So I was inspired to write about trains, because when I was in Europe, my friends and I travelled around Europe by train. We travelled for 15 days in total, to 13 different cities in Europe, mostly are big cities.
We decide to go by train because 1. There is a package from Eurail which suits us, and we thought it was cheap coz we were still under 25 years old. 2. If we take the train, we are going to arrive directly in the center of the cities, so access to tourism spots would be easy, rather than taking planes and land in a far-from-town airports. 3. There is no baggage limit. We thought travelling 15 days would mean we are going to buy hell lots of stuff (and we really did) 😀
Okay so firstly we are going to talk about Eurail. Eurail is a service that we can use where we can board any European train with only single ticket. There are many packages Eurail offers, from only one country pass, regional pass (few neighboring countries), and global pass (any Schengen countries. The validity period also varies (I don’t remember all, you can check on the website, I think it is eurail.com). And of course the prices are different, surprisingly for travelers with age younger than 25 (or 24?) its cheaper. I don’t know why but maybe youth are encouraged to travel! Yay!
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| My Eurail Ticket, one ticket to board all trains in Europe 😀 |
Buuuuut it turns out the Eurail Pass was not as convenient as we thought. The reason is that in some countries we need to have seats reserved to board the train, meaning, yes, unfortunately we need to pay more, although it was not as expensive as the price of the whole ticket. For German trains, reservation fee is around €5-€20 (depends on seating type). For French trains it depends on the class of the train, so we chose the cheapest and it was also €5-10. For Spanish trains it was around €6.50. The most expensive usually is the train that travel between countries. The most expensive we ever paid was €48.00, yes, that’s only for seat reservation. But it was an international train and it was a Trenhotel, I will explain later 😀 Aaaand for Italian second class train yayfully we don’t need any reservation, just board and sit wherever we like 😀
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| Regional Italian train second class: free of reservation fee! |
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| Regional Spanish trains: pay 6.50 Euros for reservation |
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| International train is more expensive: 9 Euros each for reservation ticket. Train to Venice is also a special case, not free, but still pretty cheap 😀 |
Ok I won’t write too long, because I know some people won’t even want to start reading when a blog post is too long (actually that’s me, lol). On the next part I will write about type of seats, different country with different service, making routes, train facilities, and more! I hope I can post some pictures too 😀
(p.s. This post was written on my journey from Surabaya-Jogja on Sancaka train. Yeah you can guess where the inspiration came from)
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