The ritual of arriving somewhere slowly

We've booked a lot of overnight trains lately. Not because they're cheaper (they're not), but because the act of waking up somewhere new does something to you that flying never does.

When you fly, you're absent. You leave one place, enter a pressurised tube, emerge somewhere else. The transition is administrative. There's a before and an after, with no during.

The overnight train is a during. You watch the landscape change. You eat a bad dinner with good wine. You fall asleep in one country and wake up in another. When you step onto the platform at 7 a.m., you have earned the place — not through effort, exactly, but through time. You have been in transit. The city has been approached.

Arrival by train makes you want to walk. Arrival by plane makes you want to sit down.