Sunday April 27 2008

The clock seemed to strike one million before I eventually rose. This was unwise. Today we were to plan our journey from Sweden to Serbia, and a mere glance at the timetables indicated an early start for the following morning. With nights stretching well into the early morning and breakfast generally taking place in the afternoon - this is what happens to me when I don’t work - my sleep patterns were ill prepared for a morning train.

Just as we had waited until the last night in Finland to plan our journey to Sweden, so we put off planning our exit from this country until the last minute. Lazy and tired, we checked internet airfares to Belgrade, but there was nothing below £250. So I sat down with my European rail guide, an incredibly useful, Bible-style tome which my father thrust into my hands before I left England, filled with endless reams of tiny yet almost perfectly accurate timetables. Incredibly, we found only one error in this book in all our time in Europe - a false claim pertaining to the availability of food a specific train. More on that later.

With pen and paper handy, I buried my head in the book for half an hour, analysing a range of routes and times until two clear options emerged. One would give us a night in Prague, a city we had hoped to see from the beginning. The other would give just 10 minutes in Prague, experienced horizontally, while asleep on a train. But we had no friends in the Czech Republic and the second option got us to Serbia sooner, so we made our decision.

Ultimately the route we took would see us catching five trains over the course of around 36 hours, stopping at Copenhagen in Denmark, then Hamburg and Berlin in Germany, before boarding a sleeper train to Vienna in Austria. From there we would catch our final train, an 11 hour trip south to Belgrade in Serbia, via Hungary. On paper, it looked like quite an adventure. In retrospect, its only real plus point is that it has made every train journey since seem incredibly short.

But we still had a day left in Lund, and we frittered it away in typically relaxed fashion. The combination of our late awakening and the fact that it was Sunday meant that there was very little to do when we ventured into town. So we looked in the windows of a couple of closed shops, ate an amazing ice cream from a shop run by genuine Italian people, looked at some more closed shops and then trundled home.

Next week: Brodos gets himself into a right old mood.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure

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