Day Eight - Budapest

Budapest Kelenti station resembles St Pancras, were it slightly smaller and had never recieved a lick of fresh paint since it was built.

Walk through the opulent dome of the main shed and notice the cracked yellow plaster and gold-leaf paint flaking from sturdy platform lamps. It has the air of a city past its once great peak.

The smell of paprika and tobacco smoke is mingled with spices and coffee - which men drink acrid from tiny plastic cups as they play chess - wafts through the bustling terminus. For the first time on the trip, a whiff of the Ottoman Empire is tangible.

Our hostel is located in a quiet, grass-fringed side street in Central Pest. Next door is a second-hand English bookshop with the smallest opening hours imaginable. Perhaps business is slow.

Budapest is famous for, among other things, its thermal springs, several of which are directed into one of the city's numerous public baths. We take the metro to Széchenyi Fürdő, one of Budapest's largest. It has nine pools ranging in temperature from 55 to an icy 18 degrees. As well as saunas and steam rooms galore the baths house medicinal pools which smell like old sea water and have an unfortunate sediment floating that looks like flakes of skin.

Refreshed and charmed by an old man in speedos and a gold medallion, bronzed belly straining at the elastic, we head back to Pest for some food.

Off the main streets are the best place to find traditional Hungarian fare which, according to the book, consists of far more than just goulash) although there is lots of that). We clamber down into a brick-lined wine cellar decoraded with homemade tablecloths and plump, decorative cushions adorning two rows of wooden benches. Four Hungarian men sit nursing beers, their slick black hair relfecting the bluish curls of cigarette smoke.

Without warning, a heavy set, braodly smiling woman charges towards us, her flabby arms open as if we are about to embrace. She looks like every other Hungarian grandmother I've so far seen. Our conversation goes breifly as follows:

"Hello, you like Hungarian food? Very good, chicken and vegetable. One chicken, one vegetable, very good? Yes?"

Before I have a chance to refuse she is off and, after some frantic stirring and suspicious sounding microwave pings, she is back with two plates of steaming Hungarian food, washed down with palinka, a homemade plum brandy of deceptive potency.

Two of the men amble over to the snugly hidden piano and began playing music. I assume it's for us, as we are the only two diners there. I raise my ears in the hope of hearing some genuine Hungarian folk music, to go with our authentic as you like food. Imagine my disappointment when the pair strike up "When You Fall In Love."

We cross the Danube to a venue that is, in the summer months at least, a 24 hour festival. Live acts and DJs bring out Budapest's young and energetic. Tonight seems to be a tribute to Sum 41 and other American Teenage Punk. It's amazing how dining to Audrey Heller can make even the direst music palatable.

Day Seven - Bratislava

The capital of Slovakia is somewhere I've never managed to imagine. Although I've never been to San Francisco or Miami, I can picture their tram-lined streets and beach side bars. But I really didn't know what to expect from Bratislava.

It's a town spliced by the mighty Danube, dividing inhabitants between the pretty little Old Town in the east and the sprawl of communist concrete blocks that race away westwards to form an alarmingly fragmented cityscape.

The Old Town has wholeheartedly embraced cosmopolitan cafe culture, albeit in a somewhat sedate manner. Through the winding, cobbled alleys and the leafy boulevards, you'd be hard pressed to travel more than ten metres without encountering a cafe.

The eminently strollable centre is overlooked by the mighty Bratislavsky Hrad, the sight of which has housed some sort of fortress since the end of Great Moravia, around 907.

The castle was completely burned to the ground in 1811, owing to "the carelessness of Austrian and Italian soldiers". How rude.

For various reasons (namely regime changes and the Slovakian administrations prevaricating) the rebuilding process wasn't started until 1953. Under Soviet guidance, with all the aesthetic subtlety of a challenger tank, Bratislava gradually regained its castle, at the price of losing any individualism.

The castle today comprises a squat concrete square, adorned on each corner with featureless pillars, turreted in red tile that resemble boring party hats. Mock stone has begun to be arranged on the characterless walls, but this is a laborious and time-consuming process. It could be some time before Bratislavans can once again look up at their castle with pride.

The views from the castle show the other half of Bratislava - homogeneous, high-rise and uninspiring. The best structure on the west side of the river is a bridge genuinely resembling a UFO. I am told a disco is held at the top of its pillar every Saturday.

Whatever else it is, Bratislava doesn't feel like a capital city, any more than it feels like it's in Eastern Europe. Pleasant but unforgettable, Bratislava's laid back feel is, I suspect, somewhat more down to its veneer of Mediterranean cafe culture, rather than its charming cobbled streets and archwayed courtyards.

I'm sure Bratislava has an identity but, in our twenty-four or so hours around the town, Claire and I are at a loss as to what it is.

Day Six - Prague

The sun streaming in through the window wakes us early, which is good, because there is a lot of Prague to see.

We start by picking our way between the throngs of tourists crawling over the Charles Bridge. As I pick my way carefully between sweating Americans and their pudgy, wheezing children, I can imagine what a spectacle the bridge would be when empty. I make a mental note to get up before dawn tomorrow, before immediately scribbling it out.

The Hlad, or Prague castle sits atop a vertiginous bank, occupying the highest point of the city. It is continually visible as you meander along Prague's cobbled alleys and serves as an oddly reassuring presence, as if casting an old and sagacious eye over the lugubrious goings-on of the townsfolk.

Midday sees the changing of the guards at the castle gates, performed by dour looking men in ill-fitting blue uniforms. They march to a tune astonishingly similar to the theme from Thunderbirds.

The Museum of Communism is underwhelming, the highlight of which is a video documenting the lead up to the Velvet Revolution. Narrated in Czech with English subtitles, it helped to add a human realist element to the story's of bravery I had heard so much about. These streets were, until very recently, swarming with baton-happy police and and dissent, even peaceful, would result in intimidation and often imprisonment.

That the museum of Communism is located next to one of the larger McDonald's I've seen provides some well-needed comic relief.

We head out to Prague III, where the 'real' Czech pubs are to be found, far away from tourist eyes. Up a steep incline to the east of the city centre are rows of houses and tower blocks, plaster crumbling and graffiti-tagged several times over. These suburbs sit under the watchful glare of the Communist TV Tower, so grey as to be almost indistinguishable from the clouds that had enveloped the city. Its alien hum provides a monotonous soundtrack for our walk up the hill.

We find some excellent, if a little frosty local bars and before long we are exchanging toasts with the barman in a blues pub, deserted but for a clutch of men playing an increasingly acrimonious card game.

We leave to Tina Turner's dulcet tones and decide on an early night. If the man in the bed next to me snores tonight, I decide, I shall smother him and hand myself in at the earliest opportunity.

Day Five - Berlin to Prague

It's a bit of a jerk to have to leave Berlin. The city is so clean, organised, laid-back, fun-loving and historically rich that in comparison to London, the English capital loses hands down.

Berlin has that unusual mixture of genuine cultural and historical artifacts and stories and solid and sustainable economic robustness. One could go and live in Prague and love its culture but find it difficult to make any headway in global marketplaces. I imagine. The closest I've had to a job recently is running the hoover across the lounge to placate my sister.

Anyway, Berlin is brilliant. So go.

Out of the Hauptbahnhof we cram onto a delayed train to Vienna. Every other moving shape is a backpack. The train is so packed with interailers that it begins to feel like one massive and very chaotically organised tour of Europe.

There are also at least two stag do parties, bedecked in generic matching tops documenting how the stag probably once raped a tramp when drunk. They are bound for the beautiful, inspiring and culturally deep city of Prague. And so are we.

The station of Praha Holcevice - a concrete slug manned by unrelenting female security guards - looks abandoned and, were it not for the scrambled English of the train's conductor, we would have attempted to stay on to Prague's main terminus. Which would have been a mistake, because the trains don't actually run there.

A dawning realisation sweeps our faces (and wallets) when all the prices are laid out in Czech crowns; in spite of the country's hurtling progress (of sorts) towards the Eurozone, the euro is not accepted in all but the swanikiest hotels. Which we had little intention in frequenting.

Prague itself is almost impossibly picturesque. Adimttedly, the first building you see as you surface from the Metro is a huge, American style shopping mall and the main boulevard leading upto Wenceslas Square is flanked with gawdy neon-spewing outlets - as if to reiterate the Czech Republic's embrace of retail economy since the Velvet Revolution.

But the rest of it is stunning. As you venture closer to the river, the soviet concrete blocks gradually begin to dissolve to a more antediluvian frontage with facades and trellises with aesthetically pleasing proportions.

From the Old Town Square where the horror-story Gothic steeples of Tyn Church (1256) jostle for your attention with the wedding-cake St. Nicholas Church and the sprouting Astronomical Clock, which entertains revellers on the hour with a mechanised play, to the soaring grandeur of the old castle set as the backdrop to the bustling Charles bridge, Prague is a comprehensive example of Baroque and Gothic intermingling to inspiring and tasteful effect.

As it's a Saturday night we decide to drink in some of Prague's more traditional bars, to good effect. Czech is a difficult language to get your tongue around, but even the smallest effort to communicate reaps full reward with bar staff who are used to braying stag-parties barking orders in an English with the volume turned up.

Czech cuisine is suspiciously close to German, but that doesn't stop Claire polishing off the biggest pork knuckle conceivable - tastefully advertised on a translated menu as "knee pig". They are big on meat; my dumplings had bacon in them despite being served with pork chops and vegetarian menus include such dishes as "fried cheese with bacon" and "mashed potatoes with fat". Yum.

With enough Czech beer inside us - which is some of the best and freshest in the world, and roughly 80p for 0.5l - we wandered south of the Old Town Square to find an 80's club.

If you do wander out of the nostaglic comfort blanket of the old town on a Saturday night, expect to be confronted by lots of drunken men shouting at one another. They will be British, and you will positively beam with national pride as you witness them urinate and vomit on the cobbled streets once pounded by the likes of Kafka and Dvorak.

Suddenly more than a little ashamed of our presence, Claire and I skulked off to a quiet sidestreet bar and talked in muted tones over the sounds of smashing bottles and laddish hawking.

Day Four - Berlin

Jonny's curtains are broken, so I wake early as the day's first light streams through the large, mucky windows.

Today were are to explore Berlin the way Berliners do: by bike. The cycle lanes are much wider, cleaner and flatter than any of London's and peddling alongside busy is a genuine pleasure instead of a death-dodging gauntlet.

We headed eventually to the Reichstag and Brandenburger Tor, but deliberately zigzagged through the old East Germany in between redbrick, abandoned factories, their morbid towers casting greasy shadows over the concrete high-rises.

Through the old Mitte quarter, we floated down Under van Linden to the imposing Brandenburger Tor, adorned on top by the golden and well traveled goddess 'Victory'. (She was claimed by Napoleon and moved to Paris before being reunited with the gate (albeit replicas) in 1815.)

We looked at the Reichstag, the German government administration since 1999 when Berlin was returned to being Germany's political capital, from Bonn since you asked. Although it retains its Baroque shell, British architect Sir Norman Foster was commissioned to transform the decrepit interior into a state of the art administrative centre. This is where the dome comes from. The Germans call it something that loosely translates as "English Eggcup".

We saw the Holocaust memorial, an unsettling and moving series of equally spaced concrete obelisks, some 2700 in total. They are all slightly different while retaining their uniformity, a testament to the individuals who perished during the homogenized persecution of a people.

Through the Tiergarten to the victory column where less than 24 hours earlier 250,000 people had gathered to euphorically hear an American presidential candidate delivering 30 minutes of nondescript platitudes to the world.

After seeing enough of Berlin's sights to start up a small postcard shop, I decided we needed some retail therapy. We headed straight to the KaDeWe, Germany's "department store of the West". It is huge.

After being gutted and suffering near total destruction during the War, it was rebuilt and stood as a sign of the West's prosperity to the East. It showed communist East Germans the benefits of capitalism, such as a foodhall that makes Fortnum and Mason's look like a Fox's biscuit tin.

It has 1800 varieties of sausage. Not meat, just sausage. It has nearly 2000 varieties of cheese. It has everything zou could ever want or need and far more beside - from canned sweetcorn to caviar.

We smugly enjozed two enormous slices of cake in its top-floor café with views out over all Berlin. We then cycled back to Kruetzberg, less smugly and certainly less effortlessly.

In Kreutzberg, after sipping pilsner with some achingly cool teenagers in a corner café, we stopped in at a shop which was essentially the remnants of someone's garage. There were no prices on its entirely second-hand and reclaimed stock. To buy something on needed to ask the chain-smoking owner before he plucked a derisorz figure out of thin air. I brought a waistcoat John Virgo would envy for one euro. Just as well really, as after just four dazs on the road, I've ran out of clean t-shirts.

We dine on fried chicken and potatoes washed down with sticky glasses of Portugese wine. A day cycling in 30 degree heat has taken its toll on all of us, and we flake off to bed, bidding Jonny good luck in his upcoming end of year exams for which he assures me he is prepared as he drains his third glass of rosé.

Photos Days One to Five

Claire at the Berlin Wall
The Holocaust Memorial

Me outside the Reichstag

A Kreutzberg commune
Cologne Cathedral

The view from the top of Cologne's Dom

Day Three - Cologne to Berlin

I awake to find what resembles a goblin, only much fatter and uglier, stomping in his hobnail boots around the dorm when five other innocents are trying to rest. At 5am. I pull the pillow wearily over my puffy eyes and roll over.

The banging continues for another 20 minutes, and I half expect to turn around to see him hunched on the bed, like a buck-toothed incubus, with a sound effects machine noisily drilling into the morning light.

After stumbling aimlessly around the Dom last night - and scaring the bejesus out of ourselves in the process as the Gothic organ struck up and almighty chord for midnight mass - we wanted to scale the thing, all 509 steps.

(I´ve since found out that there are two bigger Cathedrals in the world: one at Ulm, in Germany and one in New York on top of a skyscraper. Which is a bit like taping a cocktail stick to the end of your willy and claiming to be the best hung of all your mates.)

As we mounted the dripping spiral stairs we positively flew past old German and American ladies who were a few desperate gasps from cardiac arrest. Around three quarters into the climb, you can see the bell tower - apparently the biggest chimers in the world, but I just donť know anything anymore. Just as Claire had positioned herself nice and close to take a close-up shot of the copper inscriptions, the bells chimed half past and nearly sent her hurtling back down the 300 steps we had just ascended.

The views from the top were obviously spectacular, but my favourite part - owing to the shape and elongation of the adjacent tower - was being able to hear every conversation that was going on in the plaza below. I felt like shouting from the rooftops, but no suitable German came to mind, profanity or proclamation.

It is a four hour train ride to Berlin, stopping at seemingly ever town on the map. The rivers of the Cologne delta drifted by and gradually conceded ground to expanses of corn and barley fields, flecked occasionally with the odd emerald Ash collection.

Arriving into Berlin's Ostbahnhof takes you through the whole of what was once the divided capital of GDR and it is a veritable who's who of landmarks, both Soviet, Allied and German. The Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor served as grandiose reminders of German past and present unity whereas the massive soviet TV tower strained skywards like a hypodermic needle.

We were met by Jonny and taken straight to Kreutzberg, where he is lucky enough to live during his Erasmus year.

Kreutzberg is Berlin's 'hippest' district, a post-anarchist area in what used to be soviet controlled East Germany. Once the place for violent and aggressively partisan demonstrations, protests and ransackings, Kreutzberg has been populated by the cities artists, writers and dilettantes after reunification.

Bars and cafes mushroom out onto the street, often not much more complicated than a set of reclaimed plastic chairs and bottled beer. It's home to the anti-capitalist communes that sprung up as the no man's land either side of the Wall fell in 1989, thanks to the Hoff. They serve as bastions of subversive and intimidating counter-culture, refusing to comply with the perceived constraints of market economy. They are scary places.

We watched Obama's JFK impersonation on a German news channel which decided to interview every black person they saw in the crowd. It's weird to think that a mile away a quarter of a million people are chanting "yes we can" at a man regrettably destined to be an American political footnote.

We go to a newly and haphazardly built bar skirting the edge of the Spree, manufactured to look like a beach with the help of several hundred tonnes of sand and a swimming pool in the middle of the river, lit up like an aquamarine jewel amid the oily black Spree.

As we settle down on some reclaimed deck chairs a heavy set German man brushes past me, removing his pants before diving naked as a baby into the icy water. Germans seem to be a lot more comfortable with their flesh than I am. With theirs.

Day Two - Brussels to Cologne

The free breakfast included in the price of the hostel was never going to be worthy of a Michelin star.

One token got you:

1 x bowl of cornflakes resembling a collection of scabs
1 x UHT milk for said cornflakes
1 x cup of tea or coffee
1 x sachet of rubber cheese
5, that's 5 x slices of carpet sample bread

This was served with as much warm marge and Nutella as you could eat.

We packed away our plastic, compartmentalised trays and carried them, bellies full back to the kitchen where a woman wearing a shower cap was gratuitously hurling china into a vat of broiling washing up. I could discern a slight flicker of gleeful smile as a plate occasionally smashed in the soiled water.

Like an excited schoolboy rushing out of the refectory to go play roll down a hill and push over girls in the playground, I bounded out, very nearly falling into the hostel's tasteful water feature in the process.

As we only had three hours in Brussels, we decided to see as much of the architecture of the city centre as we could. Advised by a local to head for a carpark - which, by his instructions sounded like a dogging hangout - and take a lift to the top of its highrise.

Up at level 12, the view is stunning, enabling you to see the whole city perched on undulating plains, stretching scruffily all the way to the Atomium in the west.

The lift taking us back to solid ground screeched lividly and for a moment I contemplated the horrendous occurence of getting stuck in it for the rest of my life (another phobia of mine is getting stuck a lift, stemming from the time I sreamed a hotel down in Rennes). I glanced at the decrepit manufacturers plaque: Schindler. We were in Schindler's Lift.

Alive and not a bit persecuted, we headed for the main square of Brussels, which was nice. It had buildings. And cobbles. But not much else.

Pleased to be getting out of the blandest city south of Hull, we boarded the high speed Thalys train that would zip us effortlessly to Cologne. As we were getting on, a man stepped off the carriage and stood on the plaform, before lighting a cigarette. He wore a checked shirt in keeping with the train company's tasteful colour scheme and a card on a lanyard around his neck.

Assuming he worked on the train, everyone asked him where they were sitting. Assuming they were being stupid, he pointed them in any direction he fancied. General chaos ensued in which I ended up sat, albeit momentarily, on an elderly women's lap.

We got to a Cologne bathed in tepid sunshine and stepped out of the Hauptbahnhof into a plaza milling with cafes and young professionals, relaxing and doing whatever it is they do when they should be at work.

The Cathedral sits atop a stone square, reaching to the heavens with two brooding black spires. Looking up from the ground gives you a kind of vertigo, such is the awe-inspiring giddiness of its 196m.

An amazing feat of engineering and design, the Kölner Dom was started in 1248 and incredibly not finished for another 600 years, finally getting completed in 1880. It survived a heavy bombing in the war as it was so large that allied pilots used it for navigation.

In Cologne you drink Kölsch, slightly dry lager served in diddy 0.2l glasses, which makes for several rounds and deceptively large consumption. The headache I'm tenderly nursing this morning is testament to the beer's cruel tempations.

We had dinner (and beer) in a traditional brauhaus, Päffgen
much to the amusement of our waiter, who simply couldn't wait to try out his alcohol-related puns, "To beer or not to beer, zat is the qwestion," being the best of a terrible bunch.

We're off to meet up with my friend Jonny in Berlin tomorrow. I'll actually get up some pictures then, including one of a salacious-looking Claire staring lustfully at a Gregg's bakery steak bake. Not to be missed.

Day One - London to Brussels

Our journey got off to an inauspicious start, ill-timed as to commence on the first sunny day in England since the Queen's golden Jubliee.

Arriving at the spanking new St Pancras fills you with a disconcerting mixture of sentiments; modernity meeting nostalgia. Even though the glass-walled shops nestled in between the great brick buttresses of William Henry Barlow's shed are no more exotic than Thomas Pink and a cluster of WHSmiths, the terminus is undeniably grandiose. It fills you with pride that this - save for the graffitied concrete barriers of New Cross, which make the Gaza Strip look like Butlins - is the first structure of any significance that a foreigner will see upon entering London.

Starting the trip in style, we enjoy a glass of the Champagne Bar's second cheapest, amid business shirekers and ladies who are either going on or arriving from holiday and therefore feel comfortable quaffing bottles of fizz at 10.30 in the morning.

I've never been cowardly enough to take the eurostar before; my fear of flying having only recently precipitated, I used to gutsily board flying sarchophagi to risk my life in the name of two weeks of sunburn on a Spanish beach. I certainly have never taken the Eurostar from its swanky new home.

We were through check-in and security with the minimum of fuss or faff and as we boarded the train I was constantly expecting something to go awry. Being used to train travel in the UK, it's difficult to see the travel glass as half-full when you've had the whole thing poured over you in a flurry of penalty fares and replacement bus services.

Remarkably, the whole thing worked - from London to Brussels in under two hours. No delays, no crammed carriages and no rickey drinks trolley on which to bash your elbow.

Brussels is an odd place. It, like the constitution it is home to, cannot really make up its mind as to what it stands for. As the legislative capital of the EU, one would expect an amount of cosmopolitanism, if only to make the swarths of besuited diplomats feel fleetingly at home. Not at home of course; their wives live there and not the escorts they've picked up at the Hotel Metropole.

Upon every stree their is a clutch of English, Spanish, German and French brands as if to cement the ultimate realisation of the European Union's as having a Zara and H&M on every street corner. We even saw a Gregg's bakery, obviously wishing to expand beyond its 507 shops om Leeds. That's EU trade law for you.

Mulitfaceted culture is probably a good thing, but it shouldn't be at the detriment to national identity. Claire ''I don't think eight cardigans is excessive" Jones began the afternoon by firing off a number of hasty generalisations about the Belgians, including: "Belgians really do dress poorly," and "There's nothing that is typically Belgian." Save possibly for chocolate and waffles, she's probably right.

It's a short walk from our Van Gogh Hostel into the centre of town, which is flecked with nuggets of Flemish architectural grandeur scattered among building sites and high-rise car parks. The buildings of Brussels are the equivalent of someone throwing a handful of pearls into a bucket of sick.

I'd read about a bar called "Mort Subite", or 'Sudden Death' likely owing to the strength of the beer. We were accosted as we arrived by a brusque waitress, fag in one hand menu pressed beneath the other bingo-wing. She rather too forcefully recommended a 'Gueze' which tasted like a shandy made instead with vinegar.

One heartening thing about Belgian bars is their lax enforcement of the smoking ban. Officially outlawed inside buildings, smoking is encouraged by great dustbin-lids of ashtrays placed sometimes immediately aside non-smoking tables.

We wandered the streets in the waning light, vainly trying to get a feel for the place. Each decorative street was sporadically fissured with another building site or carpark. Along neon lit boulevards we saw hawkish waiters fishooking punters, trawling them into their overpriced seafood restaurants.

We tentatively entered a restaurant with book-lined walls and gingham tablecloths. As we waited an age to be shown a menu, I glanced over to the next table to see a small dog licking clean the plate of an effeminate and lonely man. We decided to head for pastures cleaner.

Eating mussels in Brussels, I for some reason was reminded of Jean Claude van Damme, and spent a large chunk of the night racking my brains for other famous Belgians. Didn't get much further than Kim Clijsters and Hercule Poirot.

We eventually stumbled upon a small cluster of cafes and bars to the south of the centre, full of unaffected youngsters gathering for stolen moments armed with cigarettes and urn-shaped beer glasses. Places like these were sorely missing across the rest of the city.

Still feeling like we were going on holiday in the morning (Brussels, it seems will forever remain little more than a transit hub for Europe's less convoluted cultural destinations) we opted for a little bar, "Booze and Blues" which had a jukebox to melt Henry Winkler's jacket - all 50's rock 'n' roll and skiffle.

Tomorrow we head to Cologne, home of Europe's biggest Cathedral and far too many opulent beer halls. Photos to follow.