Backpacking in Northeastern Europe

All summer I had been studying hard for the MCATs (Medical College Admission Tests), the most soul-sucking, emotionally draining and physically exhausting 5 and 1/2 hour exam I have ever sat through. The great day of reckoning was August 5th, around the same time I was wrapping up my project as a summer student in a developmental biology lab at the University of Calgary. There were still a few weeks left before I needed to start school in Lyon, so it seemed a perfect time to use some of my savings (you don’t spend much money when you’re studying all summer!) and go backpacking in northeastern Europe.

My plan was to fly to Frankfurt, and then... thats where the plan ended! I had a Russian tourist visa and a flight from Stockholm to Lyon booked for September, but that was about the extend of my planning! Although greatly tempted to spend hours on end researching places to visit and organizing an itinerary, I really wanted to focus of studying for the MCATs so I really hadn’t done much in the way of planning. Isn’t that the beauty of backpacking, I told myself? Jumping on the next train to a new city when it’s time to move on, booking a hostel the day before, asking other tourists what sites they enjoyed and reading my guide book?

I had a couple of reasons for visiting northeastern Europe first:

1) Visiting the cold places in the summer > visiting the cold places in the winter

2) Far from Lyon, so visit when I have two weeks off to save travel time

3) It is a huge pain to get a Russian visa, and you have to organize it about a month in advance, so much easier to do while I’m in Canada.

The general idea was to visit Warsaw and Krakow in Poland first, then make my way up the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), spend a few days in St. Petersburg, then head to Finland to visit my friend (and fellow Queen’s student) Jordan, on exchange to Helsinki. After that, I would spend a few days in Sweden, then fly from Stockholm to Lyon. Serendipitously, my flight from Stockholm to Lyon had a connection in Frankfurt, so I could leave a suitcase in storage and pick it up on my way back to Lyon!