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Michael Palin: New Europe starts with a simple idea: that only a couple of hours from home is a half of Europe that is for him as unknown and unexplored as the plateau of Tibet or the vastness of the Sahara. Cut off for most of his life by Cold Wars and Iron Curtains, Europe's eastern lands are now open for business - and Michael sets off to discover them.
After the Balkans, which experienced vicious fighting in the 1990s, Michael encounters a strong eastern influence through Bulgaria, Macedonia and into Turkey, where Europe and Asia meet. He follows the mighty Danube into Serbia and Hungary, the very heart of Europe, and on to Ukraine. Then it's the Baltic States, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and what was formerly East Germany. Visiting twenty countries, more than in his Himalaya and Sahara journeys combined, he encounters painful memories and exuberant celebrations.
Throwing himself into local life with his usual reckless curiosity, he samples pig fat with a brandy chaser, meets Romanian lumberjacks, drives the 8.58 stopping train from Poznan to Wolsztyn, learns about mine-clearing in Bosnia, treads the catwalk at a Budapest fashion show and watches Turkish gents wrestling in olive oil. It's New Europe, but vintage Palin.
Presented on 6 CDs, read by the author.
Audible Audio
First published September 13, 2007
"I had always imagined this dreadful place to be utterly isolated in some apocryphal landscape, yet there are houses not half a mile from the camp, and quite substantial houses too, with balconies that look out at the evening sun..."
"Dresden, the capital of Saxony, the city we are approaching in low sunlight on a fast autobahn, which stands, alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a synonym for the worst and darkest excesses of aerial destruction."
"...some people still have the Wall in their heads…that even seventeen years after reunification there is still segregation between the eastern part and the western part, and it will probably take another generation to get rid of that Wall.’"