The beauty of travel is not so much the places you visit as the chance connections you make along the way. In Olomouc I learned the rules of ice hockey from a French speaking Canadian and discovered the ethnological link between my ancestral heritage and the shape of my face. "You're very Saxon," said the Austrian, butting uninvited into a conversation about Czech women. Mishearing the final word, I took it for a different kind of compliment.
The following afternoon, on the train ride to Warsaw, I spent two and a half hours - or the entire section of track between Ostrava and Katowice - playing cards on upturned suitcases with bleary-eyed Australians born in Istanbul and Mumbai. When they changed for Krakow I had the whole carriage to myself, watching the flat, forested countryside move slowly past as I finished Sciascia's The Moro Affair and the last of the beers.
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