| Minds Numb, Bodies Sore |
| Videogames - Geek Adventure | |||
| Written by Pixelsmith | |||
Tuesday April 29 2008The hours stretched on. DS gaming began to wear thin, as did reading our books and staring out the window. Our timetable claimed there would be further stops of more than 15 minutes - long enough, perhaps, for a dash to a station cafe and back again. We arrived at the first of these stations, stopping a short walk from the platform. Passengers began leaving the train and walking across the tracks. I asked a guard in broken German how long I might have to grab some food, and he told me it would be around 10 minutes. It was too tight to risk. After a couple more hours we were at the next stop. Again I asked the guard how long we had. This time, he told me, we had half an hour. That would have been perfect, apart from two large hitches. Firstly, there was not much of a station to speak of and certainly no station shop. He indicated that if we left the train, headed away from the platform and down a nearby street, we might find somewhere. This was so far from a comfortable manoeuvre that we could barely contemplate it. Perhaps more importantly, this was the Hungarian border with Serbia. We were newcomers to border etiquette, but common sense suggested the sight of a couple of men diving off the train and legging it into town may have attracted the interest of the police. So we stayed put, stomachs rumbling and throats dry as we handed our passports to the border control. Half an hour later we were handing the same documents to the Serbian border patrol. Entering and leaving Hungary, we had felt a faint sense of menace and power emanating from the authorities, but the Serbians could not have been more of a contrast. Smiling, fascinated by what two Englishmen were doing on a train between the two countries, our passport checker began practising his English and answering our questions about the Serbian language. What initially seemed like probing questions about our business in the country turned out to be genuine, friendly interest, and when his female colleague popped into the cabin with a basket of sweets, we practically bit her arm off. The sweets weren't just for us, sadly, but she let us have two each on request. Had she known how close we were to death, she may have offered more. But we didn't want to look stupid, so we kept quiet about our dietary miscalculation. In retrospect, it was a good thing they hadn't pried too closely into our business. We couldn't have told them who we were visiting. All we had were mobile numbers and online nicknames. There was an outside chance that the border guards would have played World of Warcraft on the Ahn' Qiraj server - "Oh, you're going to visit Peyota!" - but it seemed unlikely. We set off again. I was down to just a handful of pastilles, but they were doing so little to take the edge off the grumbling in my stomach that it didn't really matter. Exhausted after almost 36 hours of relentless travel, we stared, we mumbled, we lay on our seats and tried to catch up on the sleep we had lost between Berlin and Vienna. And we looked at our phones to see how many minutes had passed. Over and over, we looked. Until finally, with minds numb and bodies sore and spirits all but eroded, we came within half an hour of Belgrade. Next week: The welcome party.Read from the start:
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