Berlin - Warsaw

Kamil, the long suffering trolley pusher of the Berlin to Warsaw Eurocity, comes over to my table for the third time with a sigh. Having asked for the menu, I then needed help translating and then found I couldn't pay by card. So I order an ice tea and drink it slowly, looking out of the window as the landscape changes from the suburbs of Berlin, to thick but orderly forest, then to quaint Polish villages with the occasional surreal sight of large Tesco's superstore.

My first interview is with Patricia, a polite German girl who speaks excellent English, travelling to Poland to visit the concentration camps. Her motivations are understandably complex and it is interesting to discuss them. She feels the subject has not really been discussed enough while she was growing up for her to be able to grasp fully the implications of that period in her county's history.

Damien and his friend, two very tough looking exteriors but friendly and funny on the inside, have had car troubles. Buying the car yesterday in Berlin they set off for Warsaw but a few hours later it broke down. They took it to the garage who said it would be fixed in two hours, four hours later they returned and were told it would need two days. So now they are sitting on the train bound their university in Warsaw, hoping to return at the weekend and reclaim their hopefully more reliable motor. They do have difficulty remembering the name of the tiny village where they left it, as much as I have difficulty pronouncing it. At the end of the interview they give me a bottle of Macedonian wine, which is a completely unexpected level of generosity. All I have is the contents of surprises from Berlin so I give them some of the glittery stickers. One big one says Babydoll in pink but I don't think they mind.

Slavomir is my final interviewee, though I met him as soon as we got on in Hauptbahnhof but he has been sleeping much of the time since and it has given him a crick neck. He is coming from the Max Planck Institute, where he has been supervising a project at the centre for Social Anthropology. His area of expertise is the effect of religion on politics in Eastern Europe and he talks very eloquently about the subject. He is on the way to give a speech at a conference in his home town and I know the audience will not doze off as he has done.