I feel kind of stupid. When I originally wrote the budget for August in Europe, I should have looked closer at the Rail Europe website. But, to be fair, it isn't exactly clearly advertised that in addition to purchasing rail passes, it is necessary to PAY MONEY to purchase a seat reservation. I just thought that, you know, I had to call or use the website to book us seats, but that they would be free with our already-purchased, uber-expensive passes.
Silly me.
Turns out that seat reservations can cost anywhere from $10-150 per person! And, of course, they charge a ton on the overnight trains to compensate for the fact that tourists take them to avoid staying in a hotel. How the hell am I supposed to save money now?!?
After stressing, I've realized the only logical thing to do is discard some of the smaller cities from the trip. Strangely, Hamburg (not a small city at all, in fact, it's the second largest in Germany) was the first to be cut. I'm rationalizing this by the fact that we were going to have to take public buses by ourselves out of the city to see a not-super-important-on-the-scale-of-all-importantness concentration camp. The second to go was Weimar, which just makes sense, I mean that place was small.
Strangely, with all this rearranging, Warsaw (a place with no standing concentration camps, but some Jewish history) has become a two-night venture and Oswiecim (the home of Auschwitz) is being reduced to a day-trip due to a lack of sanitary and satisfying public transportation and hotels. Hopefully this all works out...
No comments:
Post a Comment