My decision to travel
around Europe for a while alone was a very interesting experience for me. At
first when I came to Europe it was to visit my brother and his German wife in
Germany for Christmas and New Year's. I ended up staying in Hildesheim, Germany
for a month and had a very German Christmas. My Sister-in-Law's German family
were actually very nice. Since they didn't know me, they mainly got me a bunch
of german chocolates for Christmas. I thought it was really nice of them, I
really didn't expect any presents from them at all. The German food was
actually very delicious. The Germans love Christmas and their food. I really
enjoyed my first German Christmas. I guess I was in so much awe of being in
Germany that I forgot to take pictures. I should have taken pictures because
Hildesheim, Germany was absolutely gorgeous for a small city. Unfortunately I
was so thrilled about going to the UK, where everyone knew English, that I
forgot to visit the major cities in Germany like Berlin and Munich! How dumb was
I? Oh well, the next time I go to Germany to visit my brother I am definitely
seeing Berlin and Munich! It actually wasn't that hard to find people who spoke
English in Germany. Most of the Germans actually knew English, especially the
young adults. My German Sister-in-Law said it's because they are require to
learn it in school now. The older generation didn't seem know English as well.
My German Sister-in-Law's mother said that her English got better over the past
two years while my brother was there, because when he first moved to Germany
and married his wife, he didn't really know that much German. After living in
Germany for two years my brother is now very fluent in German. I enjoyed
getting to know my Brother's German life and family, but after a month of being
in Germany I couldn't wait to get to the United Kingdom.
A word of advice, do not take an overnight train
in Europe, unless you plan on spending the night in a train station for a few
hours or getting a hotel room. The train stations had no heaters and the trains
shut down for a few hours really early in the morning. In the winter this was
awful. Later of course, months later I find out that there are actually
trains that do run overnight, where you can sleep on the train. If you do go on
an overnight train in Europe, make sure you check the times on your train to
make sure there are no long gaps between you train times and it's an overnight
one that runs that you can sleep on. Unfortunately I paid no attention to
the huge gap between the how long connection of my trains would be. Another
thing when you get on trains in Europe do not take a train with a lot of
connections, because there is a chance that you will miss the connection and
it's not even your fault, but the train was delayed or something and you can
completely missed your connection and than you are on your own, especially
really late at night when train office closed. Unfortunately all this happened
to me! I ended up missing my connection and having to take a taxi to my next
train connection, because the train office was closed and I couldn't get any
help. After the taxi dropped me off at the next station where my train was
supposed to connect I had to wait 2-3 hours in the freezing cold waiting for
the trains to start working again. After that the rest of my journey to the UK
ran smoothly. The border control for Britain are very strict, just like
everybody warned me they would be. Fortunately I was smart enough to research
these things beforehand and came across a backpacker website that told me that
the Brits were strict and what documents that I needed to bring with me so I
could get in Britain on a tourist visa. It took the border control a minute to
consider letting me into the UK because I said I wanted to visit for 5-6
months. They thought it was suspicious for some reason, but since I provided
all the right documents and showed that I had more than enough money to live on
while I was there, the immigration officer let me in. When I finally
got to London, I was so happy and exhausted. This was my start first experience
traveling and experiencing Europe.
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