Budapest to Belgrade

Ah the wonders of long distance train travel!

For some ridiculously small amount of forints I ride a comfortable train across the Hungarian plain. It is brown and pretty boring landscape, really, but the company is good. Maddy is a student from New York who has been spending several months in the region digging through archives and getting fed up with life in Bucharest and Novi Sad. She studies the growth of nationalism in the Balkans ad Romania evidenced in the 60's student press.

'It's great' she says 'hardly anyone studies this stuff, so there's still a lot of interesting things to say'.*

Jonas is a teenager from Baden Wittenberg, Germany. He plans to get to India, and is taking the train to Istanbul, from where he will take a plane.

And Anna is taking a trip through Eastern Europe on her own before she succumbs to regular work.

As we draw close to the border, the train gradually empties, until it is almost only us four solo travellers in our carriage. Then we pull into the first town in Serbia.

'Get ready, we are about to be invaded by Serbs' says Maddy.

I feel a flush of anxiety. But, as I have learnt time and time again, people over the border are really just like us. Some pretty, some ugly, some drunk, some dreaming, some singing along to pop songs in a different language. She's right in one sense though, the carriage fills up, and suddenly it feels no longer comfortable to chat away in English about the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything else is fine.

*Her thesis is to do with the way the civil war of the 90's was due more to constructed ideas of nationality, rather than deep-seated ethnic differences.

Edit> Her focus, as far as I can remember it, looks at the alliances and growth of various right and left wing student movements during the sixties.