Backpacking through Europe

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At happy hour today, my co-worker and I were discussing about traveling and the Europe backpacking topic came out. Taking a gap year after high school before college seems to be more common in the Western culture compared to the Asian culture. I, unfortunately, didn’t have the opportunity to experience that. Although living abroad in different places since I finished my 8th grade probably gave me a somewhat similar experience, only minus the 24-hour travel time. Instead, I probably did 80% of studying and 20% of traveling. But I guess it gave me more time to experience the culture more in-depth compared to a short couple-of-days visit to a new city.

Nevertheless, thanks to all the people out there who are willing enough to share their adventure with the rest of the world online, my interest about travels seems to have grown these past couple of months. Reading and watching the things people posted online about their travel experience seem really fascinating to me. It also made me feel like I haven’t seen or experienced anything close to what they went through in their journeys.

In terms of traveling abroad, I feel a little envious to those who are an American passport holder. American passport holders don’t have to deal with the fuss of applying for visas when they want to visit other countries. You know those scenes that you see in the movies where the character spontaneously bought a ticket to fly somewhere overseas in the next couple hours? I don’t think those scenes would ever happened to, say, an Indonesian passport holder like me since there’s no way we would be able to get visas in less than 24-hours. Or I guess it’s possible if you have applied for a bunch of other countries’ visas in advanced—just in case something like this happens. Just saying :P

Traveling to Europe is something that I’ve had on my bucket list for a while now and hopefully, sometimes soon, I’ll be able to visit all the places and see all the paintings and architectures that I’ve read about when I was in college. One of these days. One of these days.