Now that its high speed track is finished, the Eurostar train travels between London and Paris in only 2 hours 15 minutes.

But that´s not all… the Eurostar claims to be the world´s first carbon neutral train service. According to a study, a passenger who travels from London to Paris on the Eurostar train is responsible for one tenth of the emissions of a traveller who takes the aeroplane. Eurostar offsets those emisssions and plans to keep reducing them by improving efficiency and sourcing responsibly.

The Independent newspaper writes about the Eurostar´s new green image in this account of the inaugural journey.

Ximena lives in Madrid, and fills this beautiful blog with tales of her culinary adventures and of course recipes. As you would expect there are Spanish recipes, but plenty more as well. The recipes are accompanied by Ximena´s beautiful drawings (such as this one above) - she is also a talented illustrator.

If you liked this…
More posts about food around the world from Topics of the World.

Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa) aims to document life stories, with the idea that every life story is a part of history and leads to better understanding between peoples and cultures. The virtual museum project was founded in São Paolo in 1991 and so far museums have been created in Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada.

On the site we can see stories of ordinary Brazilians, such as André Fodor, who was born to a Brazilian / Italian mother and Hungarian father. After growing up in Brazil he went to university in the USA, later coming back to Brazil with an American bride to help his father with his confectionary business. Many of those interviewed were born outside Brazil, or have ancestors of different nationality, reflecting the high level of immigration to Brazil over the last 150 years.

As well as collecting a fascinating repository of stories and information, the project has been very innovative in using multimedia to record life stories. Let´s hope they are able to collect many more stories from people in different places as the project continues to grow.

While we´re on the subject of India, an excellent slideshow from Guardian Unlimited looks at another side of India´s economic success. Dharavi in Mumbai is famous for being the largest slum in Asia, however it is also full of entrepreneurs. According to this article in 2006 Dharavi had a total economic output of over 1bn US dollars. Amongst other activities, it is the centre of recycling for Mumbai.

Another article on Dharavi, from the Economist, focuses not only on the small businesses that thrive within the slum, but also on government plans to destroy the existing buildings in the area and replace them with high rise flats.

Recently we have been hearing a lot about the emerging middle class in India, which has been helped by India’s huge economic growth over the past years. Mckinsey Global Institute gave cameras to three Indian families and asked them to record their lives.

The resulting photo documentary is an insightful look at how middle class families in India live, work and shop.

The slideshow is part of a larger report on the growth of India´s middle class.