Hey, yeah we are in Munich in October and apparently we will be going to a Beer Hall/cafe thing to celebrate YAY.

I have only been QLD, VIC, NT and New Zealand, lol its closer than WA and much nicer scenary.

We are now looking at living and working overseas after the trip, but its turning out to be so much hassel, and visa's are expensive!

Do you know of anyone who has moved over to europe to work for a year or so?

The company i work for have offices all over the world and secondments are very common.
The good thing with a secondment is that the company organises all the visas and your accommodation!
But i suppose it depends on the industry you are in!

Yeah thats what i need to do find a world wide company and then they can transfer me lol, however now we have changed our minds, it seemed that we wouldn't really make a lot of money as we'll be spending on visa's, accomm, then coming back and settling in Aust will cost more money so we're just focusing on buying a house now .

So will you be staying at the Ibis hotel (where we'll be picked up) when you arrive in London?

I still haven't chosen a London hotel yet. The Ibis one seemed so expensive.

I'll probably stay somewhere near Victoria maybe? Cause thats near the TT Departures Centre. I thought those who don't stay at the Ibis one beforehand get picked up from there?
Where are you staying?>

ye Ibis is expensive but coz we went to the Euro Expo back in November we got a discount so we didn't mind so much.

And yes they will pick you up from the TT centre if you dont stay at their reccommended hotel.

And it would of been free if we had of gone with the QANTAS deal thats with Trafalgar but it ended up being cheaper going with Singapore.

Have you taken advantage of the "pay in full quicker and receive a discount" i figured that i would pay the tour in full by May anyway and now i get 2.5% discount which is about $100 off so YAY, it probably would of been good to get the 10% discount but i didn't want to pay in full so early.

Did you go to the Euro or Travel Expo?

Yep i paid with 7 months to go so got 5% off i think? so that's pretty good.

i went to the Europe Travel expo. but i dont know how anyone could book there? it was so noisy and crowded. i just went to a few of the presentations and picked up brochures and headed off. Plus i had no idea who to go with anyway. After reading the brochures i wanted to do about 30 trips! it took forever to narrow it down to this one!

What is your stopover like in Singapore? When do you come home? Is it through London?
Mine is only a couple of hours on the way over, but the way back i have about 6 or 7. What is there to do at Singapore Airport for that long in the middle of the night?

I KNOW HOW CROWDED WAS IT!!! i couldn't breathe in there let alone book a holiday with all that noise, but i knew that the expo early bird discounts were still applied after the expo for about 2 weeks so i just grabbed brochures and got the hell out!

Well we are flying home out of Milan in Italy direct to syd so we will be flying back home i think on the 22nd of Oct and our stopovers going there and back are only about 1.5 hours so i will only have time to stretch my legs and hurry back on again!

But i hear that Singapore airport has far more shops than Sydney and so most would (hopefully) be open 24 hrs.

If it was me i would be booking a room and having a sleep lol, i just know i am going to suffer from jet lag. its happened before and will happen again, i never got over it until i came back to Aust last time. If only the seats on economy declined a little more as i find it so hard to sleep sitting up! I chose to lay on the floor under people's feet (luckily they were friends of mine) and i slept for a good couple of hours until the air hostess made me wake up for dinner! i would of preferred the sleep! lol

When are you returning, have you thought of a method to combat jet lag?

Yeah i'm sure i'll be able to find something to do. I'll probably be so tired that i won't want to do anything but sleep!

Jet lag - i have no idea!
i'm kinda ignoring the problem at the moment. i go back to work the next day so will probably end up recovering there!
but i can pretty much sleep anywhere so hopefully will get some shut eye on the plane!
what are your plans?

Wow going to work the next day thats brave!
well they say that you should adopt the time your travelling to before you leave, and as we are arriving at 6am we should not sleep until night time,i was thinking about sleeping pills, but its a BIG no no i found out as your body will go into a state of unconsciousness and on a plane you need to move for DVT reasons, then there's the theory of just eating healthy and having plenty of water (i dont know how im going to sleep if i need to keep going to the loo all the time!!) so the day before i leave i will try to switch my body clock, we'll see how that works out lol

Im getting all excited now its only 6 months away!
Will you be doing any of the optional extras? We are doing most for the night time extras, We figured that we would need to find dinner anyway so why not just go with the tour person.

i'm using all the annual leave i'll have to go away so can't afford any recovery time!
i'm not a fan of taking any sort of drug so didn't even consider sleeping pills.
i'm going to try to get a window seat to reduce the number of times i get woken but need to wake up a few times to eat and move around
we'll see how we go i suppose!

i'm planning on doing a few of the optionals. being by myself optionals are great cause i wont need to find my way around by myself! and the dinner thing is good too!
i'm really interested in doing the ones like the sistine chapel, lourve etc to try to avoid the long queues!

i get more excited every day! i'm trying not to get too excited though! but i do have a countdown thing on my facebook! Under 200 days to go! Ha-ha

Lol when you put it like that..200 days doesn't seem so long!

im getting more excited about going on a plane! i love flying (except for the sleep problem) so maybe i can make friends with the flight attendants and they can upgrade me HA thats wishful thinking!!

it will be a new experience having our own tvs in the chairs its all getting very high tec!

So what made you decide to travel alone?

I don't know how i feel about flying. I have never been on a long flight before, nor over that much water. But i'm excited about going on the A380! It will be a big change from domestic flight planes here!
I'm not sure what to take on board though. will i need a book or magazine or do you think the entertainment on the plane will be enough?

i decided to travel alone because i have always wanted to travel to europe and got sick of waiting for friends to have enough money or be able to go when i can! i finally got to the point where i said i dont care anymore i'm going it alone. Plus i'm on a tour for the majority of the time anyway so i'll be with people all the time and it will be perfect time to make some new friends!

Have you visited the Singapore Airlines website? The TV screens allow us to watch watever we want at whatever time we want, it also has games and music, however i find that magazines and a long book help make the flight a little more enjoyable and pass by quicker.

I feel a little funny about the way we get our plane ticket though, coz we gotta go online and print out our ticket and book our seats then so im getting a little nervous as i wana have a wide choice of seats to choose from.

How good is the Australian dollar looking, i keep hoping that the euro will rise to 70c for our dollar when i went it was like 55c.

Have you worked out if your taking cash or are you going to do travellers cheques? on one hand Trav cheques are safe but can be hard to cash in.

I had a bit of a look on Singapore's Website but didn't really look into the entertainment that much.

Mmm, i don't like the idea of web-check in. But it's good that we get to pick seats, i just hope there are window seats available!

i hope the exchange rate stays good, its going to be so expensive anyways, we need a strong Aussie Dollar!

i think i'm just going to use credit cards and cash. i dont know how travellers checks work and i figure that credit cards would probably be just as easy to use. i got told about this credit card too that has no fees not even for FX and cash advances. so if you "load' money onto it (so use your own money and not the 'credit') there wouldn't even be interest charges. its from Wizard and is called the clear advantage mastercard. i think i'll just use it and get cash out for when i'll need that!

Don't be concerned about web check in - it works every time. Many times now we have bought domestic flights on the web, printed out our details, and subsequently printed our boarding passes. It works well - the printed passes have barcodes which are scanned when you board the aircraft!