How to plan for travelling overseas for dummies with a low budget? (Part 2)

The key thing for me is where to live.

I hated the process of travelling to different places every day with my luggage in tow... trying to find the place I have booked, the process takes like 1-2 hrs, or more if you haven't actually booked the place or got lost...

My solution is to choose a base where I'll travel from. Take my trip to Spain last year as an example, I used Seville for the base of exploring Andalusia, I travelled to Cordoba and Granada as day trips from Seville.

Then what you need to consider is how to travel to these other cities/towns. You want to travel by train, then you should live near the train station. Bus, then bus station. It'll be ideal if the train station is near the city centre OR if there's metro. Usually, you cannot get that in European cities.

When I went to Shanghai, I also used the same tactic-- Shanghai as a base of travelling to Suzhou, Zhouchuang and Hangzhou. I chose a hotel right next to the train station and the metro station. It's an extremely convenient way to travel.

Back to Seville, the metro was still under construction when I was there, and the train station was not exactly near the city centre...

I had to choose between city centre and train station... In the end, I chose neither. I can't say it's a mistake... it's something I wouldn't usually do, but it did cost me some problems...

I chose this hostal that is highly recommended by Let's go-- Hostal Lis.

A really great place, just click on the link above and you'll see what a beautiful place it is, and cheap!! And according to the web, it's just 10mins from the train station... In fact, you can even walk there to the train station, I tried that one day on my day trip to Granada, coz I took the early train ~6:30 am, and so I had to leave at 6am, no bus at that time... and I walked all the way to the train station...

You can also walked to the city centre, I tried that on my first day there, though we got lost. People in Spain can't speak English and we can't speak Spanish. With the help of body language, we finally found our way to the Cathedral. However, it took us like 2 hours... sigh...

What's the problem then?? (What?! I didn't consider getting lost a problem?? haha, yeah, not this time, if I hadn't lost my way, I'd never got the experience of trying to talk to Spaniards who didn't speak English and walked through streets no right minded tourists would ever go.) I'll continue later...