Arriving in a Foreign City
Imagine. You step off the plane. The first thing that catches your attention is the musty smell of your exotic foreign destination. For the next twenty minutes you have no choice: turn left, turn right, walk a hundred feet, collect your bags, walk twenty feet to the exit.
Then as the doors open to the city itself, you suddenly realise: it is two in the morning and you have no place to stay. The musty fragrance turns bitter in your nostrils. Other passengers hurry off to homes and hotels. You, on the other hand, are lost and alone. Where do you find a hostel at 2am? You cannot afford a hotel and you do not know anyone to ask, even if you could speak the language.
This is my nightmare. So I always, always plan my first night abroad in advance.
First, I always make sure I have enough cash for at least the first couple of days. Being cashless means being helpless. Second, I always book my hostel in advance and make sure they are open at whatever time I arrive. Third, I always make sure to have the address of the hostel for the taxi driver.
Wikitravel has an excellent checklist on arriving in a new city, reproduced below with my notes on what has changed since.
Avoid arriving in the middle of the night
"Get informed about the timetable of your means of transport, and avoid arriving in a foreign city in the middle of the night. Obvious? Yes, but when you get there at 2 AM, it is too late, you cannot do anything. You will have to choose between spending the night in the train or bus station or at the airport, or searching for a hypothetical hotel open at this late hour."
Still the first and best rule, and the one that makes the other five unnecessary. Where it collides with reality is the night train, which is designed to put you somewhere at six in the morning. That is fine, because six is not two: the city is waking up, transport is running, and you can leave a bag somewhere and start walking.
Cash for two days
"No matter what city in the world you are arriving in, you will not get too far on an empty wallet. A good rule of thumb is four times your hotel cost for one night. Know in advance how hard it is going to be to get cash. Sure, the guidebook may claim there is an ATM, but is it on the other side of town?
Also be aware that it is possible to have too much money. A stack of 100 bills will not help you buy a bottle of water that costs 3 coins. Public transportation or even small guest-houses often will not have, or will not give you, change for large bills. Make sure to ask for some small denominations at the exchange counter or break large bills at the airport."
The four-times-your-bed rule is still a good one. What has changed is the shape of the problem rather than the problem itself. Most of Europe is card-first now and Scandinavia is close to cashless, so you need less. But the night bus, the locker, the small place that takes a cash deposit and the bakery at six in the morning are all still coins, and a card declined at midnight in a country you landed in four hours ago is the same emergency it always was.
Two modern notes. Take cash from a bank's own machine rather than the standalone ones in arrivals halls, whose rates are a joke. And always decline when a machine offers to charge you in your home currency; that is the machine setting its own exchange rate, and it is a bad one.
The too-much-money warning has survived intact. A cash machine that only dispenses fifties is a real problem for a three-euro ticket.
A good map
"Do not count on an open tourist office, if there is one at all. Try to have a map or at least a rough idea of the city layout. Make sure the map is detailed enough for the part of town you will be in. Often old towns or pedestrian areas are just a mess of squiggly lines on a city-wide map. If travelling in a country with a different alphabet, a bilingual map is invaluable; it will also help any locals trying to help you."
Download the offline map for the city before you go, not when you land. This is the single highest-value ten seconds of preparation there is, because it works with no signal, no data and a dying battery, which is exactly the state you will be in.
The bilingual point still holds in Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. Set your map app to show local names rather than transliterations, so what is on your screen matches what is on the street sign.
A plan for getting to your hotel
"Know how much a taxi, bus, or train would cost, how long it should take. Sure a bus is half the price, but does it add two more hours to your travel time? If you are travelling alone or at night, find out about any safety issues for that town. If you have a reservation, ask if they offer an airport or train station shuttle. Even if they do not, they may be able to send someone to meet you. This can turn the chore of getting to town into a guided tour."
Neville Millen, writing to this blog in 2003, put the same thing more bluntly: book somewhere within four hundred metres of the station, and no further, because distance on a map is not distance with fifteen kilos on your back at the end of a day.
Work out the route while you are still sitting on the train with a signal. Screenshot it. If you are taking a taxi, know roughly what it should cost before you get in, and prefer the official rank at a station over anyone who approaches you inside it.
A reservation
"If you are arriving after dark or after noon during the high season, having a reservation for the first night can save a lot of running around. Remember, you can always go somewhere else in the morning. Try to confirm a few days in advance and ask about transportation options. Be sure to inform them of your arrival time in case there are any special instructions; in many countries the front desk is not staffed 24 hours a day.
Always print out a copy of your reservation, and make sure you have the name and address in the native language and script."
"In many countries the front desk is not staffed 24 hours a day" is the sentence that strands people, and it is as true now as it was. A booking is worth nothing if the door is locked. Check the check-in hours before you book, not after, and if you are landing late, message them and get an answer in writing.
Self check-in with a door code is common now and is a good sign. A place that will not answer a message at nine in the evening will not answer the buzzer at two in the morning either.
"Always print out a copy" has become "screenshot it", for the same reason: it has to work when nothing loads. Keep the address in the local script on that screenshot too.
Three words
"If you are arriving in a country where you do not know the language and they do not know yours, learn three words: hello, please and thank you. Next numbers, and after that, get yourself a good language CD for the flight in."
Make it five and add sorry and excuse me. It is fifteen minutes of effort and it changes how you are treated, in France especially.
The language CD is now an offline language pack, and you should download it before you fly for the same reason as the map. A camera that translates a menu or a sign is genuinely useful and is the one piece of modern travel technology that would have astonished everybody in 2004.
And the rest of it
"Arrival can be the hardest part of a trip. It is late, you are jet lagged or road-weary, and everything is new and strange. Whether it is the first stop on a trip or the fifth city in as many days, every traveller feels a little overwhelmed stepping onto a new street in a new city. The sense of excitement and potential for discovery ends up in the shadow of practical matters. But having a good checklist of arrival essentials lets you head out into the unknown free to focus on the real adventure."
Which is the argument for doing all six of these while you are still sitting comfortably on the train with a signal, rather than on a kerb at two in the morning.
The checklist above is from Wikitravel, used under its Creative Commons licence.
Posted 10 April 2004 by LiveNomadic in Eurail Planning