I have been - officially - on summer holidays for seven hours and thirty-two minutes! I am happy. I am very happy! I’ve been doing seven day weeks since the beginning of March and this past month has made me feel like pulling my hair out. Patience is not my forte, that’s for sure.

But now I’m on holidays! I start back at work around September 5th, and then I head back to Australia on November 4th. Between now and then, I plan to do some serious traveling!

Money is a huge issue for me at the moment. It wasn’t a fantastic situation to begin with, but two weeks ago my handbag was stolen - my iPhone, my favourite sunglasses and lipbalm, and all of my money included. It was very, very stupid of me to have all of my money in the one spot - especially when ‘that spot’ was my purse - but I so rarely had free time that I never used the damn thing anyway and thought basically nothing of it. So I’m going to go CouchSurfing! 

CouchSurfing, for those of you too lazy to click on the link, is an organisation set up by travelers, for travelers. Once you’ve become a member of the CouchSurfing community, you can choose to host, surf, or both. Basically, you send/receive requests for total, foreign strangers to crash on your couch for a few days. It sounds sort of dangerous, but it’s not. The site was recommended to me by a friend who CouchSurfed in San Francisco, and it’s full of safety regulations and departments and probably even hardhats, I don’t know. But it’s safe. 

I’ll be getting around via trains and buses. This will see some crazy travel time (to get from Udine, Italy to Amsterdam is going to take me about forty-eight hours - yikes!), but I figure that’s why I came to Europe - to see things, to do things. Basically, for adventure. I’m a walking cliche, I knowww. I knowww. But shut up, it’s true. It will also provide me with some great photo and writing opportunities. I’m unsure as to how much Internet access I’ll get while I’m rambling (not the talking kind - although I’m sure I’ll be doing my fair share of that, too), but I intend on writing posts about my time in each city and the travel period in between. Photos, too, of course. Lots of photos. All of the photos. 

I have a week before I make my first trip. That week will be filled with packing, re-packing, cleaning, re-re-packing, swearing, speaking to as many people as I can in case I fall into the Thames and drown, and re-re-re-packing. My first stop will be Fano, a great little beach town on the mid-east coast of Italy. I’ll be staying there for a week with my old exchange student and his family. He looks like Bear Grylls. It’ll be great. Staaaay tuuuuuned.

With love, from
   Kristyn.