Europe on Two Martinis a Day - Part 1

One thing that impresses me about travel writers is that they actually find the time to write, and the inspiration to write when the time is there. Travel may broaden the mind, but it also numbs it, and at the end of a hard day's travelling, I usually just want to shower, eat and imbibe. In this case, for the first half of my journey around Europe, the imbibation was a couple of gin martinis. This is not my normal tipple, but for some reason I bought a bottle of each at the Macedonian border, and was then so eager to lighten my rucksack that I drank them every night. The "two martinis" in the title means two water glasses, which meant, as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy put it: "Gin Martini - two great drinks, one amazing hangover." So here is Uncle Solri's first travelling tip: consume plenty of fluids, but not fluids that contain more than 10% alcohol, and certainly not ones containing juniper.

So back to the Macedonian border (after a pleasant and largely uneventful journey through Turkey and Greece). I had only previously been through customs at airports and sea ports; border crossings on a train are much more relaxed affairs, with people wandering around the station, smoking, drinking and waiting for their passports to come back. They even had music playing. The only hint of tension was a policeman stopping me taking photographs, a quaint practice presumably surviving from the days of the Cold War.

Officially and at the insistence of the Greeks, Macedonia is known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. (And I thought "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" was a silly name for a country.) Naming a country after what it used to be does not bode well. How about renaming the USA as the Former British Colonies of North America? Like almost everyone I've talked to from former Yugoslavia, the hotel staff, after commiserating with us on getting ripped off by a large skinhead taxi driver, agreed that former Yugoslavia would have been better off if it had stayed plain old Yugoslavia, without all that inflation, unemployment and ethnic cleansing. Still, from the little I saw of it, Macedonia has the atmosphere of a country getting its act together: it's scruffy but active, and given ten years, it will probably be a proper European capital. Skopje is not somewhere you'd put first on your list of European capitals to visit, but it is pleasant enough. Rather like American tourists heading for the nearest McDonalds, we made a beeline for the Turkish quarter, where we found friendly people whose Turkish we could almost understand, good food and Albanian music. From there, we toured the rest of the city, visiting the castle and a beautiful new church.



And so to Serbia, which is definitely not getting its act together, if first impressions are anything to go by. (asteriskhere can give you a more accurate view of life in Serbia.) After a journey in a train that seemed to have been made when Tito was in his prime and last cleaned when he was still alive, we arrived five hours late in Belgrade. Not since I visited my grandmother's home town of Knottingley during the miners' strike have I seen such a depressing place: grimy buildings, frowning people and holes in walls where NATO paid a visit. We were planning to change trains in Belgrade and go straight on to Budapest, but we had missed our connection and didn't fancy spending another ten hours in Belgrade, so hopped on a train bound for Venice via Croatia and Slovenia. This was, of course, another dirty, antiquated train, but at least our compartment was empty, so we were able to stretch out and catch some sleep.

At the Croatian border we were woken up because we needed to change carriages. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a different world: clean, modern carriage, Latin alphabet and a German-speaking guard serving us cappuccino. We passed the time to Zagreb chatting about martial arts and organic food to a Croatian woman with the wonderfully vampiric name of Elvira. After that, it was just a short ride through Slovenia before we arrived in Venice to get washed, eat pizza and drink more martini.