…then there was no Beer…
“Nye, nye Pivo”, the Serbian barman says to me resignedly, before continuing in English, “Would you like something else? Brandy? Wine?”
I’m surprised. The train has run out of beer, and despite the heavy night in Munich, ten hours of travel has left me hankering for refreshment.
“Vodka?”, I reply hopefully, and the man nods and heads for the fridge. The train is now in Croatia, the fourth country of the day. It all started at 0726 in Munich with the journey heading south through the beautiful Austrian Alps where I struck up conversations with students heading home; an Austrian to Vienna and a young Serbian bound for Belgrade after her first ever trip to Western Europe. Then there were the Japanese girls en route to Dubrovnik.
The restaurant-bar was coupled on after we emerged from the Alpine tunnel that connects Austria and Slovenia, but it was the Croatian hordes who boarded in Zagreb that seem to have consumed all the beer. Maybe it was something to do with the burgeoning temperatures.
As I sip my rather disappointing (but astonishingly cheap) Serbian vodka it starts to get dark and I chat to a gynaecologist on her way home to her family in Serbia from her job in Ljubljana. As we approach the final frontier of the day I begin to wait impatiently for this pento-national, fifteen hour ride to finally conclude.
