After years of pining and months of planning, we finally accomplished our dream trip to Europe this fall. On the 17th of October 2018, I traveled from Delhi to Amsterdam by a Jet Airways / KLM flight while Azal got off the ship in Norway and joined me at Amsterdam airport to embark on our 22-day adventure. It was not only our first international trip as a couple but also the longest and the craziest. We used all modes of public transport to get around – trains, flights, buses, boats, subways, trams. The Eurail Global Pass gave us access to unlimited train travel in 28 countries on our chosen travel days. Our itinerary was packed with not much breathing space but we lived up to it. People wonder if everything started looking the same to us after a point. The answer to that is "Hell, No!" because every step along the way demanded our fullest attention, having planned it all on our own. So yes, we can tell the Trevi fountain in Rome from the Neptune Fountain in Berlin despite all the craziness!
Our itinerary looked like this:
Those three weeks were all about discoveries - exploring foreign lands and all that they had to offer, unraveling where our relationship stood on varying levels of intimacy after three years of marriage, exploring who we were turning out to be as individuals with distinctive thought patterns and also, as a functional, societally accepted couple. That is to say, we fought endlessly, ate all kinds of food, drank to our hearts fill, walked more than 8 km every day, watched a sex show, laid our hands on a space cake (edible cannabis brownie), got drenched in a storm, drove an Audi A5 across the German-Austrian border, entered the Roman Colosseum, slept on hostel beds, shared bathrooms with strangers, packed and unpacked several times, made friends with digital lockers, kissed in a park on a drizzly morning, paired rose wine with cheese and then made love in Paris, witnessed the fiery Venetian acqua alta, got a glimpse of Mona Lisa for real, entered the house where Franz Kafka once lived, posed with an original Rembrandt painting, caught the Eiffel tower on camera, gobbled Belgian chocolates, guzzled German beer, sipped Italian wines, attended a Viennese Opera from the stands, walked across the Berlin wall, watched a live flamenco show, tried pork knuckle and beer ice cream, picked up all that caught our fancy on supermarket shelves, enjoyed a relaxed Sunday brunch watching the city go by from the glass panes of a Parisian cafe, visited countless churches including the Vatican, and spent endless hours in European trains crossing from one country to another. After all this and more, we got back in good shape to our regular lives and continued to exist as if all of it happened in a distant dream. Amazing, isn’t it?
