Before Sunrise came out thirty years ago and I have never stopped wanting to live inside its atmosphere. So I built something. New essay on the film that shaped a tour, and why winter Europe by rail is the grown-up answer to an old longing.
I don't remember where I first saw the film. But I remember exactly how it left me. I've never recovered. There’s a moment in Before Sunrise where Jesse (Ethan Hawk) tells Céline (Julie Delpy) he’s going to take her picture. He doesn’t have a camera, so he just stops. He looks at her. He commits her to memory.
“I remember that night better than I remember entire years,” he tells her nine years later in Paris (Before Sunset), and you believe him. He paid such close attention.
Before Sunrise is a 90s indie romantic movie where a boy meets a girl on a train journey across Europe and how they fall in love in one night. However, this film is not as trivial that.
What the film is actually about is the vanishing beauty of the uninterrupted moment: two ordinary people in a foreign city, openly talking about love and faith and the philosophical texture of their lives. Not documenting it. Just being so entirely present that the hours become something they'll carry for the rest of their lives.
What strikes you in those early scenes is how quickly the formality falls away. They haven’t even exchanged names when she agrees to get off the train with him in Vienna. There’s just this curious sense of familiarity, the way a real conversation can dissolve the strangeness between two people, the way you sometimes meet someone and feel, without being able to explain it, that you already know how they think. Director Richard Linklater has always been drawn to time and what it does to people, and here he finds its inverse: two lives briefly overlapping, speaking freely in the particular way you only speak when you believe you’ll never see the person again. The conversations are the film. They’re also, if you’ve ever talked this way with anyone, the thing you still remember.
I saw it for the first time as a young teenager, before I’d had so much as relationship. I didn’t yet have strong ideas about what I wanted my future to look like, but this film made me feel that life would be an adventure, full of exceptional people and enchanting moments waiting to be experienced on beautiful summer evenings in European cities.
In the summer of 2000, I backpacked around Europe. On my first night Florence, I met a young man on a bridge over the Arno river by happenstance. His friend stopped to ask my friend for a lighter. This simple encounter sparked a flame between me and the other friend. One that would ignite into something I could have only imagined.
I’d known him for just a few days when we decided to spend the week together. No one knew I was spending my week this way. My time was entirely my own, and there was something thrilling and liberating about that at twenty. And I wanted that week with him. We walked around in those humid Italian summer nights as it slowly dawned on us that this thing was something else, and we were both just old enough to recognize it for what it was.
My memories from that week are a potent mix of heat and cigarettes and diesel fumes and espresso and sweat and dancing and jasmine.
On our last day together, we took a picnic to the Boboli Gardens where under the shade of a tree, he lay on my chest and slept. Holding him, silent tears slide down the sides of my face as I knew the next morning I would be on a train bound for Munich and I didn’t know how to tell him this was goodbye.
It’s now 26 years later. I still resurrect that memory. And just like Jesse conveyed to Celine, I too remember that week better than I remember entire years.
I think about that memory and many others I experienced since, every time I rewatch the film, because Jesse is right: you pay that kind of attention to something and it stays. The city. The heat. The quality of light. The way a conversation can open up in a foreign place, in the dark, when neither of you has anywhere to be and neither of you knows quite what this is yet.
Céline says something in Before Sunset that has also stayed with me. She and Jesse are in Paris (Before Sunset), nine years after Vienna, and she says: when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.
That line haunts me. Because I believe it to be the truth. What the film understands, what it understood before most of us could relate to or identify the feelings within us, is that the conditions for real connection are not as common as we’d like to believe. And they are becoming rarer. I don’t believe this is because people are worse, but because the habits of modern life are at work against them. We are always partly elsewhere (our phones!). We are composing the caption while we’re still inside the moment. We are dropping the location pin or checking the review. Before Sunrise is set in 1995, before any of that, and whenever I rewatch it I’m so struck with nostalgia, with a longing for the uninterrupted moment, that I want to put everyone’s phone, including mine, somewhere it cannot be found.
Jesse stops to take Céline’s picture with no camera. Just his eyes. Just attention. It’s the most romantic gesture in the film. Maybe the whole fantasy is that simple. Not Vienna at dawn or not the missed connection .. not even the beautiful stranger. Just this: someone who is actually, unhurriedly, looking at you. Fully present.
There is something to be said about a season of life when you have too little money and the strange luxury of time.. because when you’re young, you cannot yet name it as luxury. I remember stations at blue hour. The screech of metal on metal. My journal and sketch book thick with bad handwriting and a collection of ticket stubs. I remember cities discovered accidentally… and how I spent hours watching Europe go by from a cafe table.. and how the sound of church bells was rearranging the map of my life.
And I remember the people.. and those temporary intimacies that travel specializes in: like the waiter at a small spaghetteria inviting me to see Rome through a keyhole, then told me something he’d never told anyone because he knew he’d never see me again. The stranger beside me on a train for forty minutes who was, exactly then, the person I needed to meet. I didn’t know it at the time. That’s just it. You never know it at the time. You make space for it. You welcome it. And to this day we are still friends.
What I wanted then was not just Europe… I wanted a different atmosphere, I want to be enchanted and to be displaced from the life I knew and I wanted permission to be whoever I wanted to be. I wanted that feeling that my life might still enlarge itself in a single evening.
The film brilliantly ends by showing all the places that the two have been throughout the film. Those empty spaces were now incorporated with discussions they had. The beauty of dawn in their absence was haunting in a way with an essence of its own. It was as if the director wanted the audience to wake up from a beautiful dream, where those two people were now dissolved in a breeze and all they are left with is questions.
Will they ever meet again? Will they be able to pick up right where they left off. Will they keep the date?
Ugh… watching it now decades later.. undoes me. I sit in the dark and the glowing screen suppressing a sob from erupting watching those final moments.
That film understood something about rail travel that no other genre has quite figured out: that a train can make the ordinary world briefly feel fated. A station platform, a half-heard sentence, a sideways glance from a beautiful stranger. All of it seems to say that your life may yet turn in your favor, if only you stay awake enough to see it.
I think about that often. Europe by train was once the education of my young heart. I’ve been building a tour around this feeling. Nostalgia, longing, slowness, romance, happenstance..
Not around the film, though the atmosphere of the film is the spine of it, and not around the idea of manufacturing romance or engineering serendipity. The Florence week cannot be scheduled nor conjured. The night time bridge encounter over the Arno cannot be replicated. But the conditions for something like it can be made more generous. You can choose a season that slows the world down. You can travel by train, which gives you time and a window. You can stay in a beautiful room instead of a bunk or cheap hostel, which means you’ll actually sleep, which means you’ll actually be present. You can eat slowly, without looking at your phone at the table and watch Europe come to life at night. You can wander a city that has reclaimed itself, because it’s January and the tourists have gone and the streets belong to the people who live there. It’s like Europe releases an exhale and finally.. you are free to take in these places with curiosity. The streets belong to the people who live there. And so, for a little while, do you.
Winter’s Interlude runs January 18 through January 27, 2027. Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, by rail. A small group of eight. Three rail journeys with time to read and think in. Four hotels chosen for character and the pleasure of a beautiful room to return to after dark.
It is the grown-up answer to an old dream. The thing underneath it: the openness, the willingness to be changed by a place, the what-ifs built in. What if I talked to the person sitting across from me? What if I took that street instead? What if I stayed, not forever, but longer than I planned? What if I said yes to a beautiful stranger, or at the very least, to traveling with a group of strangers who won't stay strangers long?
Come with me in January. Come and be slow. Come and let Europe do what it does in the winter glow. Come and sit in a warm train carriage with strangers who will, by the end, not be strangers. Come and wander and write and stand in a record shop too long. Come and have dinner somewhere small and candlelit and talk like you mean it.
You might not fall in love with a stranger on a train. But you might fall in love with the version of yourself who would have.
Full itinerary, inclusions, and booking below:
Four gorgeous centrally located hotels,with character and private baths
Three contemplative train journeys across Europe, first class tickets
Guided walk through Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, ending at the intimate Kazinczy Street Orthodox Synagogue
Soak in Ottoman-era thermal baths with storytelling on Hungary’s spa heritage
Visit to Hollókő, a UNESCO-listed living village where folk traditions still flourish
Private visit to a Viennese violin-maker’s atelier
Two of Europe’s great baroque libraries: the Austrian National Library’s State Hall in Vienna and Strahov Monastery in Prague
Vespers at the Augustinerkirche
Visit Czech printmaking and letterpress studios
A chamber concert in the Klementinum Mirror Chapel, floor to ceiling in mirrors and gilt
Pastries, coffee and conversation at gilded, old world coffeehouses in each city
Classical music in a salon-style venue in Vienna, candlelight, Brahms, intimacy
Live jazz bar in the heart of Prague
Tea and wentelteefjes at a beloved old world Dutch tearoom
Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, a complete hidden church in an Amsterdam attic
Canal walk with café stops in Amsterdam
Enough white space to wander, write, and let the city show you something you didn’t plan for.
Farewell dinner in a Jordaan neighborhood, warm, intimate, unforgettable
About the Author
Welcome! I’m Kyle, the soul behind Sudden Journeys. I’m a writer, photographer, and founder of Sudden Journeys. I’ve spent the last few decades exploring: guiding travelers, leading tours, living abroad, and paying close attention to what landscapes, rooms, and encounters awaken in us. I write about place and belonging, hospitality and gathering, the practice of attention through journaling, and the home life between departures. Originally from a small town south of Nashville; I divide my time between the English countryside, London, and wherever the road takes me next.
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