Going to the Erlang Conference
I’m not exactly enjoying what one would call a “positive” cash flow these days, but I decided to dig into my hard earned budget anyway and spend a chunk of it on a trip to Sweden for the 12th annual Erlang conference.
Here’s my dilemma: I want to take this opportunity to make a 2 week backpacking trip in Europe. I want to see Sweden, but I’m afraid it will be too cold to enjoy in the winter. I can either stay in Sweden after the conference, or hop on a plane to France or Spain (I *really* want to visit Barcelona).
I’d appreciate it if anyone could give me some tips on what I should do.
To save money, and also to stay true to the spirit of backpacking, I’ll be staying in hostels, which means I probably won’t bring my MacBook. I hope that spending 2 weeks without a computer won’t result in serious withdrawal symptoms.
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consider buying an interrail ticket:
http://www.interrail.net/
it’s a great and relatively cheap
way to travel for backpackers - and you can
visit as many cities as you like, provided they are in your
ticket’s zone.
Just a sidenote, interrail ticket has age limit so I would suggest checking that first.
2 weeks is a really short time to go around in europe, I would suggest starting from the Benelux countries (amsterdam is great as is luxemburg and many other cities there) , maybe see the alps at switzerland or austria (luzern area is nice), go to french riviera and see monaco (nice/nizza is also great) and going to barcelona from there. That should be doable in 2 weeks but I would take a bit longer break if that is possible.
I can’t say really much about Sweden because it’s too familiar in many ways (I’m from finland and our company does business there too). It’s dark here at scandinavia at wintertimes.
I just hate your blog software. I pressed submit once, nothing. I reloaded the page and checked that it did not subit and went back, clicked it second time - nothing.
Now I see that it has again submitted about 100000000 times.
Thanks for the tips! I will probably make my way to Barcelona after stopping in Amsterdam and maybe one more destination. I’ll look into the interrail thing. And yes – the blog solfware is annoying. It should give some feedback when comments are being submitted. I’ll delete the dupes manually.
One really interesting place would also be Russia, for example st. petersburg, you can get a boat ride there at least from helsinki (I live in helsinki area myself)
Boats that go between Stockholm and Helsinki are also something you probably don’t want to miss if you like partying, these are most insane party boats you’ll ever see. You don’t believe how finns drink until you’ll see it by yourself..
http://www.eurail.com/ has passes for adults.
Sweden <-> France <-> Spain in train is looooong but a great trip. I have a lot of mileage on trains – my father used to work for the French railways, so I made good use of them free tickets :-)
Northern Europe will be cold/rainy. If you want to go to sunny Spain [that’s at least 2 full days by train – Stockholm<->Paris is 20h, Paris<->Barcelona around 12h…] maybe you should just select a coupla cities along the way. I love Brussels, it’s a beautiful and lively city, albeit cold and rainy :-). Paris is indeed a must see. And southern France quite nice. Then there’s Portugal and the Basque region, in Northern Spain and across the border in France.
Nice blog, Yariv. I think the no feedback after comments problem is a known bug with your scribbish theme. You can look at the Azure theme and patch it or wait till someone else does at the typo trac.
Yizzznarivolio. Can you dig a little deeper into the budget and maybe finance a friend joining you?
I don’t know when the conference is but it is getting cold in Scandanavia so an excursion down south may be nice. I could give a long list of Spain recommendations inlcuding Girona. Let discuss.