Life as J

After my last post, I realized I missed a few things! Funds In addition to planning my itinerary and making the necessary reservations for hotels and attractions, I had to make sure I had enough money to last all 4 weeks.  I calculated a rough daily budget based on accommodation, food, and incidentals (e.g. attraction fees), and came up with a worst-case estimate.  Obviously, I wasn't going to carry thousands of Euros in cash - that would just make me a target for those petty thieves (more on them later)!  Therefore, I devised a strategy that combined funds from a credit card, traveller's cheques, and cash. First - the credit card.  Most credit cards will charge (in addition to the currency conversion) a foreign transaction fee which is 2.5%.  However, there are cards that do not charge this extra 2.5% - the one that I ended up getting was the Amazon.ca card offered by Chase.  An added bonus for this particular Visa is that you earn 1% cashback, whi...

Exciting times – I’ve been preparing for a month-long Europe trip and it’s almost here! If you’ve been thinking of planning a long vacation, hopefully you’ll find this helpful. Ever since I was in high school, I’ve dreamt about visiting Europe – Italy in particular – to experience the amazing art and culture that were borne out of the Renaissance. I knew that if I were to plan a trip, I would have to block off a good chunk of time in order to avoid a hectic run-around tour. Therefore, when the opportunity arose to take a 4-week vacation, those dreams became reality. First, I had to decide where to go – after chatting with one of my friends who had studied in Italy, I came up with a list of cities/places to explore: Cinque Terre, Florence & Pisa, Rome, Sorrento (Capri & Pompeii), and Venice. After studying the geography of Italy, I realized that Austria was a bordering country and I could add Vienna – rich in arts (music especially)! With a time budget of 3-4 nights per stop...