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what he was talking about. Imagine, I had never heard of the existence of Ely, so what he said, was just a combination of strange sounds and then - oh, the shame of it - I didn't know the meaning of the verb to change', not in the context of trains! I can't understand it now, but it's true, believe me. (All my pupils MUST learn this expression, I tell them what can happen if not!) My English fellow travellers saved me by throwing me out at Ely crying in chorus "You must change here!". Well, when I was standing on the platform with my luggage, it was dawning on me what I had to do.

I made my longest train ride ever as a student at Heidelberg University in the south of Germany when I went to a language course in Moscow. Our professor had told us, no, ordered us, to go by train to get a feeling for the vastness of the country. I'll be forever grateful for this advice. All in all, the ride lasted 36 hours (nothing compared to what a friend of ours did: Naples - Peking, 11 days!), we had a big compartment in which we could sit, play cards, read, eat and drink endless cups of tea which the attendant of the carriage prepared with a samowar. For the night a folding wall was drawn in the middle so as to divide the women's from the men's section!

During the course a friend and I decided to visit Boris Pasternak's grave (the author of Dr. Shivago' for which he got the Nobel Prize for Literature) in a small town in the vicinity of Moscow which was strictly off limits for foreigners in those days. I decided to be a deaf mute for a while, my friend did the talking and bought the tickets. He could speak Russian much better than I, at least as well as the hundreds of non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union. We were poor and badly dressed then and disappeared inconspicuously in the crowd. All went well and we had a great day out.

I WAS a deaf mute and inconspicuous when travelling in Denmark, but in a completely different situation. I travelled with a Danish friend, small and dark-haired, who's taken for a local when in Italy, whereas I can pass for a Danish woman. So the conductors and fellow travellers used to address me which I didn't even notice because I don't understand Danish. Very amusing!

When I tell you that I travelled by train in Egypt as well, you might expect something adventurous, but it wasn't, the first class train ride from Cairo to Assuan was part of a group trip, all went smoothly. The only interesting thing were the locomotives and trains we saw in the main

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