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Confessions of Crystal

You Might be Addicted to Travelling If...

29/3/2015

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1) Instead of asking what your weekend plans are, your friends and flatmates ask which country you're travelling to this weekend.

2) Said friends and flatmates are then surprised if you say you're staying in London.

3) You have chargers, converters, and adaptors for the UK, EU, and US.

4) You are always amused when people say travelling is too expensive because

5) You travel on budget airlines that begin their safety presentations with, "this is he brace postition you must adopt if you hear the words brace, brace" instead of "please fasten your seat belt" and

6) You stay in hostels for around ten Euros a night.

7) Each week, you meet new people from all around the globe.

8) Each week, you become new Facebook friends with people that you have no mutual friends with.

9) But sometimes you do have a random mutual friend, which is really exciting (six degrees of separation!?)

10) You spend more time doing schoolwork on trains, planes, and coaches than in your own flat.

11) When looking for your train ticket, you always first seem to pull out an old ticket from a different country.

12) You have several currencies floating around your wallet and room.

13) You've tried to pay with the wrong currency at least once.

14) You seem to wear out shoes and bags more often than normal.

15) When buying a new bag, you know not to buy one with metal between the purse and strap, because you walk so much with it that you end up with bruises on your hip.

16) You can pack for a trip in five minutes flat.

17) You can pack for a nine day trip in one backpack.

18) You've broken at least one zipper on your bag from chronically overstuffing it.

19) You always seem to be at a plane or train station.

20) Everywhere starts to remind you of everywhere else.

21) You never know what time or date or day of the week it is and when you do know, it never feels accurate.

22) You know which products are cheaper in certain countries and buy them in said countries.

23) You never really know what to say when people ask where you're from.

24) Your sleeping patterns are constantly out of synch.

25) The more you travel, the more you want to keep travelling!

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Learning How to Spell Majorca/Mallorca (and exploring the island)

28/3/2015

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On Monday, I stood at an airport in Spain and looked at the flight monitor. Seeing a lot of flights to Germany, I said, "Let's change our flight and go to Dusseldorf. I want to go back to Germany." Had I not had class the next day, I might have actually done that. The next day, I heard the breaking news of the Germanwings crash between Barcelona (an airport I have flown out of on multiple occasions) and Dusseldorf. It's one thing to look at tragedies like that on an intellectual level and quite another to realize how easily that could have been you or one of your friends. I haven't written about Majorca earlier because everytime I started, I had my blog open in one tab and news about the Germanwings flight in another. I didn't like the idea of writing about how brilliant my holiday to Spain was while so much mystery surrounded the crash. I'm trying to stop reading about it because it makes me sick, but it is definitely the most-talked about topic at the moment. Now that I've acknowledged that, let's move on to my trip.

Majorca is an island with multiple spellings, which makes booking things rather confusing. I was hoping to learn which was accurate on my trip.

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The only flight from London to Palma Mallorca, resulted in me having to leave class early. I had it planned down to the minute when I could leave my class, take the tube to Liverpool Street, get on the Stansted Express, get my passport checked at the RyanAir desk, go through security, and catch my flight. I knew it would be close, but I'm generally pretty good at planning my day out to the minute. What I wasn't counting on was that the overhead power lines on the Stansted Express would fail, resulting in us being held in our approach to the platform for forty-five minutes. I was meeting a friend at the airport and she said the queue to get your passport checked was another forty-five minutes. We were certain I would miss the flight and had no idea what to do since RyanAir wouldn't help me out with rebooking a new flight and there were no flights until the next morning (which were really expensive!) When we finally arrived at the airport, it was 12:37 and my flight boarded at 1. I have never sprinted off the platform, up an escalator, to the poor worker at the RyanAir counter who had no idea why all these people were waving passports and running toward him (luckily there was no queue), through security (luckily there was no queue), and to the gate. Of course, the flight ended up taking off really late (I wouldn't expect any less/better from RyanAir!)

We had some fantastic views on our approach to Majorca!

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We booked our accommodation through Airbnb. Last week, in Ireland, I stayed in a real hotel and this week I stayed in a real flat!? After hostels and my dorm room, this was a real treat, especially because we were on the tenth floor and got this spectacular view!

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Unfortunately, the lights kept going out as we tried to climb the ten flights of stairs, but we eventually figured out how to turn them on. It just took a couple of days.

Compared to my usually busy trips, this was a nice relaxing holiday with beautiful weather.

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There was a bit of an unfortunate incident when we got caught in a crazy hail and rain storm (I've been caught in hail storms now in four countries: USA (damaging my car in the process), Iceland (no surprise there and on more than one occasion), England, and now Spain. Luckily, my broken Spanish gets slightly less broken in pressure situations and I was able to communicate with a taxi driver enough to get us home!

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I'm always impressed with the markets in Spain and the Catalina market had the cutest little dried fruit stand. The owners were all excited to meet Americans because they're planning a Route 66 trip!

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We did not encounter any other Americans on our entire trip though we did run into some Brits. It was fun to visit somewhere where we were an anomaly!

In case you're wondering both Majorca and Mallorca are accurate spellings and I haven't found a reason why the two spellings are interchangeable!

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    Crystal Chilcott

    Hi, I’m Crystal!  I love to travel and am currently a graduate student in Scotland. You’ll get all the best tips and insights from my experiences as a former ice-skating coach in Iceland and former study abroad student. Of the 27 countries I have visited, a type 1 diabetes diagnosis has been the strangest land yet.  Type 1 has not slowed down my travels and you'll learn how to take type 1 with you on the road! You can connect with me further on Instagram @CrystalChilcott, or send me ideas of where I should travel next via email: crystalmechilcott@gmail.comHappy Travels, Crystal

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