Sayonara to all our yen

[Editor’s note: Thanks for sticking with us while our access to internet was not up to snuff. I wrote lots of posts and processed tons of pictures, now I just need to get them uploaded. I’m hoping for some wifi in one of our rooms soon (wishful thinking) but I’ll do what I can with slow connections at internet cafes in the meantime, so stay tuned and please excuse me if I jump around a bit in the posts].

Japan was everything everyone said it would be: orderly, cutesy, polite, crowded, and expensive.  Oh, was it ever expensive.  We set a $200 a day budget for most developed countries we planned to visit.  While normally we ended up being way under that amount, Japan was the first country where we had trouble sticking to the budget.  To make matters worse, the value of the dollar kept dropping against the yen while we were there.  It started at 83 yen to 1 USD, but dropped to 81 yen to 1 USD by the end.  I suppose it negated any advantage we garnered from the weak euro while we were in Europe.  If we hadn’t already committed to a three week railway pass and bought a plane ticket out of Tokyo to satisfy Japan’s proof of onward travel requirement, we would have left sooner.  I enjoyed our time in Japan, but my enjoyment was tempered with ever-present concerns about our budget in the back of my mind.

(By the way, we were required to show our proof of onward travel when we entered Japan at the Fukuoka ferry terminal.  We thought about trying some ways around the onward travel requirement, but since we already bought our rail pass, we bought our flight as well).

In the end, we ended up spending an average of $180.17 USD a day for both of us, not including transportation to and from overnight destinations.  When that is added in, our costs were closer to $230.  Keep in mind that our travel style is to travel as comfortable as we can at a budget level, so we occasionally splurge on things, eat out for almost all of our meals, and try to stay in private en-suite rooms.

To give you a sense of what you get for your money in Japan, here is a breakdown of the major expense categories:

Transportation:

I know one thing: you get what you pay for.  Train travel in Japan is fabulous.

The shinkansen, Japan's fast bullet trains

We rode the rails all around Japan, taking full advantage of our Japanese rail pass.  (To read more about the logistics and costs of the rail pass, check out The Road Forks’ fantastically detailed post.  In fact, while you are over there, check out all of their posts about Japan, especially their food posts breaking down Japanese eats with delicious photos).  There is no need to upgrade to the first class green car; even the regular cars have tons of leg room and space for luggage.  As someone who is perpetually trying to overcome my deep-ingrained bad habit of lateness, the oh-so-punctual trains blew my mind.  The train stops were timed to the minute, meaning we relied upon the arrival time instead of trying to find the station name when getting off the trains.  The trains zoomed around from city to city, making almost the whole country accessible by rail, and quickly.  But all of this fabulousness comes at a price; it cost us $1500 for two three-week rail passes.  We originally tracked the prices of the train trips we took, but stopped when we realized the passes paid for themselves only a week and a half into their use.  We occasionally had to supplement our travel costs with local non-JR trains, but they usually were no more than the cost of a subway.

Speaking of subways, those too were more expensive than other major cities, such as Seoul.  Part of the problem in Tokyo is that there are two different entities running the lines, meaning that sometimes you had to pay for two tickets to get the whole way where you were going.  Since Tokyo is so big, it doesn’t really matter where you stay, but try to stay in walking distance to both lines to minimize costs.  If you can’t do that, I’d choose something near the Tokyo subway line, since most things you’ll probably want to see fall on the Tokyo lines.

Accommodation:

We quickly learned that you don’t get a lot for your money in Japan.  It wasn’t out of the question for a private room in a hostel with a shared bath to be nearly 8,300 yen (about $100 USD), although ones in the 6,225 yen (about $75 USD) range exist.  Hostels tend to be Japanese style, meaning that you sleep on futons on a tatami-mat covered floor and take your shoes off at the front door.  Dingy rooms, unpleasant smells, and shared bathrooms are common, but luckily so is free wi-fi.

We found business hotels to be a better value than hostels in the cities.  Business hotels have plain, basic, boring rooms with the same exact features that all look exactly the same – the type of unimaginative hotel room I hate when on vacation but appreciate for its consistency on the road.

Inside our Toyoko Inn hotel room in Kyoto

In Japan, a business hotel generally will get you a pretty small but clean room with fast hard-wired internet, a flat-screen television with one or two English speaking channels, decently cheap coin laundry, a refrigerator, a plastic pre-fab en-suite bathroom complete with a fancy electronic toilet, free Japanese breakfast, a cold filtered water dispenser in the lobby, and a hard double bed with strange beanbag pillows.

Toyoko Inns are ubiquitous throughout Japan’s cities.  Since we ended up spending a fair amount of time in Kyoto and Tokyo, we bought a Toyoko Inn membership for something like $18 USD.  The membership gets you 30% off on Sundays and holidays, 20% off on Mondays, and a free single room after 10 nights.  If you opt to not have your room cleaned every day, you can also save 200 yen per day for certain days.  (Be forwarned that on days you do have your room cleaned, the staff get very upset if you don’t leave your room between 10 and 2, the cleaning hours.  We learned this the hard way).  Depending on when your stay falls, the rooms can work out to be pretty cheap for Japan even with the cost of the membership.  For us, after factoring in all the different type of discounts and membership fee, the average cost per night for our 8 nights in Kyoto and 9 nights in Tokyo was about 6469 yen (about $77.94 USD).

Food and Drink:

Food and drink is another category where Japan can empty your wallet if you are not careful.  Unlike some other countries where we have travelled, the Japanese are great with promptly refilling your ice water at restaurants.  This is a good thing because we mostly couldn’t afford to drink anything else.  Soft drinks were typically about 400 yen (close to $5 USD) in restaurants, making them cost-prohibitive.  Sean occasionally splurged and got Cokes out of the vending machines, where a can could be bought for 100 to 150 yen ($1.20 to $1.80).  Beers were even worse.  A Japanese beer like Kirin, Sapporo, or Asahi, was usually 600 or 700 yen in restaurants and bars ($7.22 to $8.43 USD), making Japan mostly a dry month for us.  One night, we splurged in Tokyo and visited Baird Brewing’s taproom, which is a bar featuring the beers of the Japanese microbrew.  The beers were great – probably the best we’ve had since Europe – but the whopping 900 yen for a pint was hard to stomach.  That’s almost $11.00 USD!  At least it turned out that it was for charity.  The night we visited, Baird Brewing donated 100 yen for every drink purchased to Room to Read, a charity donating books to children in impoverished African and Asian countries.  If you want to get your drink on, vending machines are where it is at – there, a can of beer is 300 yen ($3.61 USD).

One of the problems with budget travel in Japan is the temptations around every corner.  Japanese food was tasty for the most part, but it is very foreign to our American palates, making us susceptible to influences.  The Japanese love high-end status items, and this includes food.  For example, although Japan is a tea drinking nation, they are very into coffee, especially of the iced variety.  The multitude of Starbucks proved to be too tempting to us, especially for Sean the coffee lover.  We tried to stay away, but dropped 420 yen (over $5) on coffee too many times.  We also tried the local coffee chains, but those weren’t priced any better.

This cantaloupe, sold at a Japanese department store, cost 10,500 yen - that's $127!!!

For my part, the sweets were the culprit.  No matter how many times I told myself not to succumb to the chocolate cake behind swanky department store counters or in trendy cafes because it just didn’t taste right, I did it anyway.  And I had been counting down the days to Tokyo since we finished the Pierre Marcolini chocolate I bought in Belgium.  My research had revealed that Pierre Marcolini is sold in Japan, but what I didn’t know was that it was priced over four times as high as it was in Belgium.  Four times!  It was a sad, sad day when we visited the Ginza Pierre Marcolini store and I learned that the $7 gourmet tablets of chocolate I bought in Belgium were priced at $28.  While the Japanese around us walked out with bagfuls, I resigned myself to eating one tiny $4 piece, delivered to me in an elaborate box even though I could have popped it in my mouth right then and there and saved everyone a lot of trouble.  I stretched it for as long as I could to get my $4 worth, but couldn’t make it last more than two bites.

But of course, you need more than overpriced coffee and chocolate for substance.  If a lunch or a dinner was $25, we considered that to be a bargain in Japan.  My favorite “cheap” place to eat was the bottom floor of department stores.  There, you will find counter after counter of prepared food.  It can be a sensory overload, because the options are endless (Noodles?  Gyoza?  Sushi? Fried chicken?  Salads?  French food?  Chinese food?  Thai food?  Dessert?)  The female counter clerks call out in a sing-songy high-pitched voice in Japanese trying to entice you to their counter.  The bento boxes, designed to be a portable meal on trains, were usually the best value.  My favorites were the different Japanese salads, gyoza, sushi rolls, or Thai spring rolls.

We also saved money because breakfast was included in the price of most of our rooms.  While I can never get used to the idea of eating savory dinner items for breakfast, and while we got sick of eating the same meal over and over, the rice balls and toast at the Toyoko Inn’s included breakfast was filling and prevented us from dropping $17 USD on coffees and muffins at Starbucks or other cafes.

In the end…

…I still think Japan is worth a visit.  You just need to be mindful of your costs while you are there.  If we had to do it over again, we would have spent only 2 or 3 weeks in the country and got a 14 day rail pass.  Japan is just too expensive to dawdle on a trip like ours, and because of the efficiency of the railways, you can hit a lot in two weeks.  We spent a lot of time in Tokyo and Kyoto – over a week in each – which definitely could be cut down.  We had planned to do a lot of day trips from Kyoto, but didn’t end up making any of them except one half day to Kobe because of various reasons (rain, migraines, etc.)  We got a little bored in Kyoto, but not in Tokyo, so it is all personal preference, I suppose.  Even if you are not normally a planner, be organized and efficient like the Japanese and plan your trip before you enter the country to maximize your time and money.  Hyperdia.com will be your best friend.  It is a great tool that allows you to access the train schedules for all companies in English.  There is a lot to see in Japan, so just decide what appeals to you the most – the cities, the “countryside”  (to the extent there are rural areas in Japan; the “rural” areas we visited ended up being  mostly smaller, low-key cities); mountains; temples and shrines; historic Japan; or modern Japan.

European Wrap-up, Rants and Raves

When we first arrived in Europe on March 31, it felt very much like a foreign land. We spent  many days alternating between a state of confusion and wonderment. We were only supposed to spend three months in Europe, but ended up staying just shy of four months. Some time during our four month stay – probably when we escaped back to Spain after having a tough time in Morocco after getting ill – we came to view Europe as more familiar than foreign, no matter what the country or the language. Sure, every country is unique, but every country we visited is fundamentally Western. Once we adjusted to travelling somewhere that we couldn’t speak the language – which admittedly is still difficult and frustrating at times – everything else fell into place.

We traded going to Europe for going to South America, which we’ll save for the future. Going to Europe definitely ate into our travel budget much, much more than if we had gone to South America, but it was worth it. We had never been to Europe before. The European countries have had and do have such a dominant influence on the rest of the world that it would be difficult for us to understand other countries and cultures without first experiencing Europe itself. We tried to minimize costs by going to countries that are rumored to be less expensive – Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland.   None of those countries were as cheap as we hoped, but costs are definitely lower than some European countries. We did slip in a few countries with higher costs – France, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, and Northern Ireland – but tried to counterbalance those costs in France and Germany by staying with friends and in Germany and Belgium by only staying a short time.  If you missed it, I posted about our average daily cost to travel through Europe yesterday.

Even with four months, we barely scratched the surface of Europe.  I know we will be back someday – I still need to eat my way through Italy after all.  As we move on to the rest of the world, I thought I’d close out our experiences by sharing our rants and raves about Europe:

Raves

• Canine freedom.  Dogs lead a much better life than in the United States.  They seldom are leashed and typically have the freedom to roam courtyards, restaurants, and beaches.
• Lax liquor laws.  Particularly because we live in Pennsylvania, one of the states with the strictest and asinine liquor laws (god forbid you buy a beer in a grocery store or drink outside in public!), we appreciated the freedom of Europeans to have a drink essentially whenever they want where ever they want.
• Plethora of bakeries.  Even outside of Paris, where they elevate baking to an art form, much to the delight of my sweet tooth, bakeries can be found on almost every street.  Besides providing constant dessert, the savory items, such as empanadas and the like, made for cheap eats.
• Free time.  While it endlessly confused as to why no one ever appeared to be working, Europeans’ love of sitting around in cafes and in parks, doing nothing, fit in well with our new hippie, jobless lifestyle.  Once we return to the States and re-join the “real world,” I need to remember to incorporate in more time to perfect the art of doing nothing.  I think it does wonders for the soul.
• Runaway trains. The ease of train travel in Europe is amazing.  Small towns, big cities, new countries: you can reach almost every place in Europe by train.  It is hard to suppress the urge to keep on rollin’ when it is as easy as going to the center of town and hopping on board.
• Urban love. Most European cities have compact city centers.  Life is centered in the middle, and radiates out from there.  There are no such thing as a true suburb in Europe.  There is just the city, the outskirts, and the country.  The cities are full of life.  This is most likely related to a corollary love:  ease of getting around.  Most European cities can be traversed by foot or by amazingly efficient public transit systems.  Transit for the masses in Europe is the polar opposite of the Pittsburgh Port Authority.  Most cities have subways or trams.  Even buses are better: most have digital read-outs at the bus stop indicating how long you’ll be waiting for the next bus.  Having a car in not necessary in many countries, and in fact, can even be a hindrance in many of the cities.
• Blurred edges of different cultures.  I love that crossing borders is as easy as crossing into different states.  Because each country has its own language, food, and customs, it never lost its luster to change countries.  Most jarring, and exciting, was the flights we took, which meant we switched from Spanish culture to Czech culture in the same day or, later, from Polish culture to Irish culture.   But just as interesting was travelling overland, where you could watch separate cultures swirl together, always retaining their own subtle differences.
• European green. Throughout Europe, we spotted solar energy, windmills, and recycling bins, which made my tree-hugger heart happy.
• No need for a DVR.  Though it is rare that I watch a commercial at home anymore due to the world’s greatest invention, you still can’t avoid them, such as during a live sporting event.  We met a German woman living in Portugal who just could not wrap her head around the number of commercials in the United States.  After watching television in Europe, I’m with her.  It is nice, however, to have an occasional commercial during a sporting event for a bathroom or snack break.  No need for one after practically every play, like American football, but I don’t have the undivided attention span required to watch European football!
• Beautiful things all around.  Between the architecture and green spaces, your eye always has somewhere to linger.
• Disappearing taxes.  If I had to pay as much tax as the Europeans do, I wouldn’t want to see it all broken down either.  Prices in Europe already comes with the tax included, which makes it easier to figure out how much damage you are doing to your wallet.
• No tip jars for performing your job. Tipping culture in the United States can get out of control at times.  Tip jars in Europe are a rare sight.  Waiters and waitresses are paid better than their U.S. counterparts, so tips in Europe are either nonexistent or drastically reduced.
• Living life outside. One of the worst things about working is shuffling between a dark, stuffy office and a dark, stuffy restaurant for lunch on a nice, sunny day.  There is never enough outdoor seating at home, but this is not a problem in Europe.  People live their lives outside: with open, screenless windows; at outdoor cafes and restaurants; in public squares and parks.
• Markets.  It is typically not hard to find farmers and artisanal vendors selling their wares in a market.
• No unnecessary 9.99s. The jig is up; we all know 9.99 is really basically $10.  The Europeans don’t try to fool us and just charge flat amounts.
• Casual breeziness.  Even in fancy Paris, women always looked so pulled together in a casual, understated way.  No sweatpants in public here.
• Appreciation of eating and drinking. I’ve alluded to this above, but Europeans in general have a sincere appreciation for food and drink.  My taste buds were happy there.

Rants:

• Smoky hazes.  Although some countries are getting on board with smoking bans in public buildings, the smoking habit in Europe is alive and well.
• Tiny drinks.  This was particularly Sean’s pet peeve.  The drinks in Europe are absurdly tiny, leaving us constantly thirsty.  We agree that supersizing is excessive, but how do they get away with charging 3 or 4 euros for a 6 oz. coke?
• Is this the Sahara desert or something? As a corollary to the rant above, contributing to our constant thirst was the fact that very, very few restaurants served tap water and insisted upon making you pay for fancy – and often tiny – bottled water.  My favorite is when we would be told that they flat out did not have tap water.  Right.  If we would get tap water, the chances of getting a refill was slim to none.  Related is the Europeans’ love of sparkling mineral water and my corresponding hatred of the same.  Sean still laughs at the memory of me uncouthly spitting out mineral water on the sidewalk on a 90 degree day when we couldn’t figure out, for the second bottle in a row, what meant still water in Hungarian.
• Lack of customer service.  Although our pocketbooks liked our love of tipping less, this all too often was accompanied by little desire to please the customer.  See note about no refills of water, above.  We quickly understood the cultural difference of needing to ask for the check, but never got used to being completely ignored once the food arrived.
• Sleeping like old people.  We probably had one queen bed the whole time we were there; otherwise it was two twins pushed together.  Although, I think Sean actually secretly liked having more room in a bed to himself.
• Runaway shower heads.  I cannot stand the hand-held shower head.  When there was a holder than worked, they weren’t that bad, just less water pressure than I’m used to.  The rest of the time, I never could figure out where you are supposed to set the shower head whenever you did anything else, such as wash your hair.  I’ve squirted many ceilings, walls, and my eyes when the shower head, ever so carefully laid in a resting place to soap up, suddenly surge with water.
• Confounded locks.  While the old-fashioned keys are cool to look at, use of them befuddled me 9 times out of 10.
• Lack of air conditioning.  I know that old buildings make retrofitting them for air prohibitively expensive, and excessive use of air is bad for the environment, but there is NO respite from heat in certain cities in the dead of summer – not even in the grocery store or restaurants, two notoriously freezing places at home.  When there is air, it is usually a room unit, extremely undersized, that chugs weakly in a huge space with open doors and windows.
• Tiny, tiny, tiny Speedos. Not an original rant, I know, but really – why?
• Subpar chiclet.  When I was an office drone, I chewed an excessive amount of gum.  I haven’t completely broken the habit, but the tiny, hard pieces of gum will likely help.  Where is the spearmint Orbit when you need it?
• Never having exact change, yet always having a ton of coins.  Without fail, every time we tried to pay for something in cash, the cashier would declare our tender to be too large and request exact change.  Nothing is ever good enough.  Once I tried to pay for a 19 euro bill with a 20 and was rebuffed and interrogated about the change in my possession.  Yet, because of the 1 and 2 euro coins, we were constantly weighed down.  On a related note, if I had a euro for every time the machines at places that purportedly accepted credit cards was mysteriously “broken,” I wouldn’t need to use credit cards at all.
• Paying crazy taxes as a tourist.  I know someone’s got to pay for all of the fabulous things in Europe, and you can sometimes get a refund on big-ticket purchases, but ouch!  No wonder they bury all of the taxes.
• Graffiti.  For some reason, many of the beautiful things in Europe are covered in ugly, messy graffiti.  It makes me sad such beautiful, historic items are ruined.
• 80s on steriods.  For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would wear those baggy, droopy pants that sag in the butt and crotch and taper at the ankles.  They didn’t look good on MC Hammer, and not even skinny European girls can pull them off now.  Please, for the love of God, tell me that these have not made an appearance in the United States.  Please.

So there you have it!  Traveling in Europe is a fabulous experience.  I can’t wait to go back someday, but it was great to move on after spending so much time there.  Stay tuned for posts about South Africa and Jordan in the weeks to come, then it is Asia time!

Average Daily Cost in Europe

Back in our planning stages, I loved reading travel blogs to day dream, but the practical side of me was always wondering: how much did it cost?  Here’s a brief breakdown of our average daily cost to travel through Europe.  This figure does not include supplies or gear; costs at home; misc. fees like ATM fees; or most significantly, major transport (which we define as anything that takes us from one overnight destination to another, whether it be plane, train, bus or rental car). Basically, the average daily cost includes things like accommodation, meals, snacks, alcohol, activities, and minor transport like subways.  Any oddities are noted below.

1. Germany ($73/day) (No lodging costs because we stayed with a friend.)
2. Poland ($91/day)
3. Hungary ($101/day)
4. France ($132/day) (No lodging costs except for one night in a B&B in Mont St. Michel and an air mattress because we stayed with a friend in Paris.)
5. Portugal ($133/day)
6. Croatia ($142/day)
7. Czech Republic ($144/day)
8. Slovenia ($148/day)
9. Spain ($154/day)
10. Northern Ireland ($187/day)
11. Ireland ($255/day) (This figure is estimated; we lost track of our budget quickly after many a round of Guinness.  Costs are also higher because we went out more than usual while our friends were visiting.)
12. Belgium ($272/day) (This just for a 2 day trip to Brussels.  Again, costs were probably higher because we drank a lot with our friend and bought an excessive amount of chocolate.)

There are a lot of factors that affect costs, and I plan to write in the future about some of them, including tips we’ve learned for saving money.  To give you a sense of our travel style, we are not eating ramen noodles and staying in hostel dorms, but we watch our spending.  Where you stay has the biggest effect on the budget.  In general, when it comes to accommodations, we always have a private double; we try to avoid shared bathrooms, but will share if we’re feeling cheap; we try to find clean, simple budget accommodation, which means a variety of hostels, pensions, apartments, guesthouses, and B&Bs; and we will sometimes spend $10 or $20 more to get a private bathroom, free wifi, better location, or overall nicer place.  When it comes to eating, we always eat 3 meals a day and usually dessert or snacks; we usually order a drink or two with dinner, and occasionally have a few drinks at other times; we stay at places with free breakfasts if it makes sense, but tend to self-cater breakfast otherwise;  we tend to eat out almost every day for lunch and dinner, but sometimes self-cater if we have a kitchen; we usually spend our most money at dinner, as it is typically our nightly entertainment; and overall, we tend to eat what we want and not skimp on food.

Hope that helps to put the European portion of our trip in context.  Europe is definitely not as cheap as developing countries, but as you can see, it does not need to be outrageous.  If you have any questions about our European costs, leave a comment or send me an email.

Two months…and we are back in business!

We left Pittsburgh exactly 60 days ago.  On one hand, it feels like we have been travelling forever, but we are only 2/12 of the way through our trip.

The first two weeks in Spain felt like a vacation: new, different, and fun.  Then the second two weeks in Paris were like a more exciting version of home, with friends and homey apartment comforts.  Then there was Morocco, and, well, you know how that was.  Returning to Spain again felt familiar, and we’ve spent a lot of the time ironing out the kinks of our travel style and getting into a groove.

Some things are obvious: we get pretty cranky without constant internet; we are not a fan of shared bathrooms, but will do it if we absolutely have to; and a car is not always the best way to travel.  It is fun bouncing around, but it is tiring and leaves little time for down time.  So we’ve decided for the Eastern/Central Europe portion of our trip that we are going to try to see less and stay at least a week in each location.  One thing that is pretty clear is that the quality of our accommodations directly affects our happiness, but it is also the biggest component of our budget.  We added up how much we spent on everything so far, and if continue at this pace, we’ll be 50% over our yearly budget.  Yikes.  But that figure is misleading, because we are doing the most expensive part of our trip first.  Or at least it better be.

Some homesickness has kicked in, particularly for me, and so to remedy that, we ended up chilling in an apartment for 10 days in Valencia.  I’ll write more about Valencia later, but the reality is we haven’t been doing a whole lot other than enjoying life like this is our home and it is a perpetual weekend.  (Well, what we imagine a weekend to be like, because Sean and I spent most of our weekends back left were either working at work (me) or working on our house (mostly him).  We really like the idea of having a temporary apartment.  It lets you daydream about living in a foreign land for a while.  We actually have had two apartments in Valencia.  We first booked one at 11 Flats for 3 days, and got a great deal (about $54/night) because it was booked last minute and filled the gap for the rental company.  See – just like home:

Then we decided that maybe we weren’t in such a hurry to move on, and booked another apartment through the same company at 5 flats for 7 days (about $76/night).

Both apartments are in the heart of the Barrio de Carmen neighborhood, feel positively enormous compared to the tiny hotel rooms in which we have stayed, have fast internet, and modern decor.  Our current place even has a washing machine, which is really the holy grail for “backpackers.”  I decided to wash my clothes today just because I could.  The apartments, of course, also have kitchens, which has allowed us to shop at the markets and cook real meals.  (So Matt, tell your Aunt Ceci not to worry, we won’t have to eat out for 365 days straight).

We’ve also been filling our days with running errands, a need that does not disappear when you cross borders.  One big errand we accomplished is re-purchasing our camera.  It looks like our renters insurance is going to cover the camera, minus a $500 deductible.  We’ve been scouring Valencia for a replacement since we arrived last week.  There are not many camera stores in Valencia, and our internet searches turned up nothing.  It took days of scouting to find what we needed, accomplished by a combination of asking the reception desk at the apartment company, asking a random photography studio, and keeping our eyes peeled while we walked around in popular shopping areas.  In the off chance anyone is ever in Valencia and in need of a camera or equipment, check out the El Corte Ingles department store on Colon (think Macys, with electronics), a photo store by the bullring (think independent photo store), FNAC on some street I forget (think Best Buy), and FotoPrix in the Nuevo Centro mall (think Ritz Camera).  Sean entertained himself by re-researching camera options.  He dreamed of going smaller and getting something new to play around with, I dreamed of taking pictures with my SLR again.  We pondered lots of alternatives, such as getting a compact micro four thirds camera, or reducing our zoom capabilities by getting a smaller lens.  In the end, when we stumbled across the same camera and lens we had before as a set for a great price, Sean’s dreams of lightening our load were dashed one more time.  We are now the proud owners of a Canon XSi (450D here in Europe) and 18-200 mm lens once again.  Yippee!