During one of our family holidays to Europe we visited a Christmas market in Berlin and dined on sausage and beer in the freezing cold temperatures.

A cheap holiday in Russia can be made even cheaper by booking the luggage compartment instead of a bed, as Luke shows us in the above photo. Taken on an overnight train trip to St. Petersburg, before a train attendant could catch him in the act (and we hadn’t even started drinking yet).

Croatia was another last minute holiday we booked during our spring break in London. Once we arrived in Dubrovnik, we hopped a ferry to Lopud, a small island off the coast. This Franciscan monastery dates from 1483.

Don’t worry, you can still get your Big Mac fix during your Egypt holidays. This is the police officer assigned to guard the McDonald’s in Luxor, Egypt.

During a family holiday to Ireland we took a tour of County Wicklow, where Lough Tay is situated. The estate in the photo belongs to the Guinness family, who imported the white sand, thereby making the lake appear to be a giant pint of Guinness.

A canal in Venice, Italy. One of the great things about living in London was the availability of cheap holidays. We flew to Rome and Venice for less than $100 and stayed in cheap apartments and B&B’s.

As students at The George Washington University in downtown Washington, D.C., my classmates and I had the atypical college experience; we didn’t have a football team or expansive lawn on which to play frisbee, and most of the dorms consisted of former hotels and apartment buildings that the university acquired to house the burgeoning student population. During my freshman year I lived at the Hall on Virginia Avenue (HOVA), which was a former Howard Johnson’s hotel. My dorm was situated directly across the street from the infamous Watergate complex, site of the burglaries that eventually led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. My room, 419, was the original site of the burglars’ “lookout room” from which Alfred Baldwin and James McCord monitored the DNC office. The photo above shows the view from my room.

The Bibi-Heybat Mosque in Baku, Azerbaijan, undergoing renovation in 2006. The original mosque was built in the 13th century and destroyed by the Bolsheviks in the 1930s during an anti-religious campaign. This new mosque was built in the same site in the 1990s, following Azerbaijan’s independence from the Soviet Union.

For the past two years my friends and I have gone down to Witch’s Rock Surf Camp in Playa Tamarindo. This is the camp’s backyard. Not bad, eh?

The German national dish . This was from a small fast food restaurant in Berlin and was absolutely delicious.