I’d travelled from China to Paris without a hitch, and I imagined that Paris to London would be the easiest part of the journey. Sadly I was mistaken. I headed to Gare du Nord at about midday and found that there was a train to Calais leaving in a few minutes. So [...]

I got to Paris at 9am. I got a metro to République, remembered from my trip two years earlier which exit to take, and walked along Boulevard Jules Ferry to the youth hostel I’d stayed in before. The atmosphere of cosy familiarity was abruptly shattered when they turned out to be full. [...]

The last thing I did in Berlin was go up the Alexanderplatz TV Tower. It is almost identical to the CCTV tower in Beijing, but 35 metres shorter. I had a snack in the rotating restaurant, watched Berlin go by far below, and felt like I was almost home. I had a [...]

The Reichstag, burned down in 1933 and used as a pretext for Nazi repression, had been restored in the 1990s, and three years before I arrived it had become the parliament of Germany at the same time as Berlin had become the capital again.
In many cities throughout the world, if you want something glassy and [...]

I got a train to Berlin. The six hour journey went by in a flash, and I barely had time to notice the countryside. What I did see as we crossed into Germany was the Oder River looking scarily swollen and fast flowing. I had heard that there was severe flooding in [...]

I didn’t really do much in Warsaw. I’d walked miles and miles every day in Moscow, but I couldn’t muster up the same enthusiasm here. The city was like a small village in comparison to Moscow, and once I’d walked around the old town, I felt like I’d seen it all. So [...]

I’d only meant to spend a couple of days in Moscow at first, but it had held on to me for six days and I really wanted to stay longer. But I was still almost two thousand miles from home and I had to be back at work in just over a week, so [...]

On my last day in Moscow, I invested 3 roubles and 50 kopeks - about seven pence - in a trip on the metro. It’s famously grand, and I’d already travelled on it a lot, but today my mission was to take photographs. I travelled around the brown line, which has the most [...]

If the VDNKh was a country, it would be as big as Monaco and the Vatican City put together. This huge area in the north of Moscow is the site of what used to be the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, and is now a massive marketplace, where everything you can get [...]

I changed hostels after a couple of days in Moscow, because some people I’d met on the train were staying in the Hostel Asia, and it sounded much nicer than the Sherstone. So I headed over there early one morning with all my colossal backpacks, only to find that the lifts weren’t working. [...]