Status Updates From The Cyclist Who Went Out in...

[…] Syrians began crossing from Russia into Norway up at the Kirkenes border — exploiting a loophole that permitted cyclists free passage. You may imagine my delight when TV news reports showed refugees wobbling up to my departure point through the first snows of winter on their ride of choice: a cheapo kid’s bike. Some 5,509 made it over before the Norwegians changed the rules.

[…] the raw head of a giant cannabis plant I found growing wild by the road. For two days the quieter borderlands were thick with jagged little leaves and potent odours, presumably rhetorical legacy of drug shipments abandoned in panic.

There was a palpable sense that I had broached our continent’s outer limits, and gone back the thick end of a century for good measure.

The Soviets never trusted Czechoslovakia. Before the war, it had ranked amongst the world’s most technically advanced countries; afterwards, still better off and better educated than any other on its side of the curtain, the nation was picked on as a hotbed of bourgeois intellectualism.

The compact hotel restaurant was heaving with noisy diners in matching tracksuits who appeared to be members of some sort of competitive smoking club […]