You don’t have to be rich to travel to Europe. You just need discipline and tons of research to make the trip possible.

There was an article posted on ABS-CBN that claimed P55,000 was enough for a 5-day trip to Paris. But in my opinion, this budget can still be scaled down provided you don’t mind sleeping in hostels and getting food from the supermarket. This could mean sharing a bathroom with 10 other travelers and eating cold food with a plastic fork, but I really didn’t mind. I still had the best adventure of my life during my 24-day stay in Europe.

We found a really cheap roundtrip flight for Manila-Paris-Manila last July 2013 and booked it right away for fear of the fares getting higher by the day. We still haven’t applied for the Schengen visa then, but we figured it was worth the risk. This also gave us…