Denmark!

After 22 hours of near continuous train travel we have traversed the entire length of Sweden and made it to Copenhagen! Signal failure shortly before Malmo temporarily threatened all our carefully coordinated plans, but in the end we even managed to squeeze onto the competely oversubscribed onward train to Hamburg.

Around us is a babble of different European languages. Across from us an Italian gentleman and a French couple, a Dutch guy further down, snippets of Liverpudlian drifting down the aisle. Before you ask: no, I don't think that's a recognised European language. Plenty of Danish people of course and, needless to say, the omnipresent German pensioner, never far from any tourist destination and instantly recognisable from their own brand of frumpy waterproof, known in my and other German families fittingly as the "anorak". And then there's us of course, thinking of ourselves as arrogantly unclassifiable and having descended into our private brand of Deutschlish, as we sometimes do.

I'm uncertain whether this melange played out on trains all over Europe will aid intra-European relations, as everyone exchanges their heroic travel stories in accented English or stir old prejudices as they fight over the remaining seats. Fact is, we've got a seat. But then, being German, apparently I've got a reputation to lose.