Ari’s Reviews > The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Dispatches from the Iron Curtain > Status Update
Ari
is on page 266 of 368
[…] 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.
— Aug 30, 2025 07:35AM
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Ari
is on page 263 of 368
[…] 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.
— Aug 30, 2025 07:02AM
Ari
is on page 261 of 368
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.
— Aug 30, 2025 06:57AM
Ari
is on page 243 of 368
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.
— Aug 30, 2025 05:52AM
Ari
is on page 230 of 368
The compact hotel restaurant was heaving with noisy diners in matching tracksuits who appeared to be members of some sort of competitive smoking club […]
— Aug 29, 2025 05:36AM
Ari
is on page 212 of 368
I could cast an expert eye across the land and chart out the border by colour alone: the twenty-five-year-old trees that had annexed the death-strip were a conspicuously paler green than their senior neighbours. In another twenty-five the watchtowers might have all been swallowed by trunks and leaves, but for now they stood clear.
— Aug 19, 2025 05:59AM
Ari
is on page 176 of 368
But what a rare joy, in good easyJet age, to find myself a bona fide voyage of discovery right here on my continental doorstep, exploring a huge swath of Europe I would never otherwise have dreamed of going near. Good old bicycle.
— Aug 15, 2025 06:13AM
Ari
is on page 169 of 368
In the evenings, the streets and sands were dense with hand-holders: grandparents, young lovers, even teenage boys and their mothers.
— Aug 15, 2025 05:44AM
Ari
is on page 146 of 368
The Communist authorities’ sensitive respect for cultural heritage was a perennial surprise. Warsaw’s shattered medieval old town, for instance, was rebuilt with painstaking attention to detail [..]
— Aug 09, 2025 07:05AM
Ari
is on page 141 of 368
[…] anti-Semitism was so entrenched in certain areas that Jews were being massacred even before the Nazi invasion. By the end of 1943, Liepaja’s pre-war Jewish population had been reduced from 5,700 to precisely three; of the 350,000 Jews who called the Baltics home in 1939, only 6 per cent would survive the war. No other Jewish community suffered more.
— Aug 09, 2025 06:55AM
Ari
is on page 124 of 368
Back in the pre-Internet age, you never went on holiday alone: for better or worse, there was always a guidebook for company.
— Jul 29, 2025 04:23PM
