studentsineurope

Charles Stevenson is a 26-year-old Washington state native and Managing Director of Snow or Sand, a student-oriented travel company founded in 2009.  From the West Coast, Charles leaped across the country to study at Boston’s Northeastern University and took another great leap to do a semester abroad in Perugia, Italy.  After graduation and two years [...]

Everyone knows about the liberal drug laws in The Netherlands, where marijuana is decriminalized and hallucinogenic mushrooms, while illegal as of late 2008, are tolerated.  However, few people are aware that Portugual has an even more progressive drug policy.  There, not only is marijuana decriminalized, but also cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and virtually every other [...]

A camera is a good thing to bring to Carnaval.  Besides the obvious benefit of visually documenting the twisting, turning kaleidoscope of people, colors, costumes, and oddities, it will help you reconstruct a night whose chronology is probably indistinct and whose details get fuzzy at the margins.
Safely back at home after 16 hours in Cadiz, [...]

I hate airports.  They’re big, boring, and inconveniently located.  Checking into any one of them involves the same mind-numbing process of micro-steps that makes me want to die a little.  They make you pour out all your unchecked booze and water and put all your million little metal things in a tray only to put [...]

Since the founding of the University of Bologna nearly one thousand (!) years ago, European students (and those studying abroad) unalterably shaped the character of the places their universities call home.  A number of cities on the continent have been colonized as eternally youthful student meccas, brimming with a massive student population and bolstered by [...]

Improbably high on Amazon.com’s bestseller list is an anarchist tract written anonymously by a group of radicals living in a rural commune in France.  Glenn Beck helped push their dangerous little book (titled “The Coming Insurrection”) to the top by declaring it “possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read,” but he wasn’t the first [...]

The indie rock and thrift-store chic popularized by the hipster kids New York, Montreal, London, and many places in between seems mostly absent in most European cities, where H&M and house music is more de rigeur. Yes, everyone hates on hipsters, including hipsters themselves, but they rock some pretty cool clothes and produce and [...]

The most sacred Catholic holiday, after Easter, Christmas, and all the other ones, is Mardi Gras.  Ok, it’s not actually a Catholic holiday, but it’s often forgotten that the communal indulgence in drunken debauchery  known as Carnival (among other names) has its origins in the Lenten calendar.  After “Fat Tuesday” (”Mardi Gras” in French) comes [...]

It doesn’t take much to put together a satisfactory hostel.  What a wonder then, that so many miss the mark.  Nor is it necessary to overdo it with backpacker-ish gimmicks.  Terrace Backpackers Hostel (full name: The Terrace Backpackers Pension Pilar del Potro) in the southern Spanish city of Cordoba follows the Iberian habit of keeping [...]

In September, I landed in Europe for a year-long English teaching job.  On the train from the airport, I sat in a pile of my own luggage and took in my surroundings, which, being the interior of a train, wasn’t much to look at.  There were only four other people in the car.  But three [...]