London to Budapest



The trains have been great. Eurostar to Brussels was unusually empty and I had a carriage to myself apart from a group of four Irish church biddies who spent the journey comparing notes on ecclesiastical architecture ("Franciscan far better than the Jesuits") and ladies loos in London ("The Barbican is the best. You can really sit and contemplate."). I had a couple of hours to kill in Brussels so went to see the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis before ending up, in an unexpected little preview of the Middle East, in an Arab area round the station eating flatbread and hummous and drinking mint tea.

I have been reading a wonderful book that Pedro gave me called Parallels and Paradoxes, made up of conversations between Daniel Barrenboim and Edward Said, ostensibly on music but, inevitably, given their backgrounds and engagement with the world, touching on politics, philosophy and, of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Barrenboim has famously tackled the longstanding ban on Wagner in Israel and their dialogue about Germany and the long shadow of Holocaust made timely reading as I pulled into Cologne. Whatever your personal history - and my family was spared the Holocaust - being a Jew on a railway line travelling east through Germany is always going to have resonances and I have never really felt comfortable in that country. Barrenboim, however, an Israeli Jew who lives in Berlin, makes a strong plea for a kind of mindful mourning of the past. And, unexpectedly for someone who had such a bad press in certain sections of the Jewish world, Said is less forgiving. It would be too simple to say their thoughts are full of hope, but both argue strongly for reconciliation. An excellent book and one I'd recommend to anyone with the slightest interest in how peoples can move on after conflict. Their discussion of the idea of musical tempo and the Oslo Accord (the book was published in 2001) alone makes powerful reading.



German trains are smoother than the sleepers that rattle through France into Spain or Italy and I got an very good night's sleep on the way to Vienna. I had images of pastries and creamy coffee for breakfast when I arrived but my connection was too tight to leave the station so, ironically, I ended up with a cappucino from a machine. But the consolation prize was finding this, a roll dedicated to Euro 2008.

This afternoon I have spent catching up on email and stuff in Budapest. I had hoped to get to the Gellert Baths for a scrub down and massage but these are just fleeting visits to cities on the way and I couldn't resist some real coffee and a proper lunch at a Wi-Fi cafe I found on the way. Now it's time to stroll back to the station for the 1745 overnight train to Bucharest and, in the morning, another, country, another currency and another language I am simply clueless about.

Viszlat! as apparently they say here. Till then.