From next week on, I’ll be on my grand tour of Poland and Russia and you can follow my trip over on In the Dark Night. Here’s what I did last week.

Last week, I drove 1100 kilometres in a tiny car from Korea past hundreds and hundreds of Dutch caravans, first to the city where the cinematographe was invented and then further on to a small village at the sea, where it smelled of pine and thousands of cicada were making a sound like a gigantic maracas party taking place in the trees around our tent all night. We walked up the narrow streets of an old hilltop village and had dinner next to the resting place of a French Nobel Prize Laureate who once wrote a poem called Nocturne, and we watched the lights of the cities and villages on the coast across the water getting stronger and the sun weaker. Before I drove another 1100 kilometres back to the city where the three wise men are enshrined, we had another dinner in a small stony village on a hill at a place where American tourists were discussing their alimony payments and where 350 years ago Papist mercenaries killed most people living there.