Schloss Schwerin - busy in renovation, German-style.

Whoa! It’s been quite some time. First I’ll have to apologise for the infrequent posting – I’m around three quarters through my whole journey, and travelling for such a time span (quite long for me at this stage!) is quite tiring, with all the spontaneous planning necessary on the way. Indeed my solo travelling style is almost planned last-minute: a friend of mine calls that ‘controlled indeterminacy’ (fancy name). I’ve also had unstable Internet connections all the way, especially on trains. Plus my monthly mobile data limit is 300MB! Anyway rest assured that the stuff I write is all fresh, even though I post it weeks later. Because I’m the kind of person who records everything I see and every thought I have right on the spot. So without further ado, onto day 4!

My original plan was 3 days in Hamburg, but I ended up with an overhaul: a friend of mine had been living in Schwerin for around two weeks at the time with the family of a friend of hers. (Sounds a bit complicated but not really.) Schwerin is a small town around one hour by train to the east of Hamburg. Not quite a big name, considering I’d never heard of it either, but it actually turned out to be a really nice place to stay, or just take a look and spend a nice few hours, since it’s home to the so-called Neuschwanstein of the North, despite the myriad of castles throughout Germany.

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Hamburg, the Venice of Germany

You might be wondering.

Why start from day 2?

Turns out I’m arriving in Copenhagen to start my German trip – a round trip from the north back to the north. That’s why day 1 (particularly long due to time zones) was simply sitting on the plane, then getting lost on the streets of Denmark looking for my hostel to survive the night. Thankfully three friendly Danes helped to orient this foreigner with zero sense of direction, and I arrived before midnight with my brand-new backpacks!

Day 2 was the real start of the journey. I mean it would have been, if it weren’t for a frustrating setback…

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Readying my luggage!

It’s now July, and in less than a week’s time, I’ll be in Germany, on my first (true) adventure alone! Looking back, preparing for this has been a hard time, I must say. Originally I was going to fly to Denmark with my family in August, but since the moment I decided to take my turn exploring Europe alone, I’ve really come a long way. So how did my 26-day plan appear from scratch?

In late February my family bought tickets to Copenhagen, but then in two months I realised it’s my exchange year, and I should try my best to make the most out of it! It was a hard time deciding, since the ticket prices were rising every hour, and I wasn’t psychologically ready to crash into such a big country on my own yet. So I tried my best looking for a companion, predictably to no avail, but I made up my mind anyway and paid the EUR200 extra to change my ticket.

I started planning in late May or June I think. I basically looked at wikitravel plus a map of Germany and picked the cities I know of. I also took reference from a friend’s itinerary and other sample ones from the Internet. I made a list of cities I want to go – I was considering taking a detour to the Netherlands but gave up – then started assigning days to each city, according to how many sightseeing spots wikitravel says they have. So yeah, not very accurate – something that I will evaluate after going.

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