After spending a month travelling around Europe, my friends and I were ready to settle down for the rest of the Summer. That was before an old friend invited us to her home in Spain for two weeks - we couldn’t resist. While we were at her home we booked a hostel in Granada where we would, you guessed it, spend another 24 hours exploring.

Amsterdam was our last 24 hour stop on our journey. We arrived very early, ready to make the most of our final day. We booked a room in the Van Gogh Hostel, beautifully decorated with the painter’s most famous artwork.

Before making our way home, we decided to stop off in Hamburg where an old friend of ours lived. Hamburg was a four hour train journey from Berlin, but it was worth it for the harbour and spaghetti ice cream alone.

The Berlin Wall is an iconic landmark which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. We were fortunate enough to stop off at Berlin while travelling through Europe. After a five hour train journey from Prague, we found ourselves in the country I grew up in, Germany. Germany has always been just about the safest and nicest places I’ve ever been, and was more than happy to return to.

The most iconic landmark in Prague is an Astronomical clock. Each hour, a group of moving sculptures strike the clock - one of these sculptures is a skeleton. Prague is an underrated Gothic wonder, and I’ll never understand why it’s not everyone’s number one holiday destination. Perhaps it’s because it takes forever to get there.

I cannot tell you the breath of relief we all let free the second we left Italy. Something about the country seemed like it wanted to hold onto us, and if it did we would never leave. Before we even got into Hungary we decided for a layover in Vienna, Austria. After surviving the dangers of France and Italy we celebrated with sleep in one of Europe’s safest cities. I think we slept for hours, I can’t even tell you what the hostel looked like it was such a blur.

The beautiful city of Venice has 417 bridges, 350 gondolas, 177 canals, and a very scary train station. We arrived in Venice city late in the afternoon, there were no lakes or rivers. Turns out Venice is bigger than we thought. We got on the first bus we saw and asked them where the nearest place to stay was - a caravan park. We were in the middle of nowhere at a caravan park.

A direct train took us from the edge of Switzerland to the middle of Italy. The moment we stepped off of the train in Rome, an instant haze set over us, everything had a murky orange glow. We had to settle for the Alessandro Palace, which sounds fancy, but our 16 bed room and single bathroom said otherwise.

The quaint city of Grindelwald is also known as ‘Glacier Village’ with its towering mountains and crisp air. We took the most rickety train to get into Grindelwald, it looked like it had been stuck together by tape and glue. It teetered on mountain sides and bridges, but somehow we felt safer than ever - I think it was the relief of leaving Paris behind. On the train we met a boy from Korea, he told us that in Korea they calculate age differently to us, and that he was both 18 and 21, but he could’ve been teasing.

In many books and films, Paris isn’t just a city, but its own character. It’s the city of lights, or love, either one as romantic as the other. A 2000 year old wonder filled with Gothic architecture and iconic pieces of art, Paris is truly something to behold.