Thursday, August 9, 2012

DAY 10: Schrödinger's Cat vs. The Little Frog


So, after flummoxing about last night, trying to find the border in total darkness, this morning we made one of those "Hmmnuuuuh!" discoveries (where "hmmnuuuuh!" roughly translates as "What a pair of dumbass tourists!").

Cycling about 20m to the end of the road from our pensjon, we found ... wait for it ... a bridge! It was about 50m long and it went straight over the river and into the centre of Görlitz.

Scott Goes to Poland
Görlitz-Zgorzelec Bridge, Germany/Poland, 09.08.12

So we cycled over to Germany for coffee (I don't think I'll ever get sick of saying that*) in a brilliantly decorated, slightly rundown and cavernous cafe restaurant. What a life, eh?

Cavernous and Full of Coffee
Görlitz, Germany, 09.08.12

On the way into town, we discovered a rather curious fact: namely, that the endlessly entertaining Jesus of Nazareth is alive and well, and has been baking bread and cakes in a German town this whole time. Either that, or he did die and then bugger off to heaven for a while, but now (much in the manner of, say, Jason the Texas Chainsaw Guy), he's back.

Why German Bread Tastes So Divine
Görlitz, Germany, 09.08.12
Suitable caffeinated, we then took off in the direction of a city called Jelenia Gora, which is about 65km from Zgorzelec. Didn't expect to get all the way there, because it's a long way and we'd started quite late. But there were a number of towns on the way where we could stop and find accommodation for the night if we needed to.

The first 24km were awesome: wide panoramas of spacious open fields, a couple of quirky villages (including one which contained a post office that seemed to have its own tomato patch), and a zippy downhill ride through lush green valleys which were among the most beautiful I've seen in this generally rather picturesque country. 

We then approached the little town of Luban, and this, sadly, was where the smooth run ended. Just before the turn-off into the town centre, Scott's rear wheel axle snapped in two, rendering his bike pretty much useless as anything other than a poor man's ginko** machine. Luckily there was a bike repair shop in the centre of Luban, but it was closed. So we found a cute, cheap little hotel on the town's outskirts and settled in.

Little Frog
Luban, Poland, 09.08.12
I taught a Skype lesson at 8pm, and then decided to go into the centre to try and grab some food, since we'd sort of forgotten about dinner with all the other stuff that had been going on. When I got there, everything was closed except the Źabka (it means "little frog", and it's a convenience store chain that's all over the country), so it was dinner from plastic packets for the second night in a row. 

(Btw, I'm posting the Źabka photo here mainly because I think the little frog is really cute :-)


Much worse than that, though, I had to make the journey on foot, because earlier I'd left my bicycle in the back yard of the hotel, and when I went into the yard to get it, it had disappeared. I looked around for ages, thinking the bike had been moved to make way for an incoming car, but nope: completely gone.

So now it's 11pm, there's no light in the locked reception area (i.e. no-one to ask about missing bikes), and I've got a big ol' Schrödinger's cat on my lap. Either the owners have put the bike into their garage to make sure it isn't stolen (they mentioned something about a garage when we arrived, but they were speaking Polish so I didn't understand much), or it already has been stolen. 


If it's the second one, it means we've gone from having two more or less working bikes to having one broken one between us, in the space of a single day. And that, of course, means our cycling trip is over. 

At this point, I just hope I can sleep. 

Good night!



** Not sure why borders fascinate me so much. Maybe because I was born in Australia, where there basically aren't any. (Well, there is one, but it's, y'know, The Pacific Ocean. Kind of a different thing.) Or maybe it's because I've spent most of the last seven years in 'visa countries', where crossing a border is a big deal and often involves quite a bit of bureaucracy, or at least a lot of suspicious looks from armed guards. D'know. 

** ginko = a Japanese form of gambling which involves big yellow machines full of silver balls that rattle and roll around madly, before some of them are spat out into a plastic cup – much like the ball-bearings inside a broken bicycle wheel, which rattle and roll around madly before spitting themselves out onto the road. The major difference is that it's quite possible to understand the bicycle ball-bearing system without being Japanese, whereas the principles underlying ginko are – at least to me – utterly beyond a foreigner's comprehension.

DAY 9: Frontiersmanship


"Your bike looks much better than mine", says a voice from behind me.

Turning around I see Scott, rolling slowly along on a blue-grey bicycle that looks as if it had been handed down through at least two generations of German owners before he bought it in Leipzig on Monday.

We're on the platform of Zgorzelec railway station, which turns out to be one of the weirder railway stations I've seen. The platforms are cut into a hillside, and they look quite new, shiny and evenly paved. The station building is an entirely different story. 

Standing on top of the hill, completely unconnected to the platforms, and utterly shapeless in its decrepitude, it's both strangely attractive (if you like a bit of decrepitude) and just the tiniest bit creepy. Neither of us can locate an entrance door, though there are numerous broken windows that you could use to gain entry – assuming you were, say, either homeless and freezing to death, or slightly mad.

Sunset Reflected in Railway Station Building
Zgorzelec, Poland, 08.08.12

So as I mentioned, Scott has ridden most of the way here from Leipzig, and I've come from Krakow. But why here, specifically? Well, because this is where Poland runs out and Germany begins, so it just seemed like a fun place to meet. We even had a vague plan to rendezvous Cold War novel-style on the bridge which links the two countries, and make a clandestine exchange. Just couldn't quite figure what we could exchange – given that neither of us had taken any prisoners or was in possession of sensitive information – so the plan never quite worked out.

Anyway, Zgorzelec itself didn't impress us very much at first glance (my Polish friend Basia tells me that the town's name means "gangrene", so perhaps that's not surprising!). We were a lot more taken with Görlitz, though, which is about a 2km ride from the opposite river bank. We rode into town as the light was fading, and found a cozy little Altstadt with a nice laidback feel to itSo we decided to stay for a quick coffee and a catch-up, before heading off to find our accommodation back in Zgorzelec. Thing is, though, a "quick coffee" can easily turn into a two-hour chat with Scott, so by the time we got back on the bikes, it was absolutely pitch black.

Needless to say, we didn't find the border on our first attempt, and we got thoroughly lost a couple of times before finally getting back across the river and locating our pensjon*.

All that remained, then, was to drink and smoke and eat peanuts (in lieu of dinner) until two in the morning on the street outside our pensjon, thus guaranteeing a late start to the cycling the following day ... but hey, this is what one must do when catching up with an old friend in a small Polish frontier town.

I'm sure the oversized hedgehog who lives in the long grass near the pensjon was very glad when we finally called it a night. Not only could he have some piece and quiet at last, but he was also free of the annoying Australian who kept coming up and trying to pat him.

"Why can't those Australians leave us hogs of the hedge alone?"

Because you're just too damn cute, that's why.

Good night :-)


* A kind of budget hotel, often family-run, with a sort of 'homey' atmosphere (at least in the good ones).

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

DAY 8: Adaptability


So the plan changed a bit. Or some might say "a lot".

Yesterday morning I was in a cafe in Krakow, writing my 'Clash of Civilisations' essay, when I got a message from my friend Scott. The message was basically this: "I'm in Leipzig, and I'm going to see a man about a bike. Riding to the Polish border after that – can you meet me in Görlitz on Wednesday?"

To put that in perspective: the distance between Krakow and Görlitz by road is 428km. In my first five days, making my way slowly by bicycle and super-slow regional trains,  I'd managed to cover a little over 200kms.

I'd actually determined some rules of thumb before leaving Lviv, which were these:  if you can get there in a day on the bike, do it. If you can't, get a train. If it costs more than 10 Euros to get to the next destination by train (paying for myself and for the bike), you're going too fast.

So yeah ... this was a bit of a change.

Meanwhile, Muhammad had caught up with me. I'd more or less done the research for the essay, but hadn't started writing. The plan was to stay put in Krakow for two nights and one full day, and write it there. (It's due today, btw.) As it turned out, my full day in Krakow was taken up with other stuff, so yesterday I had a mountainous task before me: write 2,500 words in a single day, and get to the next city, Katowice. That meant either a 2.5 hour train journey or a full day's bike ride.

My decision: "Alright, then, let's do this thing. I'll start the essay in Krakow, get myself to Katowice and finish writing there. Then I'll race over and join Scott."

So I sat in Krakow and wrote for as long as I could, then grabbed a train. At 7pm, having just arrived in Katowice, I had a little over 1,000 words written. So I wandered into the centre, chose a cosy-looking cafe as my venue to finish off the work, and sat down to coffee and Greek salad and Islam.

Six hours later I was still at the cafe, and I'd been befriended by the Moldovan family who run it. This was great on the one hand – they were extremely warm and friendly, and even gave me a lift back to my hostel afterwards – but it meant that I hadn't quite finished writing when I got back at about 1:30am.

I finally submitted the essay just before 4am, and collapsed on the bed to be woken five hours later by my alarm. Some helpful advice from the receptionist got me to my next destination, which was Gliwice, and from there I travelled to the low-key, moderately cute town of Opole, where I am now. So far today I've done two 'short hops' by regional train and 33kms of cycling, but there's more to come. I'm booked at a hotel in Wroclaw tonight, and that's another 100kms from here. So we'll see how long my 'rules of thumb' can last!

One of these days, I'll have a 'normal' holiday ... you know, the kind that are advertised with phrases like "Relax, unwind and recharge your batteries in beautiful xxxx" and "Put your feet up and forget the cares of everyday life in xxxx".

Right now, though, this holiday seems pretty close to perfect )))

Saturday, August 4, 2012

DAY 4: The Joy of Place Names

Covered about 80kms yesterday, which is the minimum pace I'll have to keep if I want to get to Zgorzelec (i.e. the German border) in a reasonable time. About 45 of those were by train, and then, after waiting out a fairly ferocious downpour that started the moment I left the railway station, I did the other 35 by bike.

I ended up in the small town of Ladna, and I simply had to stay there, for reasons related to the Russian language. Let me explain:

A World of Bad Joke Potential
Ładna, Poland, 03.08.12
See, in Russian, the word ladna (spelled with an "o" on the end, but pronounced with an [a] sound) literally translates as "ok". However, the meaning changes depending on your tone. 

It can be used in a friendly or neutral way, but with the right intonation it signals something else – something more like the English "Yeah, whatever", used to indicate either that someone you're talking to is being unreasonable, or that you're totally unimpressed with something, or that you just really don't care.  

Altogether, then, ladna can mean anything from "Yep, no problem" to "I'm completely over this, can we move on please?" to "You're talking crap, but I can't be bothered arguing 'cause there's clearly no way to penetrate your stupidity". Such a versatile little word )))

So as I rode past the amusing signs saying things like "Glass Factory: Ladna", "Supermarket: Ladna" and so on, I of course had many juvenile chuckles to myself, imagining a signwriter who was just horribly, terminally bored with his job. 

Never turn your nose up at free entertainment, I say :-)

Incidentally, two days ago there was a town called "Lazy" about 10kms off my route. I considered going there just to get my photo taken next to the town sign, but in the end I couldn't be bothered.

(Next time you see me, you can slap me for that joke if you like.)

The scenery today was more dramatic than yesterday. My cycling route skirted around the edge of a low mountain range (actually I'm not sure if you'd call them low mountains or tall hills, but ladna, doesn't matter), so there were some valleys of splendour and the like.

I particularly appreciated the wildflowers on this part of the journey. At this time of year, Poland essentially becomes a sea of wildflowers. On every square metre of land not otherwise occupied, they spring up in their millions, adding bold, broad strokes of yellow and occasional splashes of purple or white to the landscape. If there's so much as a vacant lot between two houses, the wildflowers will claim it and thrive on it. They look especially vivid late in the day or after rain, which were exactly the conditions in which I saw them yesterday ... hence the appreciation, I guess.

Look at The Pretty Flarsl
Route E40 (Ładna-Tarnow), Poland, 04.08.12

You know, while I was cycling today, I had a moment when I suddenly thought "This should be my life". I mean, it is my life, in the sense that I'm doing it now and I appear to be breathing (sometimes very heavily!). And there are obviously good reasons why it can't be a full-time thing – family, the need to make a living etc. etc.

The thing is, though, other than the factors I just mentioned, most of the stuff that generally keeps us stationary seems kinda empty to me when I get 'on the road'. I don't need a nice house or even a 'place to call home'; don't want a car; couldn't care less about flat-screen TVs or a backyard lawn or the familiar faces of neighbours or any of that palaver. The world is ridiculously large (as you realise only too well when you try to traverse a little bit of it by bicycle!), and so varied and interesting, and life is way too finite for my liking! 

So I ask myself: what the Hell are we all doing, missing out on so much by staying in one place? Why don't we all just gather together our loved ones, get rid of all our unnecessary stuff, work out a way to earn money while mobile, and disappear into the blue?

I know that's a horribly flawed and idealistic argument, and the lifestyle it recommends is virtually impossible to sustain (especially on an English teacher's salary!). Still, those were my thoughts last night and I'm recording them faithfully here, cos y'know, I sometimes do that.

Meanwhile, to the guy who makes those insanely delicious fruit-and-spice-infused vodkas in Kazimierz (the 'Bohemian Quarter' of Krakow): I'll see you tomorrow night, my friend!

Take care everyone :-)
Anthony.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

DAY 3: Sleepy Rural Jihad


A much easier ride today; I had 50kms to cover, but still feeling a bit sore from yesterday, I did the first 30 by train. I disembarked near the small, rather sleepy and relaxed town of Łancut, and cycled into the centre.

Peaceful, Bucolic, Somewhat Idyllic
Łancut, Poland, 02.08.12

On the way in, while passing a completely nondescript-looking building, I got a timely reminder that my other mission – Islam, civilisational clashes etc. – is still a topical one, and that I'm not the only person with these issues on my mind.

Peaceful, Bucolic and ... Jihadist?
Łancut, Poland, 02.08.12
When I finally got out onto the highway, the roads were much better than yesterday. For most of the way I was riding on a pedestrian/bike path, separated from the highway by a deep ditch. Hooray for that! The worst thing about riding long-distance is that you get those moments when an enormous truck passes you less than a metre away, displacing enough air to knock you off course and remind you of how vulnerable you are out there. The fewer of those moments I have, the happier I'll be :-)

I also invented something today called the "handlebar clothesline", for the purpose of drying clothes while on the move. Obviously this was intended for highway use only – I'm not that much of an exhibitionist that I want to ride around town with my underwear flying like a flag on my bike! Sadly, though, I have to report that it wasn't quite the success story I'd hoped for. You need to tie your clothes firmly to the bars, and that means relatively little of their surface area is exposed to sun and wind.

Oh well ... maybe I'll find a way to improve on the first version.

Small-town Euro Cuteness on The Rynek
Rzeszow, Poland, 02.08.12

I'm in Rzeszow now – a very pleasant, smallish city in Podkarpatskie (literally "beneath the Carpathians") province.

I've actually been here once before, and it was only about a month ago. I came to see off my friend Scott when he returned to England after living in Ukraine for four years. (Wizzair, the UK budget airline, flies to and from Rzeszow, so you can sometimes get ridiculously cheap tickets to London from here.) On that occasion, half the town turned up in the rynek* to watch the final of Euro 2012. This time it's a bit quieter, which I certainly don't mind ... in fact, the laidback atmosphere is far preferable to the throng of sports fans.

Ok ... that's about it.

Tomorrow I'm out of Podkarpackie, and into the neighbouring Małopolskie province, of which Krakow is the capital. Woo-hoo! Krakow, here I come (yet) again!

Good night )))


* I used this word in the first entry too. It literally means "market" (in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and probably a few other languages), and it often serves as a label for the main square of a town. Stick with me, and your Polish will improve every day :-)

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

DAY 2: Deceived

It lied to me! The bastard lied! How could it do that?

By “it”, I mean the internet of course. Our beloved information superhighway lavishly embroidered the truth, mercilessly stretching credibility on the rack of deceit in order to fashion the kind of spurious tale that you expect from grandparents when they tell you how they spent their youth. In the middle of its fish-that-got-away story, this so-called "internet" (if that's even its real name) turned dramatically to its audience, held its hands as far apart as they could go, and said “No kidding, it was THIS BIG!”

Whoever would’ve thought it could do that? I mean, it’s the internet, right – the medium of our times, domain of scrupulously tested and verifiable fact, a pristine beacon of unbiased truth in an otherwise compromised world. I’m shocked, appalled and disappointed. 

Well ok ... not really.

The thing is, when I looked up the distance from Przemsyl to Jaroslaw, the first answer I got was 23km, but that was as the crow flies*. I looked for actual road distance, and found first a site that said the distance was 27km, then later another which said it was 33.

Being an optimist, I added 27 and 33 together, divided by two and came up with a probable distance of 30kms. And that was what I thought I’d have to cycle today … that, along with the 10km from Krasiczyn to Przemsyl. 

Wrong!

After riding for about seven or eight kilometres out of Przemysl, I saw a sign that said “Jaroslaw 34kms”. So it seemed the further I rode, the further away my destination was :-( 

Two years ago I cycled 55kms through southern Finland, and it was a great day. Quite difficult and strenuous in places, to be sure, but really, really cool. I’d finished by about 2 or 3pm, and then I could just relax and say a fond and somewhat sad farewell to one of my favourite corners of the Earth. (I was due to fly out the following day.) 

As I mentioned before, I'm not in such good shape now as I was then, and today that was obvious. However, I was also carrying a lot more stuff on my back than I had in Finland – dragging a laptop and a couple of uni textbooks along with you really makes a difference when you’re on a bike.

Anyway, about 8kms out of Jaroslaw, I was so exhausted, and so many bits of me were in pain, that I really didn’t think I’d be able to make it. I walked beside the bike for a couple of kilometres, and even that was an immense effort. Seriously … I was screwed. 
.
Eventually I found a roadside service station and rested there for a while, drinking canned iced coffee and trying to forget that I had to get on the bike again in a few minutes. It revived me a little, and in the end I made it to Jaroslaw, shattered but more or less alive.

And after all that, guess what? The town is completely uninspiring! Really. 

Maybe I missed the good bit (always possible), but unlike the places I left behind today, and unlike Rzeszow (where I’ll be tomorrow), I see no charm here at all … it’s basically a collection of shopping malls, interspersed with some car repair places and petrol stations. 

Still, what a brilliant problem to have, eh? While so much of the world is struggling to get rid of horrible impurities in their water supply, my big issue is “Hey! I had to cycle further than I thought!” 

Damn privileged is what I am, no question.

Tomorrow will be a lot easier. I need to have a less intense day, or I’m never gonna get this essay written.

Will let you know how things go. Until then, stay well and happy )))

Anthony.


* (If English is not your native language and you haven't heard this expression before, it means "in a perfectly straight line".)

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

DAY 1: On The Road with Muhammad

Right then ... finally we can get back to the original purpose of this damn blog, which was to tell you where I am at any given moment and what the Hell I'm doing there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to quickly share three facts which may help throw some light onto my present situation.


MY THREE SHARY FACTS

Fact #1 

As most of you know, I'm in my final year of a linguistics degree. The core units (i.e. the actual linguistics stuff) are basically done, so now I'm primarily studying some extra units on religion and historiography (which is sort of 'meta-history' – it deals with how we record history and why). Within the religious field, I've chosen Islam as my focus.

Fact #2

A very simple fact, which I've come to realise gradually over many successive visits: Poland is an extremely cool place.

Fact #3

My fitness has declined terribly in the last two years, and I really want to try and claw it back to the level it was at before. So when vacation time came up this year, I started thinking of ways I could have a 'physical holiday'. I wanted to do it in Ukraine if I could, but for various reasons that just wasn't feasible.

So, where does that put me? Well it puts me on the outdoor terrace of a building complex that used to be the stables and granary of a giant castle, in a tiny Polish village called Krasiczyn*.

Not entirely making sense yet, is it?

No, Anthony, it isn't.


EXPLAINY

Er ... ok. Well, I'm here at the end of Day One, and I arrived by bicycle. How many more days there will be after this one is yet to be determined. 

See, I've set myself two tasks, which are these: cross the southern half of Poland by bicycle and regional train, and write an essay about the 'Clash of Civilisations Hypothesis' along the way.

Ultimate success in this mission will mean two things: first, I reach Zgorzelec on the German border, almost waving distance from Dresden. And second, I plumb the depths of Islamic theology and politics, and come up with a decent response to Samuel Huntington's thesis (Huntington being the guy who made the phrase "clash of civilisations" famous in a 1993 academic paper, stirring up quite a controversy in the process).

The two goals are quite different, in several respects. For a start, I must finish the essay, but I don't necessarily need to traverse the entire breadth of Poland. It would be nice, of course, but it isn't life-and-death. 

There's certainly not enough time to do all of it on the bike, which is what I'd ideally like to do. So I'm gonna cycle as much as I can and do the rest by rail. The regional trains are extremely cheap and also extremely slow (a journey of 40-50kms can last well over an hour), so you can still take in a bit of the landscape as you go along.


AND SO ...?

And so the journey kicked off today in Przemysl**, near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Although in fact, it really started at the bike hire shop in L'viv, where the guy was so keen to tell me all the details of all the local cycling tours I can do with his spanking new company, that I had to make a mad dash across the city afterwards to catch my bus.

In the process of negotiating Lviv's chronically decayed footpaths, I badly ripped one leg of my jeans on the bike chain. That's gonna cost me about two hours of sewing that would otherwise have been devoted to Huntington's Big Civilisation Idea Thingy.

My torn leg tucked into my sock, I arrived at the bus station just as the bus was pulling out onto the road, and stood pleading with the driver to wait for me while I bought a ticket. I guess the guy took pity on this weird, out-of-breath foreigner with a gaping tear in one leg of his trousers, 'cause he agreed to wait, and after grabbing a ticket inside the bus station I ran out to the road and jumped on.

A few hours and an argument with Polish customs later (the bastards took all my $1.50/packet Ukrainian cigarettes!), we arrived in Przemysl. It's a town I've been through many times, but I've only actually been into it twice – both times in the last month.

Przemysl is not likely to appear on any travel website Top 10s, but it does have at least a modicum of charm. Dramatically set on a hillside that leads down to a river, its expansive 'rynek' (market square) features grand churches ranged around at different elevations, and you can find a couple of cosy cafes, one of which is attached to an equally cosy bookshop. 

The city is, in a sense, the 'end of Europe'. Going just a few kilometres east from there by road, you come to the Shegyni border checkpoint, which vividly marks the transition from the EU to the former USSR. 

It does this mainly by making you sit on a bus/train/bench for a few hours while officials comb through bags, unscrew the ceilings of vehicles to search for contraband, and take your documents away for extended periods to run them through nobody-knows-what kind of computer systems, eventually returning them with a smile (on the Polish side) or a world-weary sigh (on the Ukrainian side).

Enigmatic Chicken
Butsiv, Ukraine, 31.07.12
If you keep going east, the next place you encounter after the checkpoint is the tumbledown village of Butsiv. This place forms a sharp contrast with its Polish neighbour; it's an open sewer kinda town, where bits of metal stick up randomly out of the road, where Przemysl's Volkswagen Golfs are replaced by old Ladas and the occasional hulk of a Soviet-era Kamaz (medium-sized truck), and where an unidentified shape on the roadside can turn out to be a foraging chicken with its head shoved firmly into the long grass. 

Both towns exercise a certain kind of attraction (partly depending on your taste in decrepit and/or abandoned motor vehicles), but transiting from one to the other leaves you in no doubt that you've just crossed some kind of 'great divide'. It's a memorable experience, for that reason alone.


RAMBLING ALL THE WAY TO THE CASTLE

Anyway ... so I got to Przemysl late in the afternoon, went to one of the aforementioned cosy cafes for a cappuccino and a quick re-read of Huntington, then jumped on my bike and rode about 10kms along winding country roads, some of them flanked by deeply-shaded forests. 

It was a stunning ride – though a very short one compared to those I'll be doing in the coming days – and at the end of it I arrived here in Krasiczyn.

I'll try not to bore you with too much detail about this place, but it is pretty damn cool and quite a find (I'd never heard of it until a few days ago). The highlight so far has been dinner at the castle. 

I wandered in there at about eight, as the sun was starting to dip below the horizon, and there was no-one around the ramparts at all. I don't think I'd be boasting too much if I said that, for someone born a long way from Europe, I've seen quite a decent number of castles in my time ... but I'm not sure I've ever had an entire one to myself before. It's pretty cool; think I might have to buy one ;-)

Annoying "Here's What I Ate on Holiday" Photo
Krasiczyn, Poland, 31.07.12
Inside the castle walls, I enjoyed a sumptuous meal of shopska (goat's cheese salad) and zhurek (a traditional Polish fermented rye soup with sausage, egg and spices, served in a bowl made of crispy bread – truly one of the finest things you can put in your mouth in Central or Eastern Europe). I also took the opportunity to wash it down with a glass of Chilean dry red, which you can only get in Ukraine if you're prepared to live without one of your kidneys. 

All this amid the elegant arches of a proper castle dining hall. And the total bill? A bit less than eight Euros. Amazing.

Then I exited to find myself in near-total darkness. The path leading away from the castle was very dimly lit, and ancient trees with sturdy, angled trunks towered all around me as the full moon poked eerily through their silhouetted leaves. It was spooky ... but in a really, really satisfying way.

Finally I arrived back at my hostel, which was constructed out of the ruins of the former castle granary, and is nowadays guarded by two black cats – one of whom is currently trying to unplug my computer at the wall socket – and a friendly, floppy-eared dog shaped like an oversized marzipan log.

Short version: Krasiczyn had obliged me with a perfect evening :-)


BEWARE THE POLOPHILE

Given all of the above, I have to say that I'm confirmed in my love for this country, partly because of all the unexpected and fabulous stuff it throws at you. I mean, dinner in a castle is so not how I was expecting to end my day when I woke up this morning! Unlike so many other places, Poland retains the ability to surprise, always holding a little more up its sleeve ... and I retain the ability to go "Oh, how verily you rock!" every time it reveals another snippet of coolness.


"Uh oh ... Castle Time! Must Be a European Holliday." 
Krasiczyn, Poland, 01.08.12

So yeah ... blah freakin' blah. Now you've got the context, plus a bit of ramble about the country which I currently have a massive crush on. Tomorrow the 'quest' gets serious: I have to cover sth like 40kms to reach a place called Jaroslaw, and start putting pen to paper on this essay.

I like to think of it as my 'road trip with Muhammad'. Let's see how far we can travel together ...



* Polish "cz" is roughly equivalent to the "ch" in English "cheese", so this place is pronounced like "Krasichen".


** Absolutely no idea how it's pronounced! Every time I say my version of "Przemysl" to Polish people, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Polish is quite the challenge ... but a stunner of a language, nonetheless :-)