For our honeymoon we decided to visit Europe, but we were not interested in the cliche romantic places like Italy and France; the wife really couldn’t care less for those branded goods and architecture and the risk of scams and petty theft was just a turn-off for the pair of us. Therefore, we decided on a three week trip to Germany followed by Iceland and a short stopover in London. This gave us a good mix of affordable shopping, an overload of Christmas festivities, nature and a little bit of history and architecture. The bulk of the trip was based in Germany, where Christmas celebrations were in full swing! I l have always been very impressed by the Germans, so I was elated; I have much admiration for their efficient and disciplined work attitude and their developments in engineering, science and technology. Furthermore, I love PORK! So schnitzels, currywursts, bratwursts and pork knuckles are just up my alley. The flow of our trip was as follows:
- 3 days in Munich
- 4 days in Stuttgart
- 2 days in Freiburg
- 5 days in Berlin
- 6 days in Iceland
- 2 days in London
Preparation Work
Clothing (baby, it’s cold outside~)
the wind makes the cold even colder
kept nice and warm in Iceland
It’s going to be 0 to 10°C in Germany and 1 to −10°C in Iceland, the coldest that we have ever experienced. So naturally everyone told us to wear thermal underwear. However in Europe, most indoor locations will have ample heating and the wife read somewhere that the sweating would cause terrible itching; so we decided to adopt wearing multiple layers of clothing to battle the cold. This will give us the flexibility of taking additional layers off when it becomes too warm and adding layers if it becomes too cold.
For the top half we wore a t-shirt, followed by a turtleneck long sleeve fleece/knitted t shirt and the final layer had to be a good quality wind and water proof jacket. The outer layers will have to be larger than your normal clothing size and in the instance you are still cold, you can add more inner layers. The wife bought a high end North Face jacket (those with two layers zipped together) but she felt that the down jacket she bought from Mango in Germany was much better at keeping her warm. I also bought a North Face down jacket which worked pretty well for me. So we feel that a down jacket is absolutely essential; though it makes you look puffy and the feathers will eventually all come out from the seams, it is still a good investment. Try to get one with hoods since they help keep your head dry and warm too.
For the bottom half, the wife had a pair of pants from Uniqlo which worked very well during our trip to Alishan, this pants had fleece lined on the inner parts and a windproof outer layer. Not the most stylish, but it works extremely well. Avoid a similar model from Cold Wear as it was not as durable as the one from Uniqlo, plus they are about the same price. The wife wore an additional 2XU compression tights on the inside when it got colder.
For our hands, we also adopted the layering method; it was especially needed in Iceland as one pair of gloves was not good enough to keep our fingers warm. So we had normal cotton gloves and additional waterproof ones. Try not to go for those furry Daiso gloves, they don’t work as well as the knitted ones.
For our heads and necks, we had scarfs and woolen hats. When it gets too cold or windy, the hoods on our jackets were essential. The wife’s face was not too accustomed to the cold so she also had a buff for extra protection.
Transport
The Bahn website is extremely helpful when planning your travel route between places, you just need to key in the starting and final station/location/street and a list of transport suggestions will be given. This was also where we booked all our intercity tickets. Since we used trains as the main transportation between the cities, we decided to buy the BahnCard 25 which gave us 25% off on all ticket prices. Try to confirm your itinerary and order the tickets three months in advance (special price early bird tickets), this way you will recoup the costs of the BahnCard, which we did with the purchase of Munich-Stuttgart tickets. Another perk for buying the BahnCard is that it comes with a City-Ticket that covers the cost of public transport for a single trip from the city to the departure station and another single trip from the arrival station to a point in the city. Within the city, we used tourist or day passes that allowed us to travel all on trains (Bahn), subways (U-Bahn/S-Bahn), trams and buses. We will elaborate on the passes we bought for each city in further posts.
The ticketing system in Germany rides heavily on integrity, we only encounter conductors on the intercity Bahn and very rarely on the inner-city transport system. Therefore, it is absolutely possible for someone to take advantage of this system and freeload or what some people say, travel on a budget. But we loathe travellers who think like this and we hope others don’t follow in their footsteps. To reduce our travel costs, we book earlier so we could get discounts and we made sure to purchase day tickets that only covered the zones we wanted to go.
Asian Food and Snacks
We knew we will definitely miss the food in Singapore and that Asian food produce like rice will be expensive in Europe. Furthermore, eating out will not be cheap either, so we made sure to stay in apartments with a well-equipped kitchen and eat in for breakfast and dinner as much as possible; that really helped to cut down on expenses and we still managed to have German food. We brought the following items from Singapore: chili sauce, instant noodles, raw rice, canned food (i.e. ba ding, ba jiu) and 旺旺 biscuits. Fresh produce like sausages, vegetables and bread were purchased from nearby supermarkets. They were much cheaper and fresher than the ones sold in Singapore.
carrot tops!
fresh produce
fresh eggs
lettuce, eggs, noodles, kebab, sausages
porridge with canned meat sauce
lettuce, eggs, noodles, mushroom, sausages
onion, eggs, noodles, bread, sausages, leftover hotwings
porridge with meat sauce,eggs and left over schnitzels
broccoli, carrots, noodles, salmon, omelette
Carrots, broccoli, noodles, salmon and Coke
Others
We were going to be overseas for three weeks and there is no way we wanted to get sick! It will be easy to catch a cold due to the weather, become heaty because of the lack of water and the food we ate and possibly indigestion. So we made sure we had the usual to combat bites, cold, flu and stomach upsets i.e. paracetamol, po chai pills, tiger balm, herbal tea, ginseng tea, ENO, etc. I specially got some pills from my TCM to battle ‘heatiness’ too.
Moisturizer is extremely important. It is cold and dry so nose bleeds, cracking lips and peeling faces are some of the common effects. Therefore bring along a good moisturizer, lip balm and Vaseline. We actually put Vaseline in our noses to prevent it from bleeding and it works extremely well!
Looking at the amount of things we had to bring and that we had to do quite a bit of walking with our luggage; we had to do some planning. So each of us got a humongous trolley luggage and a backpack, plus a small sling back or chest pouch for our valuables. It was not easy to move around, especially when some places were not wheelchair accessible. However, the cold weather made it a lot easier!
large four wheeler + backpack + small sling bag
keeping guard!
We had a blast in Europe! If you are interested to see where we went, this map shows a rough guide. We didn’t manage to visit all the marked out places (particularly the restaurants) as we intended, but for those that we did, we will talk about it in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!
absolute honesty 