Did a lot of writing on the train from Krakow to Warsawa, so as soon as we get Internet there’ll be a mass update. We sat in our first class cabin and relaxed with free coffee, juice, water and little ginger biscuits. It’s a short trip here, maybe three hours, but we left ourselves …

With only one day in Krakow, we decided it would be best to (temporarily) eschew our “independent travel” principles and join a guided tour of the Auschwitz complex — the Nazi concentration camp where over a million people were murdered in the name of “racial purity” …

No time for a real update — we’re sitting having breakfast in Krakow, just about to jump on a train to Warsaw then a night train to Moscow. It’ll be the first time we get to use our very expensive visas! I’ll come back later with posts on Budapest and Krakow, promise!

A relaxing stay in Vienna (Wien), with little to do and even less inclination to do it. We stayed at Wombat’s “Base” Hostel — very clean, nice, friendly and better serviced than some of the hotels we’ve stayed at. Personally I want to stay in hostels from now on, as …

We arrived in Salzburg in style: our 1er classe tickets gave us a small six-seater cabin, and les quatre etrangers we were to share with from Munchen never showed, so we had the place to ourselves. We read, relaxed (even stretched out across the three facing seats for a snooze) and in the afternoon …

Our last day in Strasbourg we walked around (a lot!) and found a local place for lunch — and I do mean local. The menus were en francais, mit Deutsche if we really wanted it, but no anglais. So we ordered pretty much at random — although we could have a pretty good guess at salade/salat, there …