The chacacha of the train
1) Search for hours on forums and web pages for hours , tips and recommended itineraries. End with your head saturated with information about Ljubljana-Zagreb trains and ferries between Italy and Athens.
2) Discuss endlessly the route with fellow travelers . Leaving with great sadness a destination that you really want thinking “next time I will go”. Since then you have not been within 100 kilometers of that place.
3)Generate hatred in travelers who have formed a queue behind you while you ask your endless list of questions at a Renfe window.
4) Quickly pack the backpack, try it on, freak out at the weight, and immediately unpack and leave half the stuff at home.
5) Buy several travel guides overflowing with information to end up carrying wrinkled photocopies of the main destinations that as the days go by become illegible from being handled so much.
6) Prepare some albal paper packets with assorted sausages to get by the first days of travel. That, consequently, the clothes smell of chorizo and Manchego cheese.
7)The nerves of the beginning that lead to checking a thousand times that you are on the correct platform and to make sure again by asking the conductor the destination of the train.
You will end up defeated. AND SO HAPPY.
8) Save and be aware of the ticket as if it were life in it . Meeting someone who has lost it during the trip and feeling that life really depends on it.
9) Make a boat with friends to share expenses and that at the end of the experience it is saturated with currencies from different countries and rivals the backpack in weight.
10) Wash socks and underwear by hand with a bar of Lagarto soap in the restrooms of the hostel or the station.
eleven) That those same socks and underwear do not dry in time and carry them tied to the backpack with bizarre techniques to ventilate when walking.
12) Furious Hate what it feels like to discover that the toilets in a station are paid for.
In the art of making your bag will be your triumph or your failure
13) The strange look meeting people over 30 years old (always foreigners) who are also doing the Interrail.
14) Get up like a European tour world pop star: What country are we in today? And here is euro?
fifteen) someone suffer the drama of the bottle of gel that opens and permeates half a backpack. Curses and suffering, but lesson learned for the remains.
16) Getting mixed up with currency exchanges successive. Mentally bless the existence of the euro and wonder how people making the same trip in the 90s managed.
17) Sleep on night trains to save a night in hostel. Waking up at the beginning as if out of one of those plastic balls that are thrown down the hills with crazy people inside and at the end of the trip setting up the stall on the seat with the experience of a Great Depression bum.
Sleep on night trains: whenever possible
18) To discover with great sadness that you and that close childhood friend have very different visions of what a trip should be.
19) Discover with great joy that that acquaintance that you did not feel like signing up for the trip and you get along perfectly.
20) Identify each city with the experience that was lived in her. Ergo, if it rained horribly in Ghent or it was hard to find accommodation in Dresden, you don't remember them fondly.
twenty-one) That the improvisation plan of not going with a reservation, but arriving and looking for accommodation on the go always goes well until the last stage of the trip ends in a city that is in full swing. Not finding a shelter or a free bed in any corner and walk around the center with the backpack in tow cursing out loud.
22) Carry a music repertoire (on tape, cd or mp3, depending on the time) which is supposed to be abundant and varied. End up hating each and every one of those songs.
23) Prisoner of the thrifty desire, sleeping in seasons . Remembering a lot about that inflatable neck pillow that your parents urged you to bring and you refused.
24) pretend to be clueless sneak into the first class car.
The chacacha of the train
25) Share food and snacks with fellow passengers. Looking enviously at those who eat something that looks delicious and don't share.
26) Go cartwheeling a two-liter bottle that is being filled in public fountains and faucets of the accommodations with unequal results.
27) Meet other Spanish travelers that recount down to the smallest detail their psychedelic / stoner experience in Amsterdam.
28) Be one of them.
29) that the slogans of the stations become your safe, best resource and close friends.
30) Realize that it is impossible to travel through Europe without visiting scenes of the Second World War.
31) Make a list of free admission days at your favorite museums you want to visit and match them to your travel itinerary.
32) If you travel alone, enjoy the experience a lot until the longest train journeys or dinners in hostels arrive, at which point you miss human interaction a little and take advantage of it to socialize.
33) Notice the difference between the first-time traveler and the expert : when the first enters a train so full that you have to sit on the floor or spend hours standing in the aisle, he blasphemes and protests; the expert sighs with resignation and begins to do sudoku.
34) Listening many times, throughout the trip, the same jokes about the Trans-Siberian, Murder on the Orient Express, and the song El chacachá del tren de El Consorcio.
35) Reviewing the stored photos in the breaks and feeling that the ones taken a week ago in front of the Louvre are from centuries ago.
36) The liberating feeling of throwing away used and old clothes as the trip progresses.
37) If the final return trip is made by plane, suddenly feel as if you had arrived in the future and yearn very much for the European rail network.
38) Adding so many adventures and adventures in 20 days of travel that when you return it seems like a lifetime has passed.
A trip that spreads more than a life
_ Originally published on March 24, 2014 and updated on January 9, 2019_*