Sorry it took me so long to update. I had been procrastinating once again. And I don't even know what's wrong with me these few days, lacking the will to even upload photos to facebook.
But as promised, here's a new blog post!
Before I start, let me briefly give some details of the trip. Me and my girl friends had planned to go for a long Europe trip and after rounds and rounds of discussions, we finally narrowed down to just 5 cities, 4 countries: Paris > Brussels > Amsterdam > Cologne > Berlin.
After listing out our tentative routes and calculating the costs, we decided to buy the
InterRail Global Pass, which allows us to travel in Europe within a consecutive period (in our case, Travel 5 days within 10 days). It basically means that within that 10 days, you get to choose 5 days as your 'travel days' and on those days, you can just hop on any trains connecting cities to cities (unlimited amount of train rides on the same day). A pretty flexible and cost effective package I would say, but will only be worth it if you travel to many places or travel to as far as you can. Like for our case, if we did not plan to go up north to Berlin, we wouldn't have gone for InterRail. So I guess you just have to do some calculations before deciding to whether take up the package or just buy the usual point-to-point train tickets.
I suggest you read up this
page it's really informative. My tip is that you should always avoid any high speed trains like Thalys for example because even with a valid InterRail pass you will still need to pay for the reservation fees which is very very expensive and not worth it. Apparently, any train connecting France is always the trouble maker so do check out the best option available. Other than that, in other countries, you can just hop on any IC or ICE trains you like and show your pass to the conductor when being asked to.
Anyway, we went to Paris by boarding the Eurostar from London (excluded from InterRail). The train ride lasted for 2 hours plus and we reached Gare du Nord around dinner time. First thing to do is of course, check in the apartment we have pre-booked online.
