Summer holidays for a student are long and stretching. Planning sufficient vacations and trips becomes quite and endeavour and needs a hell of a lot of organisation to manage the time. Thus, summer holiday planning begins in the Easter holiday and I have put aside revision to scour the internet for worthy destinations. At the moment I am trying to work out what I want from the holiday at all. Initially I thought the weeks would be filled up with work experience and part-time jobs, however my hard work through school and straight A's have clearly rendered me unemployable (apparently with no previous experience in the field you cannot get employed within the field, dammit). Instead, I have a gaping hole of time that needs to be packed out with interesting, exciting things, all funded by the student loan. So the first question is, what do I want out of this holiday? What is stylish enough to merit my throwing away of hundreds of pounds? Well, the choices are thus...
Firstly; I know of stylish resorts. The types that are casually chatted about on 90210 and Gossip Girl. St Barts, the Seycelles, the Maldives. Yes, all these would be fabulous. Whilst pretending money was no object, (there was a chance that it wasn't, I had played euromillions lottery that week) I looked deep into the resorts' shiny brochures and beautiful websites, weeping (literally) as I realised it cost twice my student loan, at least. The Conrad Rengali in the Maldives, (http://conradhotels1.hilton.com/en/ch/hotels/index.do?ctyhocn=MLEHICI) made me cry the most. I knew it would be of a good standard when I read it had been twice voted 'the best hotel in the world', but I really really sobbed when I saw the underwater restaurant. Its the only hotel in the world that has one. I suggested, tentatively, to my boyfriend that by saving up and we could maybe afford it... he was interested at first (mainly because I had halved the price tag for him) but when he discovered it would mean saving up until 2012 he eventually gave it a gigantic NO and told me off for setting my sights too high. "I knew you had elevated standards, (thanks darling) but you have gone too far this time with THE BEST HOTEL in the WORLD??!!".
Anyway, that was a no.
So secondly, my second idea has been more budget. A stylish all-inclusive hotel somewhere that hasn't been fully discovered yet (ie slightly cheaper). Turkey has been my previous haunt, but alas that was last year, when I was young, when my parents still took me on holiday. Now, I was looking at Tunisia, which has perfectly good looking hotels for half the price and going down very well with the ol' boyf. What is important, I have learnt, about finding a good allinc hotel, is reading closely the bit about food and drink. If there's just one buffet, cross it off the list. Ruthless, but even the nicest of buffets get extremely dull by about mid-week. I found some lovely ones for similar prices with at least 2 or 3 'al a carte' restaurants. Similarly, with the drinks, if they are all locally produced that leaves you in the dire risk of having to subject yourself to a concoction of local-sourced cola rather than regular coke. And that, would be awful.
So, boyfriend happy, me happy, sun shining, smily faces, cocktail-in-hand, sunbed-on-bum, perfect holiday. It would seem I had my plan.
However, this is where option 3 comes tumbling in. An adventurous, romantic, dandy and glorious trip round Italy! (Or some other country of Europe). It came to me when I was suddenly worrying that, having never done a Gap year, I may be victim to having never 'travelled'. By this I don't mean simply going to exotic places, I mean the actual concept of 'travelling'; backpacking, touring, hitch-hiking, running free on the hills, going anywhere. Yes, I may have an over-romanticised, image of the experience, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be true. This at least would be far more 'exciting' than the sunbed option and there are zillions of places in Italy that need to be seen. On the STA website you can get a 3 day travel pass that lasts for a month for £68, or a 4 day one that costs £80. Hostels are about £15 per night, so although the costs could pile up (what with all that delicious food on offer), it would be an amazing trip and something that I consider as a 'do-before-you-die' thing. I think this one has made the boyfriend even more happy. Maybe he is also imagining us skipping down the cobbled streets of Naples holding hands or feeding each other strawberries on the back seat of a gondola gliding down the Venetian galleys. He probably is. How incredibly stylish.
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