Hi, I'm Julian, and this is where I mostly publish travel related posts and pictures.
The trip from Budapest to Bucharest is our first overnight in a train. Actually, it is our first overnight in a train ever. And it was nice, after all. There is five of us in a six-bed-compartment. Suzanna, a woman in her 40s, starts conversation immediately – and soon we realise she is a very well-read woman who impresses us with a lot of knowledge about German history. We learn a lot about Kronstadt.
We leave Bratislava for Budapest quite early in the morning and the change grows more and more palpable with every rattle of the train. There are six of us in our compartment. To a splendid mind, such a crowd would present a wonderful opportunity for a humorous character study in the style of a great Russian novel, though the crowd keeps changing: people come, sit next to us and then leave almost immediately. The reason, we realise, is that, for some reason, we smell.
It's 7:03 AM but the promise of spectacular new scenery has long shaken off snooze and stirred us alert. Now, after leaving home, we are on the bus to Mannheim, some 40 minutes away from the next bigger station. I'm dwelling on Mannheim now just as I dwelt on it then - in passing. Stunning at second sight, with a charm not immediately discernible from the greyer shades of industrial architecture, this City of Squares is also famed for the grid-like pattern of its plazas.
And so came the day of days, the bun or bus day, the day Philipp and I were to seize (before millennials made it a mass motto) and mark as the beginning of our world conquest. As a crisp red dawn broke on our red-letter day, we rose to perform our usual morning ablutions, this time accompanied by that unusual feeling you get every time you are about to do something “for the last time for a while” (which in our case was, for example, the trivial but comforting convenience of using our own shower).
In the beginning was the word: We’d been talking a lot about taking the Trans-Siberian Railway – the pronoun here encompassing my good friend Michael, my little brother Philipp and, well, myself. We had pondered, planned, but we never did it. Until we did.
