[falsedan]

That is about the price for a one-way ticket from Sydney to London

Aer Lingus flies JFK to Dublin for about $700, and from there RyanAir will get you places on the cheap. RyanAir's aircraft are flying buses and they charge for bags, but my boss flies with them a lot so I dunno how crap they are… gonna be flying with them in a month to Riga
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[falsedan]

yeah that ~$700 was a return JFK <-> Dublin. One-way with Aer Lingus is about $250 + taxes ($50ish). $1000 to London isn't the cheapest! Actually AL have an offer for cheap flights to/from the US for the next two months, so a JFK-Dublin return is more like $600.

Also if you are flying into a country, check their national airline's prices and their budget airline (if they have one). They will have secured the best routes into that country's cities, with the most flights & reasonable price. RyanAir will be cheaper than anyone, but that's because they cut corners on comfort and often fly into secondary airports up to 100 miles from your actual destination.

As a starting off point for a eurail pass, Dublin is a poor choice (since it has no one rail link to another country. Book far enough in advance and it's easy to get a cheap fares to places (£16 to London, yo)
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[falsedan]

book book book
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[falsedan]

In the beginning of summer, greece and italy will both be pretty hot. In my subjective experience, greece sucks (especially athens), italy is awesome if you stay north of Roma

skip switzerland and go to vienna instead, it is so far east you can get a short ticket (not on your eurail pass) to budapest for a few euros. see ex-communism, visit the park where all the soviet statues were moved to!
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[falsedan]

felix, do you like:
eating
drinking
piña coladas
walks in the rain
having a good time
?

then you will like italy

There is a bunch of roman stuff in rome, it's pretty neat, but the spanish steps suck STAY AWAY

venice is weird, people actually live there and there are builders doing construction. I went in time for the international art festival, that was good. Try walking around the place late at night, try finding parks and gardens, try drawing a map, or just sit on a vaporetto all day

by the time I got to paris, I was too burnt out on ex-roman-empire cities to really care about it.

do you like museums? florence has heaps! get accommodation out of town and catch the bus in and out, see italian driving on the autostrada first hand

vienna is good. Go see the Klimt mural in the museum art-deco, then get thai food from the fish markets (in a landlocked country). I stayed in here

start practising german in vienna and get used to biergartens, because munich is full of them

munich is fun, more museums. see the treasury in the residentz (but not the rest, takes too long), see Schloss Nymphenburg. Taxisgarten (near Gern station) is the beer garden I went to the most, it is lively but never full, bit intimidating at first but overall excellent. pick up beers from the monestary window and give euros to the lady until she lets you go. Go for walks in the olympic park or the englischer gartens; the biergartens are positioned just so that as you get tired or walking, one is nearby.

Compare supermarkets in different countries, wear the same shoes and jeans until they fall to bits, write lots of lots of postcards with very little content.

That is about all of the intersection of my europe experiences and your plan! don't visit england, it is not that exciting. go to scotland instead
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[falsedan]

can you imaging 300 people drinking in a garden
can you imagine not shouting to be heard
imaging a family turning up with a cake and holding their son's birthday party in the biergarten, complete with 5-year-olds playing in the sandpit
now, in that vision, imaging also that they are all catholic
that is a munich biergarten

bavarian drinking culture is more similar to café culture than pub culture. certainly if you visit at the end of september you will be surrounded by lager louts, but the rest of the summertime it is just germans drinking german beer in the german fashion. also a half litre of weissbier with a pretzel is decidedly tasty!

that is all I can do to convince you to visit a biergarten and have a german beer. also as well as biergartens, munich has lots of shoe shops, as does vienna

I have never been to zurich, I think my brother went there to cater for a car show, I will ask him tomorrow (I went to vienna with him, he can provide an unbiased view. Switzerland has strange money and cheap cigarettes and mountains nobody lives in. I crossed the alps at brenner pass training from munich to venice so that is where I got my impressions from. Also a friend of mine went to boarding school in geneva for 2 years and thinks switzerland is the stupid place on earth

if you were hypothetically coming to the sunny british isles, I would recommend scotland over england (well london really). Does your eurail pass have to have contiguous travel? a train from london to edinburgh could be as low as £14 (plus US$80 for the eurostar) if you booked now

I wasn't in the mood for france. I was looking forward to riding the TGVs, and I fell asleep as soon as I boarded...

I got through my travels knowing a chunk of german, and learning "hello, goodbye, that one please, thank you, excuse me, yes, no, 1 2 3 4 5" in the romance languages. now I am learning estuary and cockney, it's hard, innit
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[falsedan]

felix good news there are drinking water fountains everywhere in italy and in some places in paris and everywhere in spain. holy shit spain! spain is awesome

also stay the hell away from mediterranean beaches, I thought coogee beach in sydney was a bit grotty until I went for a swim in the ligurian sea
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[falsedan]

See the Alps up close in Innsbruck? either before or after vienna
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