Across the European Union

Last week, I travelled to Seville on business, flying from Warsaw to Munich, on by plane to Madrid, then by fast train to Seville.

Flying into Munich, I snapped this suburban landscape which immediately reminded me of Jeziorki - except that the fields are wider, everything's tarmacked over and orderly. Yet the semi-rural nature of the landscape has not been lost. Sensible town planning is the answer; let's hope that Jeziorki will develop in a similar way and not turn into sprawl.

Onwards from Munich and over the Alps; I'm getting a geographical sense of the European Union quite different from my usual Warsaw-London-Warsaw hops. The Alps are a formidable barrier to land travel from north to south. From the air, picturesque peaks, but imagine crossing this lot from foreground over to the most distant mountain pass on foot or with pack-animal, as would have been the case before the 19th century.

Approaching Madrid from the air, I can see what is meant by the word terracotta - literally 'cooked earth'. The Spanish soil is scorched by the September sun; the landscape is quite alien to a citizen of northern Europe.

(Below:) The journey from Madrid is by high-speed train, the Alta Velocidad Espanola (AVE). An example to Poland of what can be acheived in terms of transforming a nation's transport infrastructure through political will. The train covered the 470 km from the Spanish capital to Seville in 2 hrs 20 mins, arriving 10 minutes earlier than scheduled, averaging 200km/h. By contrast, the 300 km from Warsaw to Kraków currently takes 2 hrs 45 mins - and that's one of Poland's better railway services!