Brits are of course now labouring under a diet of cold turkey. Christmas generates its own extraordinary traditions across Europe, which differ greatly from country to country. There is no such thing as a standard-issue European Christmas. The English certainly like their turkey on the Christmas table, but elsewhere across the continent firm Christmas favourites include baked carp, goose, spicy hams, and roast lamb.

Christmas may have come and gone in western Europe, but we shouldn’t forget that as we move east across the continent, things change. The Orthodox Churches still organise their affairs according to the old Julian calendar, and Christmas is not celebrated in most of eastern Europe until early January. By the time Russians sit down to have their Christmas meal (on the evening of 6 January), most western and central European households have already taken down their Christmas decorations.

The festive season brings its own cast of secular characters. So in Russia and other eastern European countries, Ded Moroz, also known as Father Frost, rewards children with gifts. Ded Moroz lives in northern Russia (click here to read more), an unkempt spot on the Sukhona river that is attempting to cash in on Ded Moroz in much the same way that Rovaniemi in northern Finland has proclaimed its credentials as the unbelievably tacky and ultra-commercial hometown of Santa Claus. While Santa relies on a bunch of elves for assistance, Ded Moroz lucks out in having secured the services of the beautiful Snegurochka to help distribute gifts.

Globalisation may have inflected many aspects of our lives, but Christmas still throws up its own culturally-encoded customs and characters.

This is the last in a series of eight postings by Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries, a Berlin-based duo who edit hidden europe magazine. They will return with more contributions to EuroCheapo in Spring 2008.

It is always worth pondering quite where is the best place to change trains. Many journeys across Europe offer multiple options. No sane Brit ever chooses to change trains at Birmingham New Street—a sort of subterranean Hades somewhere in the English Midlands—and few are ever really forced to do so. For many rail itineraries across England give a plethora of possible points for an hour’s leisure time, to enjoy a coffee and a bit of fresh air while waiting for the next train connection.

This is the case in many other European countries as well. Surely no rational human being ever decided that Warsaw’s eastern station (Warszawa Wschodnia) was the ideal place to mull over the affairs of the world for an hour or two between trains. Generous-hearted souls we may be, but it is difficult to find a good word for Wschodnia – unless you want to catch the pulse of what life was like in much of eastern and central Europe two decades ago. Take a look at this architectural gem and the surrounding cityscape.

And then there are the railway stations where it is an absolute delight to linger between trains, the sort of places where changing trains is a blessing. Dresden Hauptbahnhof is emerging from a protracted reconstruction to become one of those. Cologne’s Hauptbahnhof already is. Ignore the frenzied bustle of its shopping mall (a tribute to poor taste and greasy food) and head instead for the cathedral, a mere thirty-second walk from the station’s main entrance.

It doesn’t take a lot to transform an enforced layover into a memorable travel moment. Brussels Midi is the largest of the rail stations in the Belgian capital, and the area of town in which it is located is nothing to write home about. But we change trains there often and La Table du Midi, an unpretentious café just a stone’s throw from the railway platforms, makes it all worthwhile.

There are some stations which are just fabulous places to arrive and linger, unquestionably good spots to change trains. Among our favourites are Zürich Hauptbahnhof (so well placed for the city centre) and Berlin’s new Hauptbahnhof (a crystal cathedral for transport.)

So check those schedules carefully. You simply don’t want to change trains at Warszawa Wschodnia or Birmingham New Street.

This is the seventh in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

Europe has its fair share of those little tiddler states – you know the ones, territories like San Marino, Monaco and Liechtenstein which, if you cut a decent pace, you can walk across in a day.

Vatican City is the tiniest of the bunch. You can stride from one end of this theocratic state to the other in the time it takes to mumble two Hail Marys. In addition to those well known microstates, there are places like the Faroes, the Åland Islands and the Bailiwick of Guernsey which function to all intents and purposes as independent states while retaining a nominal political link to another entity. Then there are the places that aspire towards independence, but whose secessionist aspirations have not yet been internationally recognised: Abkhazia, Transdniestr and – certainly one to watch in the weeks ahead – Kosovo.

Oddest of the bunch is surely Sealand, an upstart self-styled principality on an abandoned sea fort in the North Sea. No-one really takes Sealand seriously, except for the retired British army officer who ‘occupied’ this unprepossessing lump of concrete in 1967. He and his family (all now royals of course) really assert Sealand’s right to independence, and in this fortieth anniversary year of Sealand life, devoted (or gullible) fans of Europe’s quirkiest polity can purchase souvenir mugs and T-shirts.

Last year life on the offshore statelet took a turn for the worse when a fire in a generator room destroyed what few home comforts Sealand ever possessed. Unsurprisingly, the Sealand Royal Family are minded to quit and return to the English mainland. So Sealand is up for sale. If you have 750 million euros to spare, now is the chance to splash out and buy your own (presumably slightly singed) statelet.

This is the six in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

Even the most seasoned European traveller can be caught unawares by rail schedules changes. Most European rail companies introduce major timetable changes over the second weekend in December, and this year there are some big alterations in the offing.

There is no more civilised way of making a big hop across Europe than on a night train, and the new schedules see a whole raft of new night train services. Take Amsterdam for example. The Dutch city has always featured on Europe’s night train schedules, but for 2008 Amsterdam secures new daily services to Copenhagen, Dresden, Milan, Minsk, Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw.

For the first time for many years Switzerland and Bavaria will benefit from direct overnight trains to Poland and points east, with new direct night sleeper services from Basel SBB and Munich to Warsaw and Moscow. Fixed fares apply for travel on most European night train routes, often with little advantage for railpass holders. A one-way journey in a shared sleeper costs from €69. For those on a budget, couchettes are priced from €49 and a one-way overnight in a reclining seat begins at €29.

The changes are of course not limited to night train services. New for 2008 are a daily direct train from both Vienna and Prague to Stralsund on Germany’s Baltic coast, a very handy new daytime train from Kraków to Budapest (less than nine hours on a beautiful route through the mountains that straddle the Polish-Slovakian border), a new fast direct daytime service from Paris to Munich (just over six hours) to supplement the long-standing Paris-Munich night train, a new direct Berlin to Copenhagen link (where the entire train gets shipped on a ferry between Denmark and Germany), and a new direct once daily train from Geneva Airport to Venice.

Rail travel in Europe can challenge even the most competent travel planner. Web sites like those of the Deutsche Bahn can help. But there is really no substitute for the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, a gem of a book updated each month. For many savvy European travellers, it is required bedtime reading.

This is the fifth in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

hidden europe has been on the road this past fortnight, meandering through Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is not a country that gets a lot of attention in the travel media. Sarajevo café life, the bridge at Mostar and the Roman Catholic shrine at Medugorje are the three Bosnian “sights” that travel writers love to cover. But what about the rest of the country?

It is of course a region that endured a terrible war in the 1990s. The Dayton Accord may have been a fine way of ending that war, but it wasn’t necessarily the best possible way of creating an enduring peace. But against the odds, Bosnia and Herzegovina is emerging as a credible multi-national state. Its two entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska, have been cajoled into a precarious co-existence, while the town of Brcko (an enclave that is part of neither entity) is maturing from a wayward market town, where everything from guns to women were traded, into an entrepreneurial pocket of Bosnia where some effort is really made to promote the co-existence of Serbs, Muslims and Croats within a single town.

As with all areas where once there has been conflict, the question of rebuilding monuments, churches, mosques, and other emblematic buildings is a knotty one. Even in Dresden in Germany, the rebuilding of the city’s Frauenkirche (destroyed by American and British bombers in 1945) is laced with controversy. Quite whose memories are being embedded in the new stones?

Similar issues arise in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the world’s media rejoiced a year or two back at the reconstruction of the bridge over the Neretva gorge in Mostar. West European and North American audiences were clamouring for some good news from Bosnia (perhaps conscious that the imposition of a High Representative does not exactly provide a model of democracy.) High flown speeches highlighted how the bridge might stand as a cornerstone of reconciliation, and one dignitary even ventured to suggest that the Mostar bridge might link the worlds of Islam and Christendom. Quite a burden of responsibility for one small bridge to bear.

We may rejoice that the Mostar bridge is back in place, but in the back streets of the city a lot of ordinary mortals are still waiting for their homes and businesses to be rebuilt.

This is the fourth in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

The cult of Che Guevara gets a boost this week as special events across Europe commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the revolutionary’s untimely death in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. In Derry in Ireland, a week of celebrations will include the unveiling on Saturday of a new mural of Che – complementing the long standing Che Guevara mural a little further up the Foyle valley in Strabane.

Che Guevara stock remains as high as ever among European socialists, not least in Andalucía (southern Spain) where knotty issues surrounding land tenure are still a popular grievance in some agricultural communities. Stop off in Marinaleda, just forty miles southwest of Córdoba, to catch the feel of a small town that has a passion for combative action against absentee landlords. A spark of revolutionary zeal permeates the town and is reflected in graffiti, street names and murals.

Other European socialist thinkers and politicians still mould the travel plans of more politically engaged travellers. There are larger than life figures of Lenin all across Europe (from Spitsbergen to St Petersburg) and even Stalin is eulogised in a new museum in Volgograd – and of course, in his home town of Gori in Georgia where a huge statue of Uncle Jo stands in the town’s main square.

Predictably Ulyanovsk, where Lenin lived as a kid, plays the Lenin card very strongly, but affection for Lenin is not just confined to Russia. There are good Lenin museums at Ulyanovsk, at Shushenskoye (where Lenin lived in exile and was married) and at Tampere in Finland.

The socialist flame has not been totally extinguished. Hasta la victoria siempre!

This is the third in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

You cannot have missed the hype surrounding Eurostar’s imminent move from its existing London terminal at Waterloo to St Pancras. For those anxious to get from Paris or Brussels to London in a rush, the Eurostar train is certainly the way to go, offering city-centre-to-city-centre journey times with which the plane simply cannot compete. Fares start at €38.50 one way.

Eurostar old hands have often moaned at the painfully slow approach into the old Waterloo terminal—an approach that will soon become a thing of the past. But we always rather liked it. The train creaked round curves and crawled over Victorian viaducts that afforded delicious perspectives on south London life. There were glimpses of Caribbean street life in Brixton, the brooding hulk of an old power station at Battersea, and the washing hung out to dry on the balconies of apartment blocks at Nine Elms.

When the new route comes into public service on 14 November 2007, trains will dive under the Thames in a new tunnel well to the east of London and briefly remerge above the ground in Essex before taking a subterranean route under east London to reach St Pancras, 20 minutes quicker than the old line into Waterloo. It remains to be seen whether the south Essex marshes at 180 miles per hour have quite the same fascinating appeal as Brixton and Battersea at 30 miles per hour.

Eurostar tickets can be booked online. For more on city approaches with Eurostar see hidden europe’s features on London and Brussels.

This is the first in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

A few weeks ago, we stumbled upon hidden europe, an amazing publication devoted to the lost corners and secret terrains of Europe. We blogged about the magazine, ordered six back issues, delighted in the unexpected arrival of the current issue in the mail, and then blogged about it some more.

This sort of fan activity doesn’t usually happen in a vacuum. Naturally, we sent the editorial board effusive, gushing emails. Happily, they weren’t put off by our enthusiasm, and today the editors of hidden europe write the first in their fortnightly series of posts for the EuroCheapo Blog.

We’re pleased as punch.