Bucharest and Istanbul
Well, I should have said a language that turned out to be oddly familiar. Romanian (and I guess there is a clue in the name) is of course just like all those Romance languages we learnt at school, just mixed up. When I arrived in Bucharest I needed to find out if there was a restaurant car on my next train, which would be be taking 18 hours to Istanbul. No one spoke English but the beauty of Romanian meant that "Se pode mangiare em train?" worked a treat. (Actually it half worked a treat. There was a restaurant car but it disappeared when the train split in two, half heading south west to Thessaloniki, the restaurant car with it.)



Bucharest itself is no picture- postcard destination. Soviet would be too mean a word for it but it comes pretty close. I wandered for a couple of hours looking for highlights but basically the city is one or two Roman Orthodox churches (with lots of nice icons) tucked in between blocks and flats that would make the Elephant & Castle blush. Oh and there is an enormous military museum. While there are certainly plenty of modern goods for sale in the supermarkets, furniture and clothes shops are still stuck somewhere in the 1970s. Clothes tend to have lots of sparkly bits on them, preferably in manmade fibres and this is not a retro lighting shop though its contents would make any self-respecting Hoxtonite quiver with desire.

It took me a while to work out the money and trying to buy a doughnut for breakfast I ended up with 12 for the price of 10. Having eaten about four of them (they tasted strangely acrid, though not bad), I gave the rest to a homeless man outside the station which caused a little commotion among his fellow rough sleepers who indicated people they thought were more deserving causes. I tried to say that they could all share them but even Romanian-garble-plus-sign language didn't really get through. (How do you do "share" in sign language anyway?)

On the train I again found that I had a compartment to myself - with a basin! - which was a wonderful luxury. I made friends with the guy who ran the carriage and he happily took my remaining Romanian lei off me in return for ultra sweet cups of Nescafe.

For the first few hours we passed through lush countryside, all ploughed fields and tractors going up and down interspersed with little green copses and every so often a wild meadow in vibrant blues and purples and yellows. We got to the Bulgarian border at 2.15pm. The Romanian guards got on the train and took a quick look at my passport, then came the Bulgarian guard, who had more of a problem with my too-new passport (it did look rather fake). He asked me if I had a driving licence with me but was very happy with my NHS E111 card instead, which he didn't even look at.

As we carried on east, the landscape got hillier and greener and soon we were travelling through cool, green woods, following the route of a rocky stream with wonderfully clear water. Even this late in the day (it was late afternoon) it was 32C and the breeze from the forest was a treat.

After dark there wasn't much to do - the restaurant/bar car having set off for Greece - but at about 10, we had a spectacular lightning storm. The land was flat again and you could see great forks of lightning in the far distance arcing down and making the whole sky light up like daylight. I turned off my light and watched them until I fell asleep.

We reached the Turkish border at about 2am. This time the Bulgarian guards were more thorough. This is the edge of the EU, after all, and they probably wanted to make sure no one escaped. We were shunted into a floodlit marshalling yard and a whole gang of variously-uniformed people got on the train to glare at our passports.

We then sat in the siding for an hour and a half. At one point I tried to get off to stretch my legs but I was shooed back on board by a guard who was patrolling up and down the side of the train. He was armed and his presence, along with the dark night and the floodlights, gave the whole scene a very Le Carré air and I found myself thinking of times when these borders were a lot more strictly policed and people got off these trains never to get on them again. When I was last here, in 1984 and also travelling by train, the person I was travelling with made the mistake of arguing with the border guards (I think it was on the Czechoslovak border) who then cleared the train of everyone except us. It was about midnight and snowing and the other passengers were made to wait an hour on the platform until someone arrived who managed to calm the situation. They spent the time glaring in our window and shivering. We were not popular after that.

By 4am we had got to the Turkish border for a happily inefficient session of queuing for a visa, queuing for a stamp, discovering we were in the wrong queue, requeuing, finally getting a stamp and then getting back on the train. As well as the 100 or so of us from the Istanbul Express, there were two or three coachloads of backpackers trying to do the same thing and what appeared to be the Romanian under-14 athletics team. Nothing was signposted, no one really knew where to go and although there were 10 or so passport control people milling around, only one of them was actually checking passports. The rest were smoking. Unsurprisingly we were a couple of hours late arriving in Istanbul.

Now I'm here and checked into a nice little hotel in Sultanahmet. It's a beautiful day, not too hot. I've had a shower and I am going to be a tourist for two days. This afternoon I'll go to Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque and then to a hammam for a massage.

If you have read this far, thanks, but don't you have better things to do with your time? Enjoy the day and catch you soon.