Deliciously ice cold tap water, gleaming white supermarkets, perfectly packaged cheeses, watches weighted with glittery bits, and the magnificence of the lake, a glistening great silvery body of sparkles that spreads out within the city: my first fresh breath of Geneva.

Belongings dropped at our rabbit warren style hostel, Iain and I strode out into the city, heading for Lake Geneva. I had never before encountered a lakeside city, and with little expectation, followed the ordinary, linear streets toward the centre. (Read on …)

The banderillero swaggered across the dry yellow sand, knelt in front of the bullgate, crossed himself – slowly, carefully – and spread out his pink cape. He was perhaps my age, probably younger. From our cheap seat, near the top of the Plaza de Toros, Claire and I could not see or hear the gate open. We saw only a blur of brown muscle, the flash of a cape, their meeting, melting, and then the banderillero rolling to the side, away.

The bull paused, sniffing. It was the second of six: blood had already been spilt in the ring. Its head oscillated, eyes acknowledging the crowd and, perhaps, its circumstances at the centre of a confusing spectacle. Again it charged. (Read on …)

Claire and I stopped, panting, at the metal rods that closed a narrow road to traffic. We had been given detailed directions and followed them closely but were lost, struggling to find the home of Ivone and Vitor Mascarenhas or the remains of a small fishing village that apparently surrounded it.

My mother’s friend Eugenia had bought a house in Portugal, near the beach, not long before our trip started. I contacted her, hoping (as budget travellers do) that she could accommodate us for a few days. She said she could, at her home in Lagos, and suggested that her parents, who live in Cascais, just outside Lisbon, might be as willing. Ivone and Vitor Mascarenhas are her parents. (Read on …)

It was just before midnight and darkness masked the contours of the city. Street lights were sparsely spread and provided no more than a dim glow. I approached a taxi driver outside Pontevedra’s station exit, asking how much he’d charge to the Hotel Peregrino. He looked at me, disbelieving, and pointed diagonally away from the station. “Es alli”, he said, his voice hesitant, perhaps regretting his honesty. I thanked him, and we walked the two minutes down the road to what was our third ‘station hotel’, complete with locals drinking outside the bar, plastic chairs, and the familiar contrast of grot and appeal. (Read on …)

Claire and I arrived in Madrid late at night. We waited for a train to our hostel, watched by police with sniffer dogs, listening to the murmur of news and advertising emitted from wide screen televisions placed between the tracks.

We stayed at Pop Hostel, in a small, two bunk bed dorm. The room was quiet but sometimes too intimate and often awkward. The hostel was full of Brazilians, so full that Portuguese had replaced English as the language of first recourse. I was often addressed in Portuguese by strangers, then laughed at when I stammered back in confusion. (Read on …)

Claire and I left France from Avignon in the early morning, when the city’s streets were for a moment quiet after another long festival night. The prospect of was travel easier and more exhilarating in the early morning, when the sun rising over a quickly moving landscape promised both a new place and a new day.

Two regional trains would carry us slowly into Spain, and then through it, to Barcelona. We boarded the first. It was made up of old fashioned carriages, the seats all confined to small compartments, which we reached through the narrow space that had been left to a corridor. In the compartment two short brown couches, sitting three to a side, faced each other, so that people sat with legs and arms intermingling. The carriage quietly conjured up black and white images of lovers solemnly parting on a platform edge, or of coated men, smoke and subterfuge, from an age when rail travel was glamorous. (Read on …)

I sat in a poolside chair on terracotta tiles, the silver handles of the pool’s steps glinting into the pale blue water. Beyond the roof of the house, the tops of cedar trees were sparsely spread between thick flowering bushes, abuzz with stripy bumble bees. I heard only the noise of the cigalles in the garden, the strange chirping creatures that resemble a small piece of bark, and chirp strictly when the temperature reaches 25°C. I felt relaxed and content, inspired by my surroundings. The simplicity of the comfortable life I languished in for a week made me long for a piece of it myself. Although my desire to continue moving was still present, after the flurry of Paris, I felt incredibly relieved to be able to exhale. (Read on …)

Paris is the world’s most photographed, most written about, most visited city. More than 30 million people arrive on the banks of the Seine each year, only 45% of them French. “Paris,” according to my literary guide to the city, “comes to us second-hand. Our imagination has been there first, worked upon by the imagination of others. It is through the filter of their memories, desires, dreams, descriptions, lies, gossip that we experience the city. What we respond to is an imagined place.”

Claire and I did the things so obvious that guidebooks needn’t bother to mention them. We dangled our feet in the fountains outside the Louvre, before entering through glass pyramids to see people seeing the Mona Lisa. We sat in the Parc du Champ de Mars, below the Eiffel Tower, and sketched swaying oak trees against the building’s complicated network of steel. We got rude service at a Parisian café when I was moved, still in my chair, from the edge of the pavement. (Read on …)