Just a few days were left to go…

…and almost nothing was set. Granted, I’ve had tons of stuff going on, but still, I felt that my level of performance regarding this trip was below average. First of all, it seemed that I was about to defend my thesis. The final draft got some positive reviews and I was a few minor improvements away from succeeding in this heavy, time consuming, yet highly rewarding task. Sadly, we were also facing bureaucratic problems regarding the loan we needed to renovate our house. It’s been quite a frustrating situation and the worst part was that it wasn’t up to us to solve it. Then there was the issue of me getting a new employment, as an opportunity knocked a few days back, but the offer wasn’t good enough to quit my current crappy job.

Never look a monkey straight in the eye…

All in all, we managed to cope with most of these situations. Just a few days back, a date was set for me to defend my thesis and we had a great time in Southeast Asia, as we visited Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bali. We enjoyed a few hours of massage, sunbathing, swimming in exotic beaches and occasionally a few arguments with some monkeys. We also met some great people and fell in love with Bali (I also fell in love with the spicy tastes of Indonesian cuisine). My hands are a bit tied at the moment as I have to prepare my thesis’ defense, so I can’t post as often as I would like to do so. Still, as our intent is to provide info on preparing our journeys (that’s a goal we fell way sort during this year) I ll’ post the list of this year’s expenses.

Our transport expenses were:

Flight tickets from Athens to Singapore and back 733,78

Flight tickets from KL to Bali   75,68

Flight tickets from Bali to Singapore 74

Bus tickets from Singapore to KL 26,58

total 910,04 euro

Accommodation cost was:

2 days in Kl               20,77

1 day in Singapore   33,76

3 days in Ubud          21,35

4 days in Legian        58.03

total 133,91 euro

1043,95 euro total sum to which we can also add the money we spent during these days which were approximately 600 euro, of which 60 were spent on excursions and transports within Bali.

 

 

Play Bali_!

 

The greatest month of the last four years has arrived once more as the 2018 Fifa World Cup is set to kick off on Thursday. It also seems like a great time to reveal our destination for this year’s trip, which as declared by the title is in southeast Asia. Bali, the island of the gods, as is well known will be our main destination and we are sure to have a good time once there. We’ll begin our travel from Singapore, which we’ll probably put on hold regarding our visit, as we’ll head north to Kuala Lumpur where we’ll spent a couple of days before catching a flight to Denpasar airport. There are lots of attractions on the island and getting the most out of them will be challenging, but we’ll try to manage our time on the island wisely. We haven’t figured out where to stay yet, but we’ll most likely spent some time around Ubud, visiting the monkey forest and rice plantations and also stay at the southern coast where great temples such as Tanah Lot await us. After that we’ll return to Singapore for a couple of days to stroll the city streets before getting back to Greece.

I wanted to draw a sketch to place as an image but there simply was no time available. So, I got the image featured on this post from here

Arranging our next travels

It’s been quite a while since we’ve last posted anything, since we were too busy working and taking care of some other stuff. I’m also trying to deal with some final remarks regarding my thesis and that is dominating a large part of my time draining up whatever energy is left in me. However, we haven’t neglected this year’s travel planning, although we had a very slim window to determine what to do and where to go. Our choices have been made, most of our arrangements have been taken care of and we’ll disclose them over the next weeks.

Furthermore, I managed to find some time and escape to a small day-trip to nearby Albania. Catherine couldn’t make it, but I wasn’t alone on this one, since it was an organized trip by a photography club, which I have to give thanks to (the club’s facebook page if you’re interested), since they offered me the chance to visit some of the country’s most prominent landmarks. I will post the highlights of this day trip in my next post (hopefully, within a couple of days).

 

Organizing our next travel

It’s been a lengthy period of time since we last posted, but we couldn’t really help it, since we were very busy and we still are. Personally, I have to intensify my efforts to present my doctoral thesis and also take care of stuff regarding my employment, while Catherine has recently returned to a normal work schedule, but has yet to adapt to that. I hope that we’ll have sufficient time to prepare for this year’s trip and maybe even pay a small visit to nearby countries, but we haven’t decided anything yet, apart from the fact that we can only travel in August. We have done some preparation and we’ll get on with our homework over the next couple of months and hopefully our plans will start getting some shape. For now, our budget seems to be swelling at a good rate and lots of cities feature in our plans, most of them in Europe, but we are yet to determine if we can produce some order from this chaos.