‘When dessert arrived after 45 minutes we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry’

Bizarre, touching and funny, your tales of travelling beyond the Iron Curtain produced a record-breaking mailbag

In the 1970s, my parents booked a family rail trip to Prague. Crossing the Iron Curtain, the train was boarded by guards who searched our luggage. One Czech woman wore jeans. These were noted disapprovingly to be a sign of Western decadence, but the guards stopped short of confiscating them.

The first station inside Czechoslovakia was busy – not with fellow travellers, but with local people heading for the buffet car to buy large quantities of bananas. Fruit was in short supply.

In Prague, I listened to the music of Bedrich Smetana in the museum that bears his name. Open windows let the sound float across the Vltava towards the Charles Bridge. It was sublime. Sally Bennett, Herefordshire

POWDER POWER

I travelled by train to Poland on a university field trip in 1971. East Berlin was in darkness as the train pulled up at a checkpoint. A group of East German soldiers barged into our carriage, demanded to see our passports and emptied my rucksack onto the floor.

One of the soldiers flicked through my book to see if I had slipped any currency between the pages, then victoriously held up my polythene bag full of white washing powder. He shook some out and snorted it. I was terrified. Was my next destination going to be a Siberian gulag? The soldier’s face contorted, he sneezed violently and made a very swift exit. Our return journey passed without incident. Annie Boon, Oxfordshire

STAR BILLING

In 1982 I went to Budapest to be in a film. It was in Hungarian, so I spoke my part in English and was assigned a translator. At the end of the first day a man arrived and placed a battered suitcase on a table. A long queue formed – extras, crew, first come first served. “Your expenses,” said my translator.

Everyone could see how much each person was getting: a few notes difference here and there. When it came to my turn, however, the man counted out note after note after note.

At the end of the shoot, I gave the translator my unused forints, more than he earned in half a year. “Where are the Russians?” I asked. “They are here,” he replied. “They are watching.” Robert Davies, East Sussex

IN THE FIRING LINE

We narrowly escaped arrest in Prague in 1975. A Czech friend had persuaded me to go, and I took my son with me. There wasn’t much in the shops to amuse a seven-year-old, but we did find a toy rifle made of wood and metal with a very realistic shooting sound. From then on, everywhere we went, locals encouraged him to “shoot” at Russian soldiers. He didn’t take much persuading, and they didn’t take kindly to being aimed at.

One night, a strange man – was he secret service? – let himself into our hotel room, looked through our belongings, stared at us, then left without a word. We were terrified.

The rifle came home with us, but it certainly wasn’t used again on the streets of Prague.

Myra Robinson, Newcastle upon Tyne

HAVING A FIELD DAY

In 1989 we took an Interflug flight from Gatwick to Leipzig for a tour of castles and palaces in East Germany. We stayed in five-star hotels and visited grand and luxurious properties, in sharp contrast with the poverty we saw elsewhere.

There were only two types of car, the Trabant and the Wartburg. In Berlin we were taken to see the infamous wall, where Russian guards prevented us from taking photographs.

On our visit to the Friedenstein Palace at Gotha, the young guide told us he was a fan of Queens Park Rangers FC, but said he would never be allowed to leave East Germany to see them. Three months later, the East German government and the Berlin Wall both fell.

A year later, the young guide from Gotha came to stay with us and we took him to see a football match: Liverpool versus QPR.

Michael Burdekin, Cheshire

MILKED DRY

My daughter and I went on a two-destination holiday to Romania and Bulgaria in the 1980s, staying in Black Sea hotels. In Romania the beaches were amazing but, in the hotel, the only way to get a white coffee was to order a black one with a scoop of ice cream – because there was no milk. Supermarket shelves in the town were full of identical tins of fruit and practically nothing else.

In Bulgaria, almost as soon as we arrived at the hotel pool I was accosted by someone wanting to buy my jeans (they settled for my lilo). As I sat there, a young woman poked bundles of Bulgarian currency at me through the chainlink fence separating us, indicating that she wanted me to buy her young son some chocolate from the tourist shop which she wasn’t allowed to enter.

The holiday was an eye-opener in many ways, but I can’t say it’s one I miss.