Backpacking Europe

May 2022 - June 2022

At the beginning of the summer after my freshman year of college, my long-distance girlfriend and I broke up. A few days later, I was hanging out with my best friend from high school, Joshua Gonsalves, and I told him "We should go to Europe". He laughed me off, saying "Ok João, sure, we can plan it for next summer, or winter break or something". I told him "No, I mean like on Thursday", thinking I was only joking, but when I got home and saw that round trip flights from Miami to Madrid and then Rome back to Miami were only $650, I called him up and said, "I'm either buying two tickets or one". Surely enough I bought two tickets and three days later we were off to Europe. We didn't really know what our travel would entail, but with me speaking four languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French) and Josh being Colombian and us having taken French together in high school, we felt ready for whatever the world threw at us. We also relied on old family friends and parents' college roommates to provide housing for us. When we didn't have a family friend to stay with we mostly staying in hostels and an AirBnb in Paris and in Rome. Not know what came next proved to be a pretty solid strategy as every few days we took an hour or two to plan out the next few days and we got to dynamically decide what we were going to do with our trip. We started in Madrid and were lucky enough to arrive while El Festival de San Isidro was going on in the city. To celebrate the city's patron saint during the day locals in traditional clothes paraded through the streets performing traditional dances, and during the night multiple stages were set up across the city as musical performances were held. To be continued...