf-cart city tours. As a woman walking alone, carrying a small purse, and dressing conservatively, few salespeople bothered me. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have to fend off unwanted attention from the locals.

Tip: even though most European youth speak English, try to learn some basic words in the local language. Everyone will appreciate it!

Strangers aren’t so strange. Studying International Relations sometimes gives me a pretty pessimistic view of the world. As I travelled, I realized that most people are similar simply because they do not want to be lonely. I was surprised at how quickly people I met, from South Korea to Turkey, wrote down their addresses and invited me to stay with them if I was ever in their neighbourhood. I was wandering around a park in Warsaw when an old Polish man began to speak to me, which culminated in a two hour long tour of the area– we even snuck into an invite-only theatre performance.

Tip: if you are approached by someone for a conversation, don’t always brush them off.

Meeting other Canadians feels like eating maple taffy and drinking hot chocolate in the winter with a reindeer sweater on. AKA, fantastic. I tagged along with a tour group for two kilometers until I saw the tour guide pull out a Canadian flag. I proceeded to follow them until I heard that someone was from Hamilton, and then had a nice conversation, reminiscing about Canada.

Tip: expect people to believe that Canadians are exactly like How I Met Your Mother depicts us.

I have to admit, travelling abroad alone is not all scented candles and roses. Eating alone in restaurants can be lonely, especially in Europe, where public displays of affections seem to be everywhere. was eating my sour cream with a side of pierogies when I suddenly realized that everyone around me was cuddling up. All this affection made me miss home.

It can also be exhausting, lugging around an increasingly heavy suitcase from trains to hostels up five flights of stairs. Since I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss seeing anything, I would wake up early and go to bed late. Finally, when I scrolled down my Newsfeed and see people update their “work” section, I sometimes wondered if what I’m doing is actually productive. But then I looked out my window and was reminded that the world is breathtaking. Maybe I’m not earning an income, and I can’t put any of this on a résumé, but I know one thing for sure: the experience of visiting a place was incomparable to what I could read about it. Sitting in complete darkness in a chapel 180 metres below the Earth’s surface in the Wieliczka Salt Mines allowed me to develop a more profound respect for religion and human endurance. Standing on top of one of Heidelberg’s mountains and watching the sunset with a foreground of hundreds of leafy green trees made me realize exactly how beautiful the world is.

Best of all, I now have stories that will last generations of bedtime tales. Further down the road, I’ll be able to tell my kids that their mother was next to a flare rocket in the Hamburg Fan-Park when Germany won the World Cup, or that she hiked up a mountain for an hour and a half for a wine-tasting experience, or had three different meals in three different countries. I’ll also be able to explain to them what ordering a “meter” in a pub in Frankfurt is.

Was travelling abroad worth it? Totally, definitely, every single one of those eleven beers in a meter, yes. I’ll always have more memories and stories to prove it.