Austria is a very pretty, rural country. Many green spaces, forests, lakes, stunning mountains.

And even better, it's so easy and affordable to travel through the chicken nugget shaped european country!

Honestly, some people walk through the whole country! Why not right?

Now if you don't wanna walk, don't worry! There are other ways to travel through Austria.

I'm now gonna talk about the easiest way which is: by train!

Unlike other countries Austria has great train connections and a great public transport system in general. Plus it is definitely affordable.

You can go from one side of the country to another. Of course, as an austrian citizen I traveled by train in Austria many times in my life.

The longest trip was from Vorarlberg where I grew up to Vienna the capital city of Austria which is a must see! You will love it!

Now how do you get from state to state? Here's the website I can recommend the most and the website I booked all my train journeys in Austria with:

OEBB Austria

the website should be very self explanatory and it's really easy to use. Should you have any complications just message me on my instagram marystravellife.

For the phone lovers here, you can also download the oebb app and book your tickets simple and easy on your phone.

If you are very flexible with your travels make sure to check out "Sparschiene" because with that you have the possibilities to travel for as little as 19€ (21$).

Shortage on time? No worries, just check out the nightjet that brings you to your destination overnight.

Wanna bring friends? Book a group ticket or check out the "einfach raus" tickets for little money.

Or let's say you are more on the active side of life you can book not only a ticket for yourself, you can also bring your bike in the train!

And if you travel multiple times make sure to get a student card, a business card or whatever suits you the most to save even more money while traveling! For a fancy way of traveling book the business class which offers more comfort during your trip.

In the mood to travel Austria now? No? Okay.. here are some pictures then to convince you to visit Austria.

My first trip to London, why I was in a police car and why I moved here

Summer 2012... one of my first trips alone with a friend. I was 19 by that time and really excited because I always wanted to go to London and my travel itinerary was about 7 pages long.

We stayed in London for about a week and had a great hotel! Hilton Hotel in Croydon, well you might think why Croydon? Well that's the same questions we asked ourselves after arriving at Stansted Airport.

Croydon is another city, outside of London, outside of the center. With the car not too far away but not very recommendable if you really wanna be in the middle of London or close to all the tourist attractions. Yes, we did check the map before leaving but we had no idea how big London is.

At least back then, London was a big city for me. Anyways, it took us let's say quite a while to get from the airport to our accommodation. We got so lost and started to ask people where to go. One of them even started to scream at us which was super scary at night, somewhere lost in London and a creepy dude screaming the directions into our faces. But it seemed like that was just his voice.

We were really tired, our feet were hurting, we ran out of food and water and we just wanted to be at the hotel to sleep! So we decided to stop a taxi and as I did that my friend suddenly said: "No! That's not a taxi, it's the police!" The policemen stopped and asked us where we wanna go, they were so friendly! So friendly that they said "hop in" so we did and this is how we got to our hotel - in the police car! About 4 hours later than we planned to arrive.

Our days there were full of touristic activities. Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, a Thames Cruise, Oxford Street, Hyde Park, a hop on hop off sightseeing tour, some of the London markets, London Eye, etc. it was a great time! Bonus was that it was shortly after the Olympic Games took part in London so there was some decoration on the bridge as well as some statues from the olympics left in the city which was quite nice to see!

We really loved the city and we were sad when our last day came. We decided to go to a restaurant and eat something nice before we had to head back home the next morning/ in the middle of the night actually. So we ended up in Chinatown in a chinese restaurant.

It was so full, we had to sit at the bar because there was no free table anymore.

Back at the hotel, we started to feel bad and when we went to the train station to get back to the airport my friend had to vomit... yep such a great last night! So I ran around the station like a crazy person to ask for help.

One of the workers called a taxi for us that took us to Urgent Care Medical Centre somewhere in London.. or probably in Croydon where we waited for a pretty long time until suddenly they gave my friend some medicine and we left for the aiport just in time to catch our flight back home.

We took turn with occupying the toilets because we felt so bad. As we landed in Germany, I still had a very long car drive home.. well maybe around 3 hours but when you feel sick it feels really long. The following night I felt so bad that we had to go to the hospital. After giving me a medicine that I had an allergic reaction to, they kept me there and gave me a different medicine and after a few days I luckily felt better and was able to go back home.

What was it? Well, as you can probably guess. It was the chinese food, it was a food poisoning! We will definitely not forget our first trip to London!

In 2015 I went back, my second trip to London because I still liked the city a lot. This time, I was there for the new year. It was a wonderful experience, I discovered my favourite museum in the world which is the Natural History Museum which is in South Kensington which is my favourite area in London. I love the white pretty buildings and the museum of course and the cute corners.

One day I thought I wanna live in Kensington.

And who would have thought that this would happen?

In 2018 when I came back from the US I decided to move to London because I wanted to keep working in the same job and I also wanted to keep talking english so this was the perfect solution for me.

Even if I was so sad to leave the US, I was kind of excited to move to London and after I changed the family I worked for I ended up really close to my favourite area!

And now to end this blog post I can say: I still like London a lot but I don't wanna live here forever and I'm already trying to find my next adventure somewhere in this world :)

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post :)

Mary