Already before I started my 3-month Interrail trip in 2023, I created a structure to document what I wanted to do and eat in each destination of my trip. The idea with the spreadsheet table was initially supposed to help me personally not to overload my schedule.

When I would only manage to do 3 activities per place and try only one local food, snack and drink each per country, that would have to be enough to be content with having experienced the place. To actually discover a place with its local culture that is obviously not enough. When having on average only less than 2 nights / place and even staying only 1 night in a few countries, this could be a great start, tough. Basically, I wanted trying to put too many activities on my schedule and it did actually help.

The best thing for you as a valued reader is that I reflected on all of these activities and foods again and prepared the spreadsheet in a way that you can find my personal highlights for each place. You can take the following excerpts and the complete overview in this spreadsheet as inspiration for your trips.

One of my bigger objectives of the trip was trying a lot of local foods, which I also want to cover first in this blogpost. Although I highly appreciate healthier and more sustainable foods (as described in this blogpost), I was trying almost anything on my trip. The following bullets just give a glimpse of the range of foods that are great to try in the relevant countries:

• Tortelloni with butter and sage —> Italy

• Salmon pie —> Finland

• Paella Valenciana —> Spain

• Vegan köttbullar —> Sweden

• Bacalhau a bras —> Portugal

• Galletes —> France

• Štrukli —> Croatia

And this gallery is an incomplete overview of all the delicious foods I can recommend to try…

Regarding snacks, I had the desire to find a kind of “no-regret” snack, which I didn’t know about yet. For almost any country I searched the supermarkets and also the internet to find that one type of food, which I could eat all the time without having to feel guilty. Unfortunately, I didn’t find such an exact snack, but at least some that were healthier than the typical sweet and salty supermarket aisles. It looks like there is still the market niche with the food I’m craving for, but can neither find nor develop myself yet.

In the list of my overview spreadsheet, I’m focusing on country-typical snacks that are great to try when visiting a country as a tourist, though. Here are a few images of what I tried and liked enough to recommend here (even though most of it is either full of sugar or fat). Enjoy them in appropriate portions ;-)

The spreadsheet also contains one typical drink for every country.

Summarizing all the places, sights and activities of my trip is an almost impossible task. As I wrote above, I didn’t want to plan too much in every place or have the desire to do too much.

Therefore, I kept the list of maximum 3 general activities per place as a recommendation how to see the best spots in the described time per city. When seeing the described places or doing these activities, it should feel like you have seen some of the most unique aspects of these cities :)

Once I have sorted out the best photos from my trip, I will also add a galery of these beautiful places here. Until then the one photo of the Sagrada Familia needs to suffice as an example.

In addition to the foods, snacks & drinks per country, I also sorted them to the individual cities / places where I tried them or would recommend to try them. This list also contains additional foods, which didn’t fit into the list per country. It is located in the columns E-G of the tab “Places, sights and activities“.

Check out the whole overview with all my personal favorites / recommendations both for foods / snacks / drinks and places / sights /activities from my trip in this spreadsheet:

With all this information gathered in the spreadsheets and the description in this blogpost, I hope no one minds that I only managed to post the first 11 country summary posts on my instagram page and probably won’t find / take the time to create the remaining 13 posts. All the places and most of the foods and drinks are included in my highlight stories, which I kept as a resource for travelling.

As always: In case you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to reach out via the contact function.