My first Eurotrip

It started with Federico. He was a visiting PhD student in our department from December 2008 till July 2009 from University of Trieste, Italy. Since he was working on the same field as mine and also the fact that his hometown is near-by my case study area, my adviser Keith, squeezed a table in my office to accommodate him during his period of stay. Gradually we became really good friends apart from being great colleagues, and I believe there are two reasons to that, we both just love talking and we have views about anything and everything in the world. Eventually, Federico found out that his colleagues in Italy are going for 2nd European Geographical Congress (EUGEO 2009) and this time its in Bratislava, and he decided that we should go. Till then Bratislava, was a kind of place to me which you know because once upon a time you mugged the countries and capital but never believed that they actually exist . So when Keith told me, that he thinks I should also go with Federico and he will fund my travel, I was completely taken aback.

After this began my planning. Gosh!! it took me months, to make the optimal route, which I can make within 2 weeks with least expensive. So the equation I followed to frame my research were, time is constant, variable feasibility is inversely proportional to variable money. that means, decrease in feasibility will lead to increase in money. Since money was my independent variable, so I gave most importance to that. Back to normal writing, I went from country hoping to regional roaming, to strip routing. Ok, I think, I am tending towards abstractness for almost everybody except grad students (yes, we are different species) !! I had to go through a very difficult time, after visiting all the embassies I was visiting just to get one schengen visa, I got it from Czech Embassy just 3 days before I left. Two things that I remember from this experience are, first the German lady visa officer told me I am not out for shopping, that I can just apply for visa anywhere to visit any country of THE European UNION. And secondly, the Slovak embassy not accepting my English/german schengen form, because they need English/Slovak schengen form, though practically neither German or Slovak on the form didnt serve any of my purpose.