Key Takeways from our 2016 Europe Trip

Here are the key takeaways from our trip.

1. Travel light and enjoy the trip. Make use of the self service laundries. That itself is an European experience and takeaway. Laundries may not be found so easily in tourist areas, so research ahead, taking your hotel as the base. Remember, Google Maps is your friend. In Bruselles, I could find two laundries within a five minutes walk from the Gared du Midi. In Amsterdam, there was a laundry two tram stations away. But do keep in mind, it takes around two hours for the process. You could schedule it late at night or early morning. You could even start the process, roam around, and come back after an hour, for your presence is not needed once the machine starts rolling.

2. The verdict is split open on whether to layer yourselves in three of four thin clothes plus a jacket or take a thick (fur) coat. Take your pick depending on how well or poor you can handle cold. If your body is not too receptive to the cooler climes, you may need both!

3. Indian SIM cards works perfectly fine for whatsapp calls, and there are free wifi on most trains, railway station, hotels, restaurants, parks, museums, shops, and boats. You really do not have to spend a penny on telephone. However, it does help top have a local SIM number on hand to make emergency calls. This normally presents a problem if you are traveling multi country. For all the EU and Schengen integration, a French SIM card still goes into roaming mode in Bruselles or Zurich, and you cant make international calls. France’s Orange seems to have a SIM card, which for 39 Euros gives 10 GB data nad some talktime across most of Western Europe. If you can get your hands on that, do not look further. I couldn’t get one from Charles de Gaulle, and opted for another French SIM card at 30 Euros instead. It worked fine for the six days in Paris, but since then we were cut off from making calls and packet data.

4. Opt for a mixture of cash and travel forex card (scout around, we got the best deal from Tata Forex.) Make sure your travel card is Visa, or at the very least Mastercard. God help you if you have Diners Card or American Express. Keep your Indian credit card and debit card, but don't use it unless you really have to. using the pre-loaded travel card does not cost any extra money. You pay a premium of 3.5% over and above the exchange rate when you use your Indian credit or debit card.

5. Unless you are a hardcore vegetarian or a Jain, ditch the food packets, and travel light. Food, even the vegetarian stuff, is freely available. About 5 Euros is all it takes for a pizza, a falafel, or a supermarket meal.  It's actually cheaper than India if you factor in the size of the pizza or the length of the sub.

6. You can drink tap water with confidence everywhere, but bottled water is not too costly either, as long as you purchase 1.5 litre bottles from supermarkets. In Germany, a 2 litre bottle costs just 0.25 Euors (or approx 20 INR), about half the price in India! But avoid the small shops, railway stations, and airports, where a small 0.5 litre bottle sells for outrageous 3 Euros or even 5 Euros in some places.

7. Be prepared to be ripped off big time if you enter an Indian restaurant. A dish of substandard channa masala costs around 30 Euros at La Maharani in Bruselles and 35 Swiss Francs at GourmIndia in Luzern. Naan to go with the channa costs extra. Get into a Turkish restaurant instead and opt for a pizza or falafel. A family of four can eat to their heats content for about 30 Euros. As a rule of thumb, allocate Euro 10 per person, per meal.  If you set foot in an Indian restaurants, triple this amount.

8. There is no way you are going to cover everything you want to see in a single trip. How you pace yourself and how much to see is entirely up to your taste, preference, and energy levels, but it is advisable not to try and do more than three things on any day – one main must-do activity, another secondary activity which may either precede or come after the main activity, and then  a third activity which is dispensable if you run short of time. Beyond that be flexible enough to make changes to your itinerary as the situation unfolds - for instance do something indoors on a rainy day. In any case, do not rush. It is better to see one attraction well that rush through two attractions superficially.

9. Don’t over do the tourist attractions. Simply loitering around in a park, sitting at a roadside café watching people move around, taking in the sites in a bus or train trip are all enriching experiences, much more valuable than what monuments and museums offer.

10. If we did this trip now, with the wisdom of hindsight, we would have skipped Bruselles altogether and given ourselves an extra day in Paris and Amsterdam each. We don't regret our time in Bruselles one wee bit, it is only a question of prioritizing what is better with the limited time on hand.

We made the hard decision to skip Spain, especially Barcelona. However, skipping the Italian mainland (Rome and Venice), Berlin and Budapest was deliberate. Rome, Venice, and Berlin would constitute the core of our next trip to Europe, whenever it is. We would definitely want to visit the charming Paris again, and Amsterdam too.

Tax Refund

Finally a note on tax refund. If you buy anything above 150 Euros from a single shop in the European Union, you qualify for a tax refund when you exit the European Union. The cuckoo clock we picked up from Triberg qualified.

Getting the customs stamp from Malpensa was easy enough, with the customs officer not even bothering to inspect the cuckoo clock. Again, the trust which I experienced at the start of the trip. 

I lost hope at the next stage though, when I found a kilometer long line to get the cash. After wasting five minutes in a non moving line, I realized the line was for guys who wanted to pack in their cuckoo clocks and other goodies into their checked in luggage. With a customs stamp already in our kitty, and the cuckoo clock in our hand baggage, we could collect the money after immigration.

Fortunately, the VAT refund desk at the other side of immigration hads just two customers ahead of us.

Who wouldn’t love to get a few additional Euros on their hands, but the evil Slovenian who was (wo)manning the refund desk at Malpensa would have none of it. She insisted on refund only to a credit card, probably suspecting we wouldn’t have one to present. But three cheers to State Bank of India. I flash my credit card, and she has no option to process my refund directly to the credit card and issue me a refund. EDIT: The refund was credited to my account after a month, after I had lost hope of ever seeing it!