Copenhagen to Brussels

There was indeed little sleep for any of us in our compartment. We each contorted our body back, left, right, forward, legs in, head sideways, legs out, slouch, sit up, try forward again, arms to the side, across the body, to the side again, legs in again, head forward, head propped on right arm, left arm, one leg in, one out, both arms by the side with head back while twisted onto one hip, legs in, arms in, out in out left forward right swing everything around rock forwards stand up sit down arms and legs akimbo stop. Wake up five minutes later, arms out, leaning forward and about to fall onto passenger opposite. Eventually we were all so tired that we could have been standing on our heads and still nodded off. At one point I woke up to see all our legs in a polite, no-touching tangle in the middle and the others' sleeping heads bobbing with the train; our weird, subconscious intimacy gave me another one-world moment.
At Hanover the train was divided into two - one half for Amsterdam and another for Cologne and Basel - and each half was joined to similarly halved trains from Moscow/Warsaw and Prague, making six bits of train from three points of origin heading for two destination. It's a bad time to go exploring on the train because you could easily end up in the wrong carriage and wake up in the wrong country. The process of reforming the trains takes an hour or so but one incoming train must have been late because we arrived an hour late in Cologne. I still caught my connecting whizz-train to Brussels, though. The journey south has been so fast that in Cologne after the sleepless night I actually really asked for 'Coffee latte takk bitte?' intoned as a sort of confused question. It translates as 'Coffee milky thanks please?' The coffee man correctly inferred 'milky coffee' and asked, 'Mitt nehmen?' meaning 'To take away?' and I said, 'I'm sorry I don't speak English.' Then I stopped talking and nodded a bit, which was safer.
Meanwhile my coinage system completely broken down yesterday. This is what it was:
Norwegian: back-right pocket
Danish: back-left
Euros: front-right
Swedish: front-left
British: bottom of ruck-sack
The cultural whiplash inflicted by the rapid changes of country has put stresses on the system which are way beyond its design tolerances. The small lumps of coins somehow contaminated each other at some point south of Oslo and now there's just one big lump in a back pocket. I've tried to use the general confusion involved in paying for things - i.e. using about 25 different types of very similar, poorly labelled coins - as a conversation-starter but this has been hard-going; faces this far south have seemed more pinched and severe and there's less eye contact, if any. People look at the fistful of coins and start huffing. Every huff takes five minutes off your life. I think further south people open up again - in Spain, for example, where the golden-bodied people seem to belong to the sun and there's less heaviness around.
In Brussels I had a couple of hours to explore the backstreets and their countless independent cafes and shops tucked away in old buildings. Under the bridges there were signs of an oddball counter-culture - a mural of friendly monsters, for example. Looking at it I realised that the monsters are supposed to be the world's underground people - misfits being themselves in an interesting way that society doesn't usually make room for. It made me think that being a friendly monster is in essence what it means to be creatively counter-cultural. Under another bridge I found the dude in the Appel-a-go-go poster. It's tempting to suppose that a rough-shaven man in shades and a bomber jacket demanding up-front payment from a fly-poster for his own cheaper-than-all-the-rest pyramid-selling mobile phone scheme might not be telling the whole truth. Sometimes it is hard to keep an open mind.
Finally to the Eurostar terminal, then, where I see my first Daily Mail in a while: 'MINISTER DARES TO SPEAK THE TRUTH.' Shock story: Tory government agrees with reactionary newspaper. But I'm in the tunnel now, there's no going back.