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 :-)

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