Language
I was able to achieve my goals satisfactorily in English in all countries. The restaurant menus are written in the language of each country, so I used Google Lens translation.
Safety
All cities were safe enough. However, I often saw beggars begging for cigarettes in front of big stations.
Cost
- Airplane class choice is a trade-off between comfort and cost. This time, I prioritized comfort, and chose business on the outbound and premium economy on the return. However, premium economy was not as satisfying as the price paid.
- All shops in all countries accepted Visa Contactless. I have VISA registered with Google Pay, so I was able to make payments smoothly at most shops and facilities. The only exception was St. Moritz taxis, which were cash only.
- Food costs are very high when eating at a restaurant or the like. Using the supermarket can be relatively cheap, but it is a trade-off with your own satisfaction.
- I used Trainline to buy train tickets, but they charged me double the cost on some purchases. This is a problem, but it could have been avoided more by using a Eurail Pass.
- Accommodation costs in London and Paris are ridiculously high. Using Airbnb in London kept the cost down, but I should have done it in Paris as well.
- Cigarettes are very expensive. It costs about ¥2,500~¥3,000/box. Box displays limited in information, so there is little room for choice.
- In summary, the potential cost saving ways were:
- choosing economy class for the aircraft.
- using Eurail pass for the train.
- usinf Airbnb for accomodation.
In general, a trip to Europe costs around ¥30,000 per night, excluding travel and sightseeing expenses. This can be considered to be about 150% to 200% of the cost of staying in urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka. I felt that the Cost of Living was very high.
Internet
- Latency between most of Europe and Japan was around 350-500ms. The degradation of UX due to latency is almost unnoticeable when it uses HTTP. 600kbps is enough for HTTP streaming.
- I was able to use 4G in all countries, but I was often out of range while traveling by train. frequently saw no response for several tens of seconds, and requests often timed out. From the application point of view, I felt that implementation of CDN, read-ahead, and offline caching was essential.
- The idea that updating a blog requires updating a Git repository may not be a very good idea. Especially when you just want to upload several photos.
- It seemed that VPN is not useful very much. Moving to zero trust will improve convenience, but I felt that countermeasures against latency were more important.